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ROOM
by Emma Donoghue
HarperCollins, September 2010
352 pages
$29.99 CAD
ISBN: 1554688310


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

When Jack's mother, known in the book only as Ma, was nineteen, she was abducted on her way to class by a man who had prepared a virtually escape-proof prison in his back garden. A shed, measuring eleven by eleven feet, it has no windows, merely a skylight, and is thoroughly sound-proofed. Ma has been incarcerated inside for eight years, together with Jack, the son her captor fathered on her. Now that Jack has turned five, his mother tells him something overwhelming. There is a wider world outside the Room, which is what he calls the shed, filled with people, animals and things he has imagined only existed on the grainy television he's watched. He has enough trouble with the idea, but worse is to come - he and Ma must try to escape and he will have to play a major role in the attempt.

Emma Donoghue takes an enormous risk in ROOM, as the entire book is told in Jack's voice, and an odd and individual voice it is. The actual room may be sensually barren, but, aided by Ma, Jack has populated it with objects that become presences: Bed, Wardrobe, Sink, Plant. Every object capitalized in the German fashion, and lacking a definite article, as there is only one of each. They are not quite persons, but they are definitely very real. Described in this way, the effect might sound a bit precious, but on the contrary, Jack's syntax speaks volumes about the way he has lived his life and suggests much about the enormous effort his mother has gone to in order to raise as normal a child as she can in circumstances that are as abnormal as one might imagine. Should they ever succeed in getting out of there, Jack will have a fighting chance at entering the real world, once he understands that it exists.

I hve to confess that I was reluctant to read ROOM, as I've read too many stories about the forcible confinement of women, some fictional, others, horrifyingly, all too real. But once I opened the book, I was hooked. There are passages of such tension that I was torn between putting the book aside for a bit to relieve anxiety and the need to continue reading to see how it all works out. Because Jack tells the story, the two characters that matter, he and his mother, are presented only obliquely. The reader must fill in what Jack cannot know or understand.

One thing that he doesn't comprehend is something that all small children have problems with - that his mother is in some way separate from himself, and he resents her for it. He can't quite understand why she is so anxious to leave what to him, who knows no other life, is a perfect, and perfectly safe, existence. But Ma not only wants her real life back, but she is afraid for the two of them, dependent on their captor, a selfish man who might very well let them die rather than own up to what he's done. So she must prepare Jack to play a major role in the escape plan she has hatched, even though he is far from being convinced that there is anywhere to escape to or that he wants to go there if there is.

The captor, whom the two call Old Nick, is notable for his relative absence from the book. Too often in novels dealing with captive women it is the man who is the focus of attention. But here we know precisely as much as we need to about him and not a syllable more. He is mean, he is unimaginative, he is unfortunately good at DIY, and he has an empty space where his heart should be. We are spared the italicised passages when he remembers being confined in dark cupboards by an evil mommy, we are spared the lust, we are spared the sex, and happily, we are largely spared the man. Donoghue doesn't care why he did it and neither do we. He wanted to and he could, so he did.

The focus instead is where it should be, on Ma and Jack, on questions of survival, and on the delicate matter of the relationship between a mother and her child. They are both of them heroic. Though the novel did not win either the Man Booker or the Giller prizes for which it was shortlisted last year, it is hard to imagine that any other book of the year was more original, more provocative, or more involving than ROOM.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2011

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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