Room

Emma Donoghue — Room

Donoghue’s book undoubtedly tackles an extremely innovative idea: its protagonist-narrator, Jack, is a five year old boy who lives with his mother in a single eleven by eleven foot room.  Jack has never known anywhere else and his mother has lived there since she was brought there by her captor seven years ago at the age of nineteen.  It is undoubtedly technically excellent in many respects — Donoghue maintains Jack’s voice very convincingly over the course of the book, while she excels at detail.  These details in particular are crucial to what makes the text work, to my mind, as it is that very specificity and realism which chills: that Jack would never have stopped breastfeeding, seeing as there has never been any social necessity to do so, or that Ma’s teeth are in a state of the most wretched decay having been kept away from any kind of dentistry for seven years.  And Donoghue, in various ways, chooses not to shy away from making difficult choices in her later characterisation and plotting, which I found admirable.

In spite of the novelty of the idea and the precision of its execution, this was an unsatisfying read for me, and I finished it with an ambivalent feeling.  Nevertheless, I found myself vigorously defending it at last week’s book group, for which this was the chosen text.  This was not so much because there weren’t parts I could criticise — rather that I found their criticisms objectionable: some accused it of trivialising the situation of the captive pair, while another simply had a problem with anyone making art out of such a scenario (both ideologically in the abstract and in practice when he had to deal with that art).  A number blamed Donoghue for not answering burning questions — the captor’s motivation and previous life, for instance — that I thought were obviously moot considering the narrator was a five-year-old who would not and could not ask such questions.  So I left the meeting feeling far more strongly in favour of it than I had immediately after finishing it.  But now I’m not quite so sure.  It’s audacious, it’s clever, it’s well done, but I wasn’t moved by its ending, in spite of feeling it to be extremely well structured and, intellectually, the right way to complete it.  Humby-ho.