Room

In Room, Emma Donoghue has created a beautiful and tender story from something horrifying – a mirror for the two main characters in the novel. Our narrator, a five year old boy named Jack, has been born into captivity after his young mother was kidnapped and trapped, in a garden shed. This imprisonment should make for a harrowing story, and yet Donoghue handles the plot with such lightness and tenderness of style, that it has more of a bittersweet tension about it. That is not to say we are not confronted with the heinousness of this very topical issue, but somehow Jack’s naivety make the situation even more heartbreaking. He has never known anything else – his world is a box that he enjoys measuring, and his friends become characters like ‘sock’ and ‘tooth’. He cannot appreciate why he sometimes wakes in the night to find his mother frantically flashing signals at the skylight, and believes the universe to be the very box he lives in – characters he sees on television are floating in space. And so when the idea of escape is proposed, Jack’s tiny world is rocked. This premise gives Donoghue a fabulous platform to question the nature of what we perceive to be real, and how we come to learn about our own existence, while the social commentary of the crime makes for an avid plot that will no doubt enrage the reader. However, at the end of the day it is also a beautifully written and captivating story that can easily be read in one sitting – once I had picked it up I found myself struggling to stop, and more than a few tears were shed before the end.
Becky Milford (Fri 15th Jul 2011)