The ending, however, is too blithely happy. The Wonder is a well-paced and heart-rending tale in which Donoghue yanks you into the world of this dim hut. It seems Donoghue, author of Room (about a boy and his mother imprisoned in a room by their kidnapper) and historical novels including Slammerkin and Frog Music, is drawn to stories of children who suffer in extreme ways at the hands of adults. Even the doctor who is meant to have the child's best interests at heart is more swayed by his hope for a miracle and his skewed, freakish hypotheses: "Might her metabolism not be altering to one less combustive, more of a reptilian than mammalian nature?" he asks. Set seven years after the end of the Great Famine, The Wonder examines the ideals of self-sacrifice embedded in religion and the willing blindness of a family's belief. The question becomes whether she can sit by and watch a child slowly starve. "The watch has altered the situation that's being watched," she realises. Examining the girl she sees fine colourless hair over her body, and wonders: "Was this hairiness common among the Irish, by any chance?"Īs Lib gets to know Anna, she learns that the girl is not the one deceiving, and that her own role as nurse might be what leads to Anna's death. "What was it about this spoiled miss," she wonders, "that she'd managed to enrol all the grown-ups around her in this charade." At first Lib sees nothing wrong with Anna, though as contemporary readers we understand things that Lib does not.
We are given the story from the perspective of Lib, who begins not trusting Anna or the Irish in general. English nurse and widow Lib Wright, who served under Florence Nightingale in Crimea, is brought in with another nurse to watch Anna and attest to the veracity of the family's claims.Įmma Donoghue's historic novel The Wonder. Emma Donoghue's latest novel is inspired by the cases of these "fasting girls", as she brings us to a small cabin in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, where 11-year-old Anna O'Donnell has supposedly gone four months without food. In North America and Europe between the 16th century and the 20th there were well-known cases of religious pre-adolescent girls also lauded for their ability to survive long periods of time without food. It was also a way to avoid marriage and childbearing. For these women, fasting allowed them to exert a greater level of control over their lives. When a scab from the water stuck in her throat, she said it tasted as sweet as communion. In one case from the 12th century, Catholic saint Angela of Foligno refused food and only drank the water she used to wash the sores of lepers.
0 kommentar(er)
