The Wonder by Emma Donoghue; Little, Brown, $27
During the 19th century, an enigma emerged in North America and Europe involving a series of more than 50 young Victorian girls who were purportedly not consuming food yet surviving months at a time, and often even longer. To many during that era, these fasting females were considered to be spiritual miracles, since the art of fasting once carried the claim of harnessing magical powers and a sign of impending eminence.
Celebrated lesbian author Emma Donoghue draws on her fascination with this phenomenon in The Wonder, a new gothic thriller set in Ireland in the 19th century. Her novel follows divorced English nurse Lib Wright, who served in the Crimean War with none other than Florence Nightingale. Lib has crisscrossed through the lush Irish countryside to arrive at a tiny village to attend to the bedside of 11-year-old Anna O'Donnell, as commissioned by the family physician. Anna is a marvel, the "wonder" of the book's title, and a child baffling medical science, since refusing food for four months, and subsisting on water and holy prayers, has yet to bring on any physical signs of malnourishment or failure to thrive. Hoax or divine embodiment?
Nurse Lib's claustrophobic, round-the clock surveillance on the girl garners attention from the cagey, potato-rationing townsfolk as she becomes joined by a creepy nun who shares sentry duties in the shadowy halls of the family home. Dark, brooding, and excessively moody, Donoghue's attention to period detail is striking and crisp, as are her sharp social observations ("Adults could be barefaced liars too, of course, and about no subject so much as their own bodies. Everybody was a repository of secrets.") She masterfully sets up this candle-lit premise with an increasingly suffocating sense of suspense as Lib oscillates between feeling sorry for Anna, speculating on what is actually happening to her, and, as a nurse, diagnosing the girl from a medical perspective. Her true suspicion, once Anna begins to show signs of deterioration, is that she was secretly being fed until Lib's watch made the whole ordeal impossible to conduct.
But Lib has demons in her own closet that begin to emerge as the looming feeling of menace forces her to confront the piously superstitious local Irish community as well as the repressive Catholic Church, each with stern denial on their faces. With themes of morality, life, death, and the desperate lengths some go to in order to protect a child, Donoghue's book chills with its sinister plot while making clear-cut points about religion, overprotectiveness, and the whirlwind effect of naming something a modern miracle (think Jesus-imaged toast and crying statues).
The book begins to spin in place a bit in its final third, which unfortunately chips away at Donoghue's hard-won and thrilling set-up, but all is not lost as this is a beautifully written, portentously gloomy novel which concludes with nary a sunny sky �" sad indeed, but refreshingly unapologetic.
Donoghue's success reached meteoric heights with her 2010 bestselling, award-winning novel Room, which also centered on the plight of a child, and was made into a riveting feature film. This novel is equally urgent and absorbing, though in a much more shadowy, slow-burn fashion. Once the truth is revealed, its effectiveness and believability take a back seat to the fact that the reader has become wholly enchanted by Donoghue's historic tale.