She often loses her appetite, and after a particularly nasty meal of cold griddle cakes, she wonders - with some justification - “Did the Irish hate food?”įood is the dominant chord that runs through “The Wonder,” because the girl Lib has been hired to observe - along with a mostly silent nun named Sister Michael - is said to have taken none at all since her 11th birthday, four months previous. Lib herself is given plenty to eat, but very little of it appeals to her English palate. The Irish potato famine has been over for seven years when “The Wonder” commences (in 1859, by my reckoning), but the aftereffects are everywhere. “ ‘The hungry season,’ muttered the driver.” stationed on the verge, a knot of children in the hedge behind her.” The woman’s cupped hands are lifted to the sky, as if to catch heavenly manna. She glimpses “a woman in a filthy frilled cap.
When Lib asks her driver for clarification, he tells her they are in the exact dead center of Ireland, and even before she reaches the tiny village where she will lodge in a room at the spirit grocery (a store selling alcohol), Lib becomes aware that the Irish Midlands are dead in ways that go beyond geography. She’s been hired by a committee of influential locals to spend two weeks observing a young girl named Anna O’Donnell. The man who makes the remark, on the first page of Emma Donoghue’s engrossing novel, is the driver of an uncomfortable horse-drawn wagon called a “jaunting car.” The woman to whom he directs it is Elizabeth (Lib) Wright, a nurse trained by Florence Nightingale, and proud of it.
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