In ‘The Wonder,’ Irish girl becomes a medical marvel
The world has made advances since the Crimean War ended in 1857, but some problems that should be easy to disentangle remain stubbornly knotted. Committees composed solely of men still have a pesky habit of rendering decisions about women’s bodies. Neighboring countries harbor prejudices toward one another that are sometimes based on flimsy pretexts. And to extremists on both sides of the science vs. religion debate, a person can become a symbol rather than a human being.
These are some of the themes that “Room” author Emma Donoghue puts forward in “The Wonder,” an excellent new novel that is as much a mystery as it is an analysis of the extent to which some people are governed by their faith.
Lib Wright is an English nurse who served under Florence Nightingale at Scutari, the Turkish army barracks in which Nightingale and her nurses cared for soldiers throughout the recently ended Crimean War. Five years earlier, when Lib was 25, her marriage of less than one year ended after the couple’s infant daughter died. Lib now serves as a nurse at a London hospital. At the start of the novel, she has been summoned to the Irish Midlands town of Athlone for an unusual case.
Anna O’Donnell, a devout 11-year-old Roman Catholic girl, has taken no food — not even arrowroot or beef tea, only the occasional sip of fresh water — since her most recent birthday four months earlier. Yet she shows no signs of malnutrition or illness. The press and the townsfolk call her an “extraordinary wonder” and a “living marvel.”
Dr. McBrearty, the O’Donnells’ 70-year-old physician, greets Lib after she steps out of her jaunting car — as she has proved in all of her works of historical fiction, Donoghue is a master of the perfect period detail — and enters the ramshackle grocery that is her lodging. He suspects a hoax, so he and an all-male committee have hired Lib and Sister Michael, an Irish nun, to watch Anna ’round the clock for two weeks. Lib, baptized in the Church of England but now a nonbeliever, concludes that she has been brought here to “cast a veneer of respectability over an outrageous fraud” and is determined to uncover the truth about the girl that the O’Donnells believe is “thriving by special providence of the Almighty.”
But something unexpected happens after the first couple of days, during which Lib examines Anna’s bedroom for places where food could be hidden: Lib finds Anna charm- ing and likable. But she is certain that Anna is being fed somehow and that the many visitors who leave coins in a box by the door are being swindled.
So does William Byrne, a religious man and a reporter for the Irish Times. Byrne, who is more of a sounding board for Lib than a fully fleshed-out character, thinks that Mr. Thaddeus, the town priest, may have more involvement in this case than he lets on: If Anna is recognized as a miracle, funds will flow in to his church. But the miracle theory begins to be disproved when, after a few days of roundthe-clock monitoring, Anna finally begins to weaken.
As Anna’s condition deteriorates, Lib finds herself in conflict with many of the people who brought her to Athlone, from Dr. McBrearty and the priest to the O’Donnells themselves. And she soon suspects that Anna’s reasons for not eating pertain to Patrick, her deceased older brother, whose image in a daguerreotype positioned above the fireplace dominates the O’Donnells’ whitewashed cabin.
The ending of “The Wonder” is too neat. And, although the point about men determining the fate of women is valid, some of the men in the novel are cartoonish and onenote, whether they’re doctors barking orders at women or priests and baronets cautioning the nurses to mind their place. Nuanced portraits would have made Donoghue’s point stronger.
Yet this brave novel vividly suggests that one can take unquestioned belief in religion or science too far. Excessive fealty can come at the cost of one’s humanity. Late in the novel, Lib tells Byrne that they must dig out the truth about Anna “because the child’s life depends on it.” The tricky bit, Donoghue reminds us, is that definitions of truth differ. That, too, is as relevant today as it was in Anna’s time.