They stand and sing with full hearts, “We rest on Thee, our Shield and our Defender!” The melody is beautiful and old. Finlandia. Five wonderful young men stood beside his dad’s plane and sang this hymn that fateful day in early 1956 when they flew into the camp on the Curaray River. Five who knew the terms of their mission. They knew, and still they went. “When passing through the gates of pearly splendour, Victors, we rest with Thee through endless days.”
Based on the true and tragic events known as “Operation Auca”, Joan Thomas’ Five Wives makes for an intriguing read (and especially to someone like myself who didn’t know the story going in) and I’m not surprised that this novel won Thomas the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for English Language Fiction. In an afterword, Thomas relates the extensive research that went into this project, and also states that while the principal characters in this book (the five missionaries and their wives) are lightly fictionalised (events are true but conversations and relationships imagined, etc.), Thomas decided to entirely invent the next two generations of their families (out of a reluctance to write about living people). This made for a slightly uneven reading experience for me: the true bits were the most dramatically satisfying (with narratively pleasing hubris and irony and natural suspense), and while I can see the need for the modern characters (to reflect on the tragedy’s legacy and to demonstrate how faith and culture evolve), I found that the invented paled against the actual; I think I would have liked this better if Thomas had stuck to the facts. Three and a half stars, rounded down.
Is it better to have an empty drum of a heart, or to fill it how you can?
As Five Wives opens, the five new widows are given their recently deceased husbands’ notes and journals and attempt to piece together the men’s final days; that a tragedy is at the heart of this story is no surprise, but there are many twists and turns as the timeline jumps back and forth between the mid-twentieth century and today. We learn that these men, and their wives (and the sister of one of the men), are evangelical Christian missionaries, members of the poor but pious Plymouth Brethren. We are privy, in a jump to the past, to the courtship of two of the couples, and it is evident that these are all people of deep belief; people who honestly believed that the members of an uncontacted tribe in the Ecuadorian jungle were doomed to an eternity of hellfire if no one brought them the Word of God. Never mind that this was a notoriously aggressive tribe that had murderously repelled other explorers and oil speculators (the name “Auca” is a slur meaning “savage” that was given to this tribe by neighbouring tribes; they call themselves the “Waorani”, which simply means “the people”), these missionaries believed that God set them on this mission and they were prepared to be martyred in the process. As time jumps around, we see these couples setting up homes in the jungles of Ecuador; having babies and learning the local languages and bearing witness where they can. We see how the men lost their lives, how the women react (mostly praising God’s wisdom and waiting for His purpose to be revealed), how the world reacts (there is a huge boost in missionary zeal and offerings to the Plymouth Brethren), and by bringing the timeline up to the present, we get the benefit of learning everything that eventually came to light about those final days in the mens’ lives and can see how contact has affected the Waorani into today. All of these details are very interesting and worthy of a novelistic investigation, and it must be noted that Thomas’ prose is rich and satisfying.
Turned out that Carol had been raised in a garden-variety evangelical church, not as strict as the Gospel Hall. She was aghast that women were not allowed to join in the hymns in Olive and Pete’s assembly. “Well, we can sing,” Olive explained. “But only in our hearts. We contribute through our silence.”
At least two of the women in this story (Betty Elliot and Rachel Saint) had callings of their own, but for the most part, this is the story of five men who believed they were in personal communication with God and the women who, even if they couldn’t hear God’s voice themselves, followed their husbands because they once made a vow to love, honour, and obey. In the present day timeline, we meet Abby – the granddaughter of two of the slain missionaries – and she is modern enough to both reject the paternalism of her parents’ faith and recognise the arrogance behind her grandparents’ mission: just because the Waorani didn’t worship the Christian God or wear clothes or till the land didn’t mean that they didn’t have a civilisation or a culture. And this is where I kind of had a problem with this: the modern timeline with Abby and her father doesn’t go anywhere – I really think it’s just there to give the enlightened take on colonialism – and while a person could say that Thomas was really fair here and didn’t impose her own views, that’s not really true; any secular person reading about this mission today would likely come to Abby’s conclusions without Thomas leading us there (through what Abby says and what the wives keep to themselves), and that would be a more powerful reading experience.
What happened to the missionaries was indeed a tragedy – made more ironic by information that is eventually revealed – and while I'm willing to believe that their intentions were pure and selfless, their mission led to a tragedy for the Waorani people (turns out that the missionaries unwittingly paved the path for the oil companies to get into the jungle after all) and I appreciate everything I learned here. Great research, great sentences, plot quibbles.
