‘I live on manna from heaven’

Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room made her into an odd sort of overnight literary sensation, given that it was her seventh. The story of a mother and her son, Jack, held prisoner by a sexual predator, Room exploited the public’s fascination with reallife cases, such as Josef Fritzl’s decades-long imprisonment of his daughter Elisabeth. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and last year adapted for film by Donoghue herself. The Wonder, her ninth novel, is similarly inspired by actual events.

An afterword mentions the Victorian phenomenon of “Fasting Girls” – women young and old who were apparently able to survive for long periods, sometimes decades, without food. Many, though not all, claimed divine inspiration. This is certainly the case for our fictional titular “Wonder”, 11-year-old Anna O’Donnell and her devout, impoverished family in the “dead centre” of Ireland, where the locals are “virtually all Catholics”. It is 1859, seven years after the potato famine’s end. Anna and her family claim she has not “taken food” since her first communion on her 11th birthday. At the book’s start, she’s been fasting for four months. Anna says she subsists on “manna from heaven”, and the O’Donnells believe it a miracle.

DrMcBrearty, though, considers it a scientific breakthrough. Haven’t most new discoveries in the history of civilisation seemed uncanny at first, almost magical?” he asks, later suggesting that her metabolism might be altering “to one less combustive, more of a reptilian than mammalian nature”.

Others dismiss Anna’s fast as a hoax. Farmers in the local inn (or “spirit grocery”) sarcastically refer to her as an “extraordinary wonder”. Although pilgrims come from all over Ireland to see her, the Irish Times is sceptical. So DrMcBrearty and a committee of local worthies engage two nurses to keep a fortnight’s watch over Anna, and “bring the truth to light” – whatever it may be. One is a young English “Nightingale”, Lib Wright, trained in the Crimea by Florence Nightingale.

Room’s vast success was partly due to our enduring interest – at once prurient and prudish – in vulnerable children like Anna and Jack; that interest is made The Wonder’s subject. Unlike Room, which was narrated by Jack, allowing the reader to enter the inner life of a character who might otherwise be treated as something between a freak show and an object of pity, The Wonder is told from Lib’s perspective. This distance lets Donoghue to examine why people like to ogle such children in the first place.

Anna, like Room’s five-year-old Jack, is confined physically, under a 24-hour watch, and mentally, by her upbringing. From the opening chapters, which feel like the start of a 19th-century gothic novel, Lib’s airy rationalism is pitted against local superstition. Her matron in England criticised the Nightingales, with their disregard for established procedures and hierarchies, as “uppish”, and Lib takes her distaste for dogma to rural Ireland. She has no time for the O’Donnells’ elaborate piety – the endless run of saints’ days and prayers – or their belief in “little ones”, malignant fairies appeased by a saucer of milk.

Sam Kitchener enjoys a mystery by the author of ‘Room’ about a fasting Irish girl who won’t die

Lib’s own backstory, the shame that caused her to volunteer in the Crimea, is slowly teased out; she is, we find, familiar with the male dominance that lies behind Anna’s fast. A continuity emerges between the high-handedness with which DrMcBrearty dismisses Lib’s concerns that her vigil is endangering Anna, preventing the girl’s mother from secretly feeding her, and Anna’s fast itself, which we learn is prompted by abuse. If anything, Donoghue cleaves too closely to Lib’s perspective, and the effect can be strained and artificial. Too many of Lib’s thoughts bring her back to the central problem – what to do about Anna – and too few of them flit about like the “darting fish” of a visiting reporter’s smile. We are told that Lib is “chilled” by Anna’s “tone of renunciation”. You can often detect a similarly steely tone of renunciation when an author commits to a conceit – there’s a deliberateness to the way they abstain from any narrative temptation that might take their conceit off the rails. The Wonder is a very accomplished novel, and its tone is far from chilling. But Donoghue could have been greedier, and denied herself less.

Accomplished: Emma Donoghue