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. ( )

Five Wives is a captivating book. I really enjoyed the switch between two timelines as I read this book. The places and time it all began and the time and places where it wound up, many years later. I wasn't sure I was going to like it, (but I did love The Poisonwood Bible), so I had to give this a read. I have a definite...abhorrence for Christian missionaries and their interference in native populations the world over, I still found this story to be absolutely captivating. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

The destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the impact of that devastation on human life on earth have recently been in the news. Five Wives examines the devastating impact of missionary zeal on the people living in the Amazon.

The novel is based on Operation Auca, the mission of a group of American Christian evangelists in the mid-1950s. Their aim was to convert the Waorani, an isolated Indigenous people living in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Five male missionaries decided to make contact and were killed. Among evangelical Christians, the five men were seen as martyred heroes.

The focus of the book is the wives of the missionaries, especially Marj Saint and Betty Elliot, and Rachel Saint, the sister of the team’s pilot. We learn considerable background: how Marj and Betty met their husbands, how Rachel came to be involved in the mission, how the women reacted to the deaths of the men. There is also a contemporary subplot involving Abby, the granddaughter of both Marj and Betty. Abby is not proud of her family’s legacy because of how they “’went to someone else’s country and said to people, your ways are wicked, our ways are good’” (31).

There is a long cast of characters so it is occasionally difficult to remember who is married to whom. A chart at the beginning of the book would definitely have been helpful. Fortunately, the major characters are sufficiently developed that identification becomes easier.

Initially the women are subservient to their husbands. Women aren’t even allowed to sing aloud in church. When the men and their wives have a meeting to discuss making contact with the Waorani, Marj understands, “This is not a meeting to discuss the risks and vote yes or no; this is a meeting to brief the girls. The plan is glorious and complete, it’s an extravagant bird in full flight” (185). The women are expected to accept the plan, even if they disagree and think the men are being hasty. The men think only of the glory that awaits if they succeed and give little consideration to the consequences for their families should they fail. After the men are killed, the women must decide for themselves if they should continue to be involved in the mission.

What amazed me is the single-mindedness of some of the missionaries. They believe that God is behind all events and that even the simplest of things can be God’s message which must be interpreted. Their faith leads to a form of blindness because events which most people would see as warnings are viewed as positive signs from God. When God seems to be ignoring her, one of the wives concludes that “God had a new contract with her, the contract of silence” (331). When the missionaries are killed, Betty views the killing of the men as “’a marvellous indication of God’s love and purpose. It seems clear that God has moved a step closer to redeeming the Auca’” (278).

There is an element of blindness and hubris in the missionaries’ belief in the superiority of Christianity which is even seen in the name they give the Waorani; they call them Auca, a pejorative name meaning “savage.” Non-Christian cultures are seen as valueless: “They always talked of how they would change the Indians, what they would bring to the Indians, but they didn’t think of what the Indians would bring to them” (340). More than one person on the mission wears a “breastplate of righteousness” (315).

Contact annihilates the Waorani and their culture. Exposure to disease leads to deaths. The tribe is restricted to a protectorate (reservation) comprising 8 percent of Waorani land. That land, oil companies are free to exploit so one Waorani says, “’Thirteen days of oil for America ruined Waorani lands’” (350). It is only after Waorani culture has been virtually destroyed that Abby learns about “The hunting taboos that protect certain animals. The songs celebrating the bounty of the forest. The way individuals from clans far away are recognized by their footprints in river clay. The warfare rituals, the sharing rituals” (372). There is such irony in a Bible finally being translated into the Waorani language, “the fulfillment of a dream cherished by three generations of Operation Auca families” (357), because by then only a few elders speak the language and not many of them can read.

The author shows different approaches to Christianization. Betty, for example, asks, “Was it possible to reach people’s souls, and turn them over to Christ, and leave the people otherwise as they were?” and has “a lot of ideas about accommodating the gospel to native ways” (350). Rachel, on the other hand, is totally unbending; she is determined to break their itinerant lifestyle. She wants the Waorani to raise beef cattle so they will give up eating wild meat: “’And anyway, if they live in one place, the game is going to peter out pretty shortly’” (325)!

What is amazing is that the author manages to arouse sympathy and antipathy for both women. Betty is an intelligent woman who questions the way Christian missions operate yet still has “faith that terrible and even bizarre tragedies are planned and carried out by God’” (15). Rachel is a bully who forces the Waorani to live as she sees fit; even her nephew recognizes that the Waorani needed protection from her (350). Yet this same woman raised five boys while she was just a girl herself and had her heart broken twice (130 – 131). The flawed and layered characters are a wonderful element in the book.

The son of one of the missionaries realizes “that his family’s story always sounds better in the US. You tell it there and people are moved to tears” (352). My hope is that people are indeed moved to tears but not just because five men died; the impact of missionary zeal on the Waorani left me feeling devastated and reflecting on the treatment our Indigenous people received.

This book is so timely, perhaps influencing people to think more about First Nations reconciliation. I understand why the novel won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction.

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