Everyone now knows that it's good (it received Booker shortlist confirmation of that this year, alongside glittering reviews and features on best seller lists), and for want of a better phrasing, considering its subject matter, it was something of a summer hit. However, I can still admit to trepidation on picking up Emma Donoghue’s Room. Donoghue made the clear admission that the novel was 'triggered’ by Joseph Fritzl’s incarceration of his daughter Elizabeth, and it was written in the two years after the discovery and of Joseph Fritzl’s arrest, being published in the summer of this year.
Before reading, I was nervous of the ethical implications of writing a novel tackling feelings impossible to relate to; how can you write a personal novel inspired by one of the most horrendous news stories of the past ten years- a man who fathered seven children with his incarcerated daughter- without the horrendous personal experience of having lived it?
The answer is Donoghue’s child's perspective. The novel is narrated through the voice of a five year old boy Jack, whose mother has been imprisoned for seven years, during which time she is repeatedly raped by her captor. And it is through this perfectly pitched narration that Donoghue avoids a misery memoir scenario; although this child has been kept in the same room for his entire life, his voice and imagination is perfectly relatable to anyone who has come into contact with a sensitive five year old boy.
It is this familiarity with the child that makes the novel unsettling. Jack thinks his Room is the only place that exists, and that ‘TV’ is everything going on outside in some kind of unattainable outer space. Real life is twisted into the room and things take on magic realist elements that could only have ever been conjured from a child’s mind, 'Ships are just TV and so is the sea except when our poos and letters arrive... Forests are TV and also jungles and deserts and streets and skyscrapers and cars. Animals are TV except ants and Spider and Mouse.'
We see a woman’s 11ft x 11ft prison as a whole world, yet 'Ma’s' cramming of the first five years of a child’s crucial development into the space of one room doesn’t feel claustrophobic because it is a child’s world, the only world he knows, meaning it is endless with opportunities. ‘We have thousands of things to do every morning’ he tells us at the beginning of the book. He lists the familiar objects and activities in his every day life as any other child would; the mother and child play games like ‘Scream’, and ‘Phys-Ed’; his favourite objects are pieces of bent cutlery, ‘meltedy spoon‘ and a snake made of egg shells that lives under the bed. He calls his mother’s captor ‘Old Nick’- confusing the innocence of a story about Santa Clause he saw on television with the man sneaking into his mother’s bed at night.
Jack’s innocence isn’t overkill here- it’s absolutely realistic and insightful. Donoghue has shone light onto a new way of writing about the most horrific of situations- to pare it down to the absolute basics and reflect it from a new perspective. Adult vision is especially skewed in the second half of the novel, and everything that we know is taken over by a innocent and instinctive knowledge that feels more insightful than what we knew before it. Donoghue has refused an all out tear jerker and has instead exemplified to us the ease with which a situation can manipulate a child’s imagination and development to deviate away from the norm. This makes the novel less about human suffering and more about human survival, human development; the thread of fiercely protective motherhood in a hopeless situation is the spine of this novel. Even though the situation is a unpromising one, the mother teaches Jack how to read, how to count and how to play. You can tell that Donoghue is a mother herself, and it is easy to see that she has been able to push her feelings to place herself, carefully, into the most desperate of situations.
Back in the room, it was inevitable that real life would seep in, and this is where the novel’s other major success plays out. In placing the novel on the child’s fifth birthday, we see Jack beginning to question everything he knows and how it got to be there- which is everything inside the room- and we can see his ‘Ma’ struggling to contain him. It is when we watch him recognise a bottle of painkillers on the television that are the same brand as his mother’s, when she has to explain to him that there is a world outside of Room, that there is a turning point.
Donoghue’s book is as perfect and as illuminating as a shaft of light on a situation so dark. She has given new eyes to a situation lived by so few, but one that rings at the heart of so many through a delicate and knowing shift in perspective; 'I knew that by sticking to the child's-eye perspective there'd be nothing voyeuristic about it... I knew the chills would be justified. The book has some really serious questions to ask.'
Room is published by Picador, and is available in hardback at the modest price of £12.99
Go buy here and read.