Emma Donoghue’s superbly original Room won prizes and was turned into an award-winning feature film, catapulting her to a whole new level of attention. Which can have its downsides: “Since publishing Room,” she quips on her website, “I’m mostly known as the locked-up children writer.” It is unlikely that this new novel will do anything to still that reputation.
Lib, a young English nurse fresh from Florence Nightingale’s bloody Crimea, takes up a mysterious new post in the dark and peaty Irish countryside. Her “patient” turns out to be 11-year-old Anna, but Lib is told that surveillance rather than nursing is what’s required. For Anna, allegedly, has refused to eat anything for the past four months, yet appears to be in perfect health.
As priests, villagers and even (or, indeed, especially) her parents clamour to claim her as some kind of lucrative, crowd-pulling miracle, an urgent “committee” is established to ferret out the truth. Is this a hoax or a true visitation from God? Is the child secretly being fed or is she really, as she claims, living on “manna from heaven”?
For two weeks, Lib and a local nun will take it in turns to keep a round-the-clock watch, before a verdict is pronounced. So there it all is: a room, a child and an adult thrown into claustrophobic proximity, not to mention an escalating sense of manipulation, jeopardy and possibly abuse. All the ingredients of Room are here, just shaken up and spilled out differently.
And the first half is indeed a deliciously creepy gothic cocktail, enticingly set up and chillingly, suspensefully dragged out. In a country where the potato famine is all too recent history and folk insist on sprinkling salt on their porridge to keep the “little people” away, Lib is at first torn between concern, bewilderment and medically trained scepticism. But as the days pass and her charge’s condition deteriorates, it seems increasingly possible that she may somehow be complicit in whatever damage is being done. Even so, it takes a plain-speaking young journalist (befriending her in the hope of a scoop) to point out that something truly sinister may be afoot.
Which, I’m afraid, is when the problems start. It doesn’t matter at all that Lib is a not a totally reliable narrator – it’s clear, for instance, that her past has not been entirely revealed to us – but she is nevertheless drawn as an intelligent young woman, refreshingly (in this oppressed and superstitious community) atheist, questioning and curious. So why, again and again, does she fail to ask the glaringly obvious questions that might get her somewhere? What, for instance, has happened to Anna’s missing older brother? What is the significance of the prayers that the child obsessively mutters? And when the journalist asks her if she’s “ever put to Anna, fair and square, that she must eat?”, you realise that a part of you has been wanting to ask the exact same question for a few too many pages.
Meanwhile, Lib seems relentlessly blind to well-strewn clues and so prone to jump to wrong conclusions that at times the narrative takes on a “he’s behind you!” quality that only undermines its otherwise very promising creepiness. Too many conversations are blatantly expositional, with people either revealing things for no particular reason or else reminding each other what needs to happen next. By the time we get to: “You and I must dig out the truth… not just because we’ve been charged with that task, but because the child’s life depends on it”, what began as a tightly wrought thriller is threatening to descend into parody.
Which is perplexing, because there is so much to enjoy here. Donoghue weaves crunchily convincing period detail through a pacy narrative with relish and aplomb. Explicit medical business, clinically – often unnervingly – precise descriptions of the child’s symptoms, small insights into the theory of nursing: all of it is vivid and well judged. You never for one second doubt that Lib trained under Nightingale and the Crimean elements, far from being mere backdrop, provide a whiff of something properly violent and agonising that permeates the whole novel.
Only once the “room” itself is finally exited, the tension lifted, are you left feeling a touch deflated, which is a problem I also recall having with Room. Maybe it’s that Donoghue’s settings, like her plots, are so suffocatingly precise, so tightly wound that, in a way, they leave you nowhere to go. Or perhaps it’s just that she is such an undisputed master of the small and the slow, of the uneasy fragmenting of time that happens when human beings are contained within four walls, that all you want is for her to go on doing what she does so well. And as reputations go, that’s not a bad one to have to live down.
The Wonder is published by Picador (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £12.29
