Emma Donoghue on Fasting and Faith

English snobbery versus Irish tradition, science versus faith, a single woman versus a powerful male cohort: conditions could hardly be better for breeding dramatic antagonism, and Lib has no trouble racking up nemeses from the stock cast of small-village types she finds herself thrust among. There’s the physician presiding over the case, who believes that Anna may be converting sunlight into energy, like a plant, or developing a reptilian metabolism, and the local priest, whose murmurings on sin and penance are repulsive to Lib’s unreligious mind. Anna’s father is too doltish to doubt his daughter; her mother, as crafty as her husband is simple, solicitous of gift-bearing guests and sour toward prying Lib, is the kind to know more than she lets on.