Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder Will Make You Believe

Room was noteworthy in part because it so ably captured a child’s point of view without being precious or twee, and, even once its premise was made clear, without piling on salacious detail for the sake of shocking readers. But the book became a hit because, at a time when much of realist literature suffered from an almost fatal self-seriousness, it refused to be cynical, slow-moving, or depressing: Donoghue rewarded readers’ investment in her characters with a thrilling escape attempt and a happy, though still complex and believable, ending.
Here she takes up that pattern again. Donoghue’s philosophy seems to be that a story does not need to be dour to be important, and that change is always possible. Even within the most desperate situation, if there’s life, there’s hope.

When The Wonder begins, that there is life, or rather that it will continue, is by no means certain. English nurse Lib Wright, who trained and served under Florence Nightingale herself, has been called to examine and oversee an Irish girl named Anna O’Donnell, whose family says she has been existing without food. To an effusive local doctor and other residents of her village, who have so recently survived famines and plagues, she is perhaps a saint and certainly an inspiration. To the skeptical Lib, however, Anna’s a pious faker whose deception needs to be uncovered.
At first, Donoghue deploys the contrasts with a heavy hand. Lib is experienced, while the countryside is provincial. Lib is fixedly secular, the countryside oppressively religious. Lib is pointed forward toward progress and science, the countryside pointed backward toward tradition and superstition. Each entity is as hostile to the other as a cat in an alley. A reader familiar with Diana Gabaldon may half expect the townspeople to start muttering curses at the “Sassenach” in their midst.
Yet Anna herself, despite being the golden child of her neighborhood—and, as her fame spreads, of Ireland as a whole—is not a distillation of her community’s values. She is her own person, a kindhearted and quick-witted individual who enjoys riddles and the natural world, and, it transpires, Lib’s company. She is artless, and her artlessness disarms even her battle-hardened nurse.
Anna, Lib realizes, is no Abigail Williams, a young woman intent on destruction because she has nothing to lose, using religious fervor as her tool because she has access to no other. In fact, Anna is neither Lib’s enemy nor the proper target of her investigative powers. Someone else is. But who?
As Lib delves deeper into the mystery of how and why Anna seems to be existing without food, Anna’s health begins to fail, and Lib realizes she is racing against time as well as a power structure that may not care if one girl dies, so long as certain myths and assumptions are maintained. Lib gets an unlikely assist from a good-natured and intelligent reporter up from Dublin, who represents a more modern Ireland; he helps infuse the last quarter of the book with sexual tension as well as some real momentum.
Superficially, The Wonder could be read as anti-Catholic, or even perhaps anti-religion in general. Lib arrives impatient with repetitive Latin ritual and with the ineffectual village priest, as well as the nun helping her watch Anna. She only becomes more impatient as Anna declines and people of faith don’t act. But Lib is not always as “right” as her name would suggest: she has a lot to learn, from her charge and about life itself. And whether or not Anna’s interpretation of scripture is misguided, it is earnest, even inspiring.
Anna’s religiosity also seems, at least in part, to echo the philosophy of the author. Donoghue is well-acquainted with the cruelty of man and the unfairness of fate, but in her wise, humane, and lovely books, as in traditional Catholic belief, the one unforgivable sin is despair.
The Wonder is on sale September 20, and available for pre-order now.