The Wonder is a gripping thriller that shouldn’t be missed
A gripping thriller with a satisfying conclusion, The Wonder should not be missed.
In 2010, I was asked if I had the stamina to review a new novel by an obscure Canadian writer about a young woman who has been kidnapped, raped and imprisoned for many years. I agreed, secretly hoping the work would not be a transgressive exploitation of the terrors endured by real-life kidnap victims Elisabeth Fritzl, Sabine Dardenne and Natascha Kampusch. But once I started reading Room by Emma Donoghue, I was hooked, declaring the novel a “convincing tale of human survival, informed by the genius of hope and will”.
Room’s combination of authorial command, psychological acuity, imaginative genius and profound humanity is again evident in Donoghue’s astonishing new novel, The Wonder. Set in the 1850s Irish Midlands, it is the story of 11-year-old Anna O’Donnell, who has become the object of local curiosity, national fascination and religious adulation for supposedly existing on air and water for more than four months. The village elders bring Elizabeth “Lib” Wright, a nurse trained by Florence Nightingale, to the small town of Athlone to share a 24-hour watch with the local nun, Sister Michael. Together they are to determine whether this hunger strike is a miraculous act of devotion or a subterfuge orchestrated by those closest to the young innocent.
Based on accounts from the 16th to 18th centuries of fasting girls who supposedly survived for long periods without nourishment, The Wonder, like Room, examines the ingenuity of human exceptionalism. Both protagonists are young women struggling to overcome overwhelming limitations. The heroine of Room is a sexual prisoner attempting to transcend her incarceration through the strength of her imagination and her will to keep her young son alive, whereas Anna is a prisoner of primitive superstition and societal restriction, attempting to transcend her own pain by aspiring to saintly evanescence.
What is remarkable about this novel is how there is so much motion in stillness, as the narrative action occurs primarily through observation. Nurse Lib is brought to Athlone
to watch, not to treat, Anna. Trained in the advances of modern science, she has preconceived notions of primitive Irish superstition: “It does sometimes seem as if the 19th century hasn’t reached this part of the world yet,” she says. “Milk for the fairies, wax discs to ward off fire and flood, girls living on air … is there nothing the Irish won’t swallow?”
Similarly, the young Anna pities her nurse for her lack of faith in anything other than what exists in this world. Yet their time together transforms them both, as Anna
It is an exciting psychological thriller, filled with revelations and surprises.
gradually yields her secrets and Lib confronts the mysteries of her own past.
The Wonder held me in its grip from the first page, even as I grew restless and impatient with the slow unveiling of the story’s resolution. It is an exciting psychological thriller, filled with revelations and surprises, that arrives at a supremely satisfying conclusion. It is written with verve and skill and is not to be missed. THE WONDER, by Emma Donoghue (Picador,
$29.99)