“Shiftless, thriftless, hopeless, hapless, always brooding over past wrongs.” It should be a tough sell to make such a narrator relatable, let alone likeable, but Donoghue pulls it off. “What a rabble, the Irish,” she muses at one point. Thus The Wonder paints a negative and hostile portrait of 19th century Ireland, which (at least initially) verges pretty close to the Punch cartoons of the time that depicted the Irish as ignorant apes. So instead, the reader is treated to scene after scene of Lib watching, only able to store up her scorn internally at the awfulness of Irish society. The Wonder will be published this month by Harper Collins. Her role is specifically to observe the case for fraud – and the closer Lib gets to an answer the more painfully aware she becomes that solving the mystery means very little, as she’s powerless to act on her discovery. Lib is an outsider in every sense – a rationalist protestant English woman in a patriarchal, catholic, nationalist, and superstitious Ireland. It’s a classic, almost gothic, mystery setup raised to tragic proportions by the protagonist’s lack of social agency. English nurse Lib Wright has been called to the post-famine Irish midlands to investigate the case of an 11-year-old girl who has stopped eating, but remains miraculously alive and well. For a the most part, The Wonder assumes the guise of a skewed alternative to the detective story.

The book never makes the mistake, however, of being too obviously about a message rather than a story. Under the premise of a gripping yarn, Donoghue dares her readers to confront a damning indictment of themselves through a heightened vision of their past. Sure, it may be the obsessively catholic and dismally poor rural Ireland of the 1850s, but it’s hard not to see a certain analogue of today’s country in the image Donoghue paints – less a literal reflection of said attitudes and more a residual taint of their presence. The first thing likely to strike any Irish reader of Emma Donoghue’s new novel The Wonder is the contempt its narrator holds for the Irish.

Emma o donoghue the wonder