We often picture Florence Nightingale as a lonesome figure, stalking hospital corridors with only a glow of light for assistance. In reality, she travelled to Constantinople in 1854 flanked by a 38-strong team of volunteer nurses. During the Crimean War, the Lady with the Lamp trained these women in her pioneering nursing practices. Those who returned to Britain in the conflict’s aftermath brought with them a certain repute.
Emma Donoghue’s new novel spotlights one such “Nightingale”: Elizabeth “Lib” Wright, a young widow working in a hospital in London, who is singled out to travel to the Irish midlands on a well-paid but somewhat obscure commission.
It isn’t until Lib has been deposited in a pub-come-grocers-come-undertakers-come-guesthouse in a village outside Athlone that the bizarre nature of her assignment is outlined by the local doctor. She has been summoned by a committee of “important men” on behalf of the O’Donnell family’s only daughter, Anna, who is “not exactly ill” the doctor says.
Lib’s only duty “will be to watch her” for a period of two weeks, in a schedule of eight-hour shifts shared with a surly nun from the House of Mercy in Tullamore. Such surveillance is required because, since the day of her 11th birthday, Anna is said to have consumed nothing but sips of water.
For four months she has survived on what she describes as “manna from heaven”, and because she remains mysteriously well, the parish is beginning to attract attention. Pilgrims come to sing hymns with the girl sustained by grace – A living moving statue – and deposit coins in a collection box as they leave.
Terrible potato failure
This is rural Ireland circa 1860, a place, we are told, the 19th century hasn’t reached, a country still in recovery from “that terrible failure of the potato”. The O’Donnells are simple people, their walls cemented with mud, their mattresses stuffed with straw. They keep shorthorn cattle; subsist on oatcakes, turnips and tiny, bony river fish; attempt to solve problems by means of votive masses and miraculous medals.
This is a landscape steeped in “the enigmatic atmosphere of stone circles, ring forts or round barrows”, but all Lib sees is ugliness and morbidity: “flat fields striped with dark foliage. Sheets of reddish-brown peat . . . the occasional grey remains of a cottage, almost greened over.” And all she tastes is peat from the fire her food is cooked in, imagining that “if she did stay the full fortnight, she’d have consumed a good handful of boggy soil”.
The English nurse is scathing about the “shiftless, thriftless, hopeless, hapless” Irish, always brooding over past wrongs – “Their tracks going nowhere, their trees hung with putrid rags.” She “wonders” at many aspects of the O’ Donnell’s simple life: their farming practices, religious devotions and superstitious rituals – a saucer of milk beneath the dresser to placate the “little folk”, a slice of bread carried in the pocket while walking.
Most of all, Lib wonders what is going on with Anna, who appears, indeed, to be swallowing nothing but “God’s own water”. One by one, Lib suspects everyone around her: is the nun in on the family’s plot? Is the priest manipulating the child in order to make money for the Church’s “shrine-building fund”? But as the Watch grinds on, doubt begins to collect inside her like the soil, to soften into compassion.
Confined place
Though set in the same era as Donoghue's most recent novel, Frog Music, The Wonder shares more territory with her bestseller Room. What lies at the heart of that Booker-shortlisted novel is the touching dynamic established between an adult and child together in confinement. For The Wonder, Donoghue has recreated something of Jack and Ma's garden shed in a farmhouse in Victorian Westmeath.
Here is a woman and girl, a world reduced to the size of “one small chamber”. Though little happens on the surface, the story is suffused by “a fug of the ineffable”, and the reader is seduced by the suspense; compelled to pay as close consideration as the nurse in order to understand precisely what’s going on.
Room and Frog Music are both drawn from true stories, and in a note at the end of The Wonder Donoghue acknowledges being inspired by some 50 cases of so-called Fasting Girls, who were hailed for surviving without food for long periods in the British Isles, western Europe and North America between the 16th and 20th centuries.
One doesn’t have to look any further than Wikipedia to find the case of Sarah Jacob, a Welsh girl who forswore eating on the occasion of her 10th birthday in 1867. The local vicar corroborated her claims, and for two years she attracted gift-bearing pilgrims until, in 1869, her family consented to have her monitored by professional medics.
When Sarah began to show clear signs of starvation, her parents continued to insist that there was no need to intervene; that their daughter was miraculous. In little over two weeks, she died. Mr and Mrs Jacob were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to hard labour in Swansea prison.
The first two-thirds of The Wonder sets a superb pace, but in the final third it's as if Donoghue novelist had had her pen taken off her by Donoghue the scriptwriter (Oscar-nominated earlier this year for her Room). Goodies and baddies begin to emerge; there's even a love interest. The case of Anna O'Donnell comes to a close with significantly less poignancy and poetic justice than that of Sarah Jacob.
Sara Baume is the author of ‘Spill Simmer Falter Wither’ (Windmill Books).
