Anti-Irish
The protagonist of the novel, Lib the nurse, is a complicated type. She is situated as the pro-science voice of reason amongst the superstitious Catholics committed to their faith that believes in the existence of God explains everything. She is not to be viewed as entirely progressive, however." Lib’s eyes fell on the whitewashed wall, and she thought of the dung, hair, blood, and buttermilk mixture in it. How could such a surface ever be clean?” This imagery describing the construction of the walls of the home is just one of many that implicate the profoundly regressive anti-Irish prejudice of the British nurse. Lib associates the filthy living conditions of the Irish not with British oppression, but with a comprehensively offensive inborn national lack of character.
Pat
The family mentions a brother named Pat who is not around, and Lib can only hypothesize about his absence. The only evidence of his existence is a family photograph in which his appearance strikes the nurse as odd. “Pat’s adolescent face was similar to his sister’s softer one, allowing for the fact that boys parted their hair on the right. But his eyes; something wrong with their glitter. The lips dark, as if rouged. He leaned back on his indomitable mother like a much younger child, or a drunken fop.” Lib’s misassumption about what makes this imagery seem a little off will come back to humiliate her. She is a trained nurse, after all. And yet she cannot recognize that the image is an example of what was popular if rather macabre and mercifully short-lived tradition at the time: death photography in which deceased family members were posed along with the living before their burial.
“Manna from heaven”
Lib is not a religious person. Her unfamiliarity with the bible is such that she has never even heard the word “manna” before. Anna says to her, “I live on manna from heaven” with an unusual sort of literalness to the phrase that stimulates an obsession in Lib to discover what it means. Over the course of much of the story, the reader learns along with Lib a little bit more about the subject through imagery like “it fell every day to feed the children of Israel when they were fleeing across the desert from their persecutors” and” it was like coriander seed, white, and the taste thereof like to flour with honey.” Eventually, this imagery will ignite Lib’s obsession to produce inspiration that leads her to figure out the mystery of what Anna really meant by living on manna.
The Secret
Eventually, the secret behind Anna’s survival without food is revealed. It is not the most shocking secret about the girl that Lib learns, however. Anna is fasting because she is terrified that her dead brother is in trouble in the afterlife. The cause for this concern about the potential impossibility of redemption for the brother’s soul is expressed through the innocent imagery of a young girl’s only understanding of such things. “He married me in the night. I was his sister and his bride too.” Lib is shocked by the confession from Anna, but she is more shocked that the girl’s mother and priest already know and have already responded. Such slander of her dear departed brother will not be tolerated.
