Early on in Emma Donoghue’s new novel The Wonder, our heroine Lib Wright poses a riddle to her young patient Anna: “There’s not a kingdom on the earth, but what I’ve travelled o’er and o’er, and whether it be day or night I neither am nor can be seen.” The answer is the wind, invisible but everywhere, an almost menacing presence. This paradox—between what is and what is seen, what is perceived and what is real—is as good a description as any of the novel’s central preoccupation.
Three years after a stint working for Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War, Lib is sent to the tiny village of Athlone, in the “dead centre” of Ireland, to nurse Anna. Upon arriving, though, Lib realizes she is not supposed to nurse but merely watch her. The eleven-year-old Anna claims to have eaten nothing for the past four months, and yet she seems in perfect health. A cabal of “important men” has hired Lib, along with a local nun, to take turns surveilling Anna continuously for two weeks to answer the question: Is Anna an honest-to-God miracle?
Ostensibly, Lib has been chosen for her objectivity. She has no local loyalties and no reason to root for Anna—unlike the girl’s parents, the parish priest, or the town doctor, each of whom has a stake in Anna’s glory. And yet, immediately upon meeting Lib, we see that she is not much of an observer at all: distrustful and dismissive, she always seems to be looking in the wrong direction. Lib is full of prejudices that warp her sense of the world around her, not least towards the Irish, whom she views as credulous, squalid, and uncouth. “The Irish were notorious for neglecting the niceties,” she reflects. And: “Was it true that the Irish were impervious to improvement?”
Lib is an unlikely heroine: exacting, judgmental, cold, distant, at times almost implausibly dense (when informed that Anna’s older brother Pat has “gone over, God bless him,” Lib assumes it’s abroad, probably to America). Anna is the opposite: quick, open, kind, thoughtful, pious. She is written to be loved. Much of the book chronicles the unlikely—or perhaps more aptly, the narratively inevitable—friendship that blossoms between the two. Anna is all faith and superstition, Lib is all skepticism and science.
Surely, we think, Lib will come over to Anna’s side and defend her cause. And yet—almost miraculously—the novel unfolds with exquisite suspense. Though there seem to be three possible resolutions—Anna is a fraud, Anna is a miracle, Anna is being manipulated—I had no inkling of where it all might end up. As in her 2010 novel, Room, Donoghue masterfully creates drama within small domestic spaces. In The Wonder, nearly all the action takes place within Anna’s small house, Lib’s inn, and the green, boggy road between them. Lovers of Room will find familiar ingredients here (the loveable child, a young woman struggling against shadowy sinister influences) but overall, the effect is something altogether more drafty and Gothic.
At her best, Donoghue strings us along with sparse, meticulous language. Her writing is often precise, clean, and unhurried, punctuated by lovely images. “The Irish Midlands were a depression where wet pooled, the little circle in a saucer,” she writes. She describes Anna’s mother as having “a smile holed with dark.” The details she discloses, from Anna’s religious icons, to the buttered oatcakes, to the eerie family photograph taken with Pat’s corpse, transport the reader to a rich and convincing 1850s Ireland. Compelling is the puddled, peaty landscape that Donoghue paints, riddled with mystery and tinged with tragedy.
Donoghue has an odd tendency of slapping us on the head with her red herrings. Upon first arriving, Lib judges of Anna not only that “the chit had them all charmed,” but also, “What was it about this spoiled miss?” and “The data … indicated that Anna O’Donnell was a false little baggage.” Anna is, at turns, “the brat,” “the minx,” “the little fraud,” and “a shammer of the deepest dye.” Lib thinks, “I’m going to crack you like a nut, missy.” This all quickly grows old—we get the gist—and I often wanted to swat Lib’s repetitive (and unimaginative) appraisals away like gnats. Listening to Lib denigrate everyone around her is tiresome, especially when it’s so obvious we’re not meant to agree.
Still, we are swept away by the story. In creating a world and immersing us, The Wonder is a great success. But in answering some of the finer questions Donoghue raises—particularly with regards to Lib’s disregard for the Irish—the novel falls short. Donoghue has all the pieces of a powerful story but, perhaps unlike Room, they don’t ultimately cohere. All the detritus of a larger message are tossed onto the fires of the suspense machine.
Though the book’s conclusion is indeed thrilling, we find ourselves much where we began: in a waterlogged Ireland, filled with still-buried potatoes, starving peasants, and religious fanatics. All mystery is dispelled, and we are left not with any great sense of wonder but with a somewhat deflating reminder of earthbound evil. The Wonder is an engrossing novel, full of gorgeous atmosphere, but at the last it’s just that: a good read, no more or less than what it seems.
Madeline Gressel is an editor at Nautilus magazine.
