Tuesday, August 1, 2017

A good read, but somewhat mechanical: The Wonder, by Emma Donoghue

The Wonder, by Emma Donoghue (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2016).

This well-written novel set in the 1850s is about an English nurse (Lib Wright) who is sent to a remote Irish village to observe an eleven year old fasting girl (Anna O'Donnell) who purports to have not eaten anything in four months. The village committee that hires her and a fellow nurse (a Roman Catholic nun), wants to certify that the girl is in fact not secretly receiving any nutrition and that her story is not a hoax. Lib, who believes religion is silly superstition, is certain the story is a hoax, and that she will soon get to the bottom of it within a few days, finds herself instead loving the starving little girl for her innocence.

Once I got a third of the way in, the book was very hard to put down. I wanted to know just how the girl was actually getting any food. She grows steadily weaker, and she is heading toward death. Lib's attempts to save the girl from herself and the delusional obsessions of her parents are gripping. She is joined in this fight by William Byrne, the newspaperman from Dublin. The two of them devise a somewhat hard to believe plot to save the girl.

I wondered how a nineteenth century nurse, such as Lib, could be so anti-religious. She clearly thinks religion is in general a sort of hoax. Even Darwin left room for religious belief as being rational. It would be easy to think this is an anti-Catholic book, but he book itself doesn't really take a stand on religious thought -- the nun Sister Michael turns out to play a crucial role in the fight to save the girl's life, and Byrne himself seems to be a faithful Catholic.

It was a little hard to believe that Lib would talk to Byrne the journalist in the first place. She seems too knowing herself to not realize that Byrne is in the business of making money on his stories, and that he will write about the little girl. Their eventual romance seems a bit odd, kind of mechanical, without much heat.

Yet, the book was hard to put down.

In case you're interested, Stephen King wrote a review in the NYT Book Review.