Room [Mass Market Paperback]

Jack is the narrator of `Room'. Jack is excited by his fifth birthday, is curious about the world and full of energy. But Jack's physical world is contained within an 11 by 11 foot space called Room where he and his Ma live. This is Jack's world: the room and its contents, and his mother. Because we are viewing this world through Jack's eyes, we are protected in part from his mother's awful reality. Jack recounts what he sees and experiences and the reader knows the situation that Jack and his Ma are in. But Jack does not: this is his life and this is the only world he knows.

In Jack's world, he has songs and stories. He has a snake made from egg shells, and a maze made from toilet roll inserts. He has the unreal world of television which he sometimes watches in unlimited amounts when Ma doesn't get out of bed. For Jack, these are the days `when Ma is gone'.

One day Ma tells Jack that there is a world outside Room. And this becomes the beginning of another story, one which is best read uninfluenced by reviews and story synopses.

I added this book to my reading list because it is on the Man Booker 2010 longlist. I had some misgivings about reading it given the subject matter but once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down. I would have found it unbearable if it was written from the perspective of Ma. Our view, through Jack's eyes, is more focussed on the relationship between son and mother than on the situation itself. The book ends, but the story isn't over.

It's like a crater, a hole where something happened.'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Reason for Reading: With this subject matter, who is *not* wanting to read this book?

A 26 year old woman has been kidnapped and held captive in a soundproof, escape-proof 11 x 11 foot Room for 7 years. She has a five year old son, Jack. She cares for him fiercely and has created a world for him out of that Room, giving him everything she possibly can that he needs to grow properly, physically and emotionally. They do daily exercises, she teaches him, etc. This is their story, of their day-to-day life, their escape and how they cope on the Outside. A truly fascinating story to start with is only topped by the fact that it is told in the first person narrative of five year old Jack.

I'm going to start by saying this is a hard review for me to write. I agonized over my rating. There is not doubt that Room is a wonderful piece of writing. The subject matter is enticing and the reality of the situation has been explored to such detail that one is amazed the author could have thought of some things without having actually experienced captivity herself. The book is divided into distinct sections, each one focusing intensely on a certain stage of Jack and Ma's story. Donoghue has managed to write about a horrific situation without ever actually putting in print any scenes that show the obvious s*xual violence that was perpetrated. In the hands of a lesser author this could have become a much more graphic story thus losing Ms. Donoghue's perceptive touch. The book reads fast, is compelling and is tremendously well written.

So why is this review hard to write? I didn't love the book. Yes, it was good. Good enough to keep me reading, and reading quickly too. The second half was better than the first, as in enjoying the story and the characters. I really enjoyed the introduction of Grandpa Leo, Steppa. He was the most real character in the whole book. I often found myself annoyed while reading the book. The child's narrative just didn't win me over. I didn't hate it but it felt detached somehow and thus I felt detached from the characters. I never had any great emotional response to the boy and his mother, which I *really* wanted to have. None of the other characters were fully developed, even Steppa , but he at least had the behaviour of a real person and came to life for me.

As you can see I had problems with the book, while appreciating it. Now that I've finished it, my immediate response is "Yeah, it was good." I wouldn't grab people and say you *must* read this book, but if anyone asked me I'd recommend it with my reservations as noted above. I may feel differently about my rating a month (a year) from now but it's been 6 days since I've written this review and I still feel the same way. Very well written, but only good, not great.

It took me a while to figure out why I have a problem with this book: it's too cute. It seems paradoxical to say this about a novel which deals with such horrific subject matter. In a way, Room is a sort of Uncle Tom's Cabin for our times. Rape, forcible confinement and child abuse have the same power to move us to disgust and outrage as slavery did for progressive minds in the 19th century. It's therefore understandably difficult while reading to separate our moral feelings from our critical responses.

But there's a basic weakness at the heart of this novel. As many reviewers have stated, this is a story of survival and the mutual love of a mother and her son. No problem with that. But it's not survival in itself but rather the decisions and choices made to achieve that survival that supply the substance of a fully realized novel. When the central character is a five-year-old the possible development of that character through purposive action is severely limited. It's the same problem Faulkner faced with Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. Like Faulkner, Donoghue tackles the problem head-on by exploiting the character's limitations to the maximum. Her invention of a child-like language to express a child's perceptions is without question original, ingenious and brilliantly carried out.

However this very considerable "tour de force", extended over 300 pages, can't entirely disguise the thinness of the storyline. This can be simply summarized: Ma and Jack are confined, they escape, they recover. Though we rightly have feelings of sympathy and compassion for them in their predicament, they don't develop as characters and therefore don't command our deepest response. And who are they? They have no history and only the barest social context. As in Gothic fiction the villain, Old Nick (the Devil), is a plot device rather than a character. There is a curious insubstantiality about the whole thing.

As a consequence, the many circumstantial details of Jack's daily life, which fill out the narrative, are interesting rather than compelling. Though as readers we are required to do some work in order to "interpret" Jack's understanding of reality, his experience of the world is too immature (inevitably) to prevent this exercise from resembling a clever game. Hence the "cutesy" quality of, for example, this episode in the Cumberland Clinic: "She says the persons are here at the Cumberland because they're a bit sick in the head, but not very. They can't sleep maybe from worrying, or they can't eat, or they wash their hands too much, I didn't know washing could be too much. Some of them have hit their heads and don't know themselves anymore, and some are sad all the time or scratch their arms with knives even, I don't know why. The doctors and nurses and Pilar and the invisible cleaners aren't sick, they're here to help." The disjunction between adult and child perceptions is amusing but teeters between comedy and sentimentality.

There's a famous precedent, of which I'm sure Emma Donoghue is aware, for her inventive use of a child's point of view. James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins like this: "Once upon a time, and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...." But the "nicens little boy" (Stephen Dedalus) soon grows up to be an active, intelligent adult whose story fully engages our adult attention.