READING THE BESTSELLERS
Five Wives By Joan Thomas
HarperCollins, 2019.
400 pages. $19.99 (e-book $11.99). Preview at Amazon. ca and Books.Google.ca
IN 1956 MEMBERS of the isolated Waorani tribe speared five missionaries to death in Ecuador. The discovery of their bodies captured international headlines. Their widows’ testimonies – notably Elisabeth Elliot’s books – spurred efforts to take the gospel to remote ends of the earth.
Winnipeg writer Joan Thomas recently won the Governor General’s award for her compelling novel inspired by the saga. Thomas was raised in a home that honoured the five men as martyrs, and her novel evokes – with stunning authenticity – the missionaries’ call to reach the Waorani, known to kill all outsiders.
The missionaries’ doubts, loves and rivalries are convincingly and compassionately told. Readers will find more nuance here than in the caricature of Nathan Price in The Poisonwood Bible, a bestselling African missionary novel by Barbara Kingsolver.
Readers familiar with the history may question Thomas’ use of real geography and real names for the missionaries (all deceased except one) while completely reimagining the characters, but the plot and settings are masterful and engaging in their own right.
The stories of the widows, a rival Catholic priest and the devoted but sidelined missionary colleague Rachel alternate with a contemporary narrative of pastor David, a fictional son-in-law of Elisabeth Elliot, and his agnostic daughter Abby as they seek to come to terms with the missionaries’ legacy.
Along the way Thomas spotlights the ethnocentrism that often blights mission work. The fly-in missionaries use megaphones, Kool-Aid and balloons to draw the Waorani out of the forest for a friendly encounter. After the deaths Elisabeth and Rachel persist in befriending the Waorani, eventually leading converts to tour American churches. Meanwhile, government and oil companies wreak their own havoc on Ecuador’s Indigenous peoples.
Thomas’ novel candidly reflects the challenges of cross-cultural mission. But even more, it is a gripping tale about the complexities of relating to a vastly different people.