Joan Thomas (1)

This book was chosen by my Library Book Club to read for May 2021. In the interests of complete disclosure it was my suggestion based on the fact that the book had won the GG for English literature in 2019 and that the author lives in Winnipeg. We had our (virtual) book club meeting a few days ago and Joan Thomas was gracious enough to join the meeting. It added so much more to our discussion. Even without her participation I think the members of the book club would have had lots to discuss.

In 1956 a group of five American male missionaries from an evangelical church entered the Amazonian rain forest in Ecuador. They wanted to convert a tribe of indigenous nomadic people known by them as the Auca but who are now called the Waorani. They didn't know the tribe's language because this tribe had never had contact with people outside of their territory. One woman had fled the tribe in fear for her life and lived in a settlement that did have contact with outsiders. Rachel Saint, the sister of one of the male missionaries, had spent some time with her supposedly learning the language but Rachel was no linguist and her notebook of Waorani words was filled with errors. The men of course did not know that so they attempted to talk to three Waorani who showed up at their encampment. Despite the language difficulties they had a peaceful encounter but a few days later all the men were killed by the Waorani tribesmen. Their reasons for this are revealed later in the book but initially the attack was viewed as unprovoked and savage. The wives of all of the men and the sister Rachel grieved but they also felt that God must have had a reason for taking all of the men. Most of the wives stayed in Ecuador to continue the missionary work; Rachel and Elizabeth Elliott actually went back into the Waorani territory (Elizabeth took her young daughter) and were accepted, perhaps because they were female. The result was that the Waorani ceased being nomadic and oil companies and other resource extractors got access to their territory. All of this is documented but Thomas brings in a contemporary story line as well that is purely fictional. Despite that it seems very real; several times in our discussion with Joan we referred to the fictional characters as if they were real.

I had never encountered the story of Operation Auca before but Joan told us that in the ecumenical church in which she was raised the story was well known. Perhaps if I had been raised in a more ecumenical religion rather than the United Church it would have been part of my upbringing as well. The idea of putting all your trust in God and going into the jungle may seem brave at first but in reality the men, who took guns and body armor with them, were probably not as brave as Rachel and Elizabeth who walked into the settlement with no protection. Yet it is the men who received most of the attention in the North American press; this book is one of the few that introduces the women's story. Highly recommended.… (más)

Joan Thomas’s GG-award winning fourth novel, based on actual events, is mainly set in the 1950s in Ecuador. In 1956, a group of American missionaries set their sights on a group of indigenous people living in the Ecuadorian rainforest with the intention of converting them to Christianity. To this point, the Waorani’s exposure to the outside world was virtually nil. Little was known about them or their way of life other than their itinerant practices and their tendency to defend themselves ferociously against outside encroachment. The Waorani were known locally as the “Auca,” a derogatory term meaning “savage,” and the missionaries adopted this term, calling their action “Operation Auca.” Thomas’s novel begins in the lead-up to the operation, providing background on the participants—all of them very young—showing how they came together, explaining how the plan was hatched and describing the complex mechanisms that finally set it into motion. Thomas’s intricate, detailed narrative is related from many different perspectives, primarily the men leading the excursion and their wives. The common thread running through all of these narratives is the evangelical fervour with which these people approach their mission, their unwavering faith in what they see as God’s plan, and their unquestioning willingness to accept the hardships, dangers and tragic outcomes as part of that plan. Thomas portrays the male leaders of the operation as true believers, driven to serve God in any way they can, willing to risk life and limb—willing, as it turns out, to make the ultimate sacrifice—in order to spread the Word to people they believe will be condemned to eternal damnation without their intervention. The triumph of this novel is the author’s ability to convincingly and without judgment present a mode of thinking that will be alien, possibly abhorrent, to many readers: the belief that everything that happens, without exception, can be interpreted as a sign: a direct communication from God that the believer will use in his or her ongoing search for direction and purpose. It will come as no surprise that Thomas does not endorse or condemn any particular way of thinking. Her characters are sincere and obviously trust that they have been instructed by God to save the Waorani people from sinfulness. But from our modern perspective the ignorance, arrogance and hubris inherent in the evangelical Christian’s approach is also obvious as it is based on the assumption that a way of life that evolved over hundreds of generations and thousands of years—that likely existed before Christ’s time—is inferior—morally, materially, and culturally—to the Christian way of life. In Five Wives Joan Thomas lays out all the information and allows her reader to reach his/her own conclusions. The only portion of the story that seriously questions the purity of the evangelical’s motivation comes in several chapters set in a contemporary time closer to our own. Abby, a young woman whose grandmothers both participated in Operation Auca, and whose father grew up in Ecuador and is a preacher, has strayed from the path of righteousness and is no longer convinced that God is a ubiquitous presence in her life. Abby is a curious and independent thinker, educated and modern in her attitudes, who suspects that tearing down an entire peoples’ culture and replacing it with something foreign to them is neither just nor honourable. The cynical among us will also find him/herself wondering about the role of the oil companies, who in the years following World War II came to covet the Waorani’s territory and in the end got what they wanted. Five Wives is a timely, courageous, dramatically urgent story, written on a grand scale, swarming with fascinating characters, covering large swaths of history that will be unfamiliar to most of us, and seamlessly incorporating the author’s extensive research into a coherent and absorbing narrative. It is deserving of the praise and accolades that came its way.… (más)

A novel based on the real-life: five missionary men murdered in the Ecuadorean jungle in 1956. In real-life, a freelance journalist for LIFE magazine happened to be there on another assignment and was able to capture the account and interview the widows. You can find photos from that magazine spread online.

Because she was working within the confines of the histories of real people, with living descendants, Thomas does not cover quite as much ground as Kingsolver in the Poisonwood Bible. Nevertheless, I found the characterizations did jibe with what materials remain of the account.

Obviously, the lead-up and the aftermath form most of this story and I find both fascinating.

Five Wives won Canada's Governor-General's Award for Fiction in 2019.… (más)