Room by Emma Donoghue

Room is intense. Intimate, brooding and humane. With a novel like this – which could be manipulative, trite, exploitative or theatrical, Donoghue’s success is in laying out exactly how Ma and Jack live. I can’t discuss too much of what happens because the events of the story are part of what make it so moving and it’s the sense of discovery in experiencing so many things for the first time through eyes not our own that make this story compelling.

Coming to it I had wondered if it was going to be ‘chick-lit’ or something saccharine and nostalgic. Donoghue presents something entirely savoury – meaty without being preachy, substantial without being indigestible. Simply, even sparsely, written and told through the eyes of the 5 year old boy Jack, Donoghue has clearly spent a long time thinking through every aspect of emotional and social development of her characters (whether protagonists or supporting roles). That might sound clinical but what it does is layer in depth and genuine life.

I remember Fritzel, it was covered at length here in the UK but a similar case in the US didn’t find as much air time over here. Donoghue is clearly inspired by both but particularly by the US event rather than Fritzel. That doesn’t matter – the pain and inhumanity of the imprisonment and torture suffered in both cases is verging on the impossible to understand or empathise with. A bit part character in this book sums our difficulty up succinctly – after a long dinner party conversation about the issue the tired and imaginatively poor characters wonder if it wasn’t so bad – they had, after all, enjoyed a week long retreat of solitary confinement. Donoghue doesn’t condemn this honest but ludicrous comparison but shows it as a way of highlighting to the reader our own difficulty in beginning to understand what her protagonists have gone through. It’s a salutary lesson about the gap between you and me but more poignantly about the gap between the prospering and the suffering other.  I remember not really knowing how to think about the events at the time and this story does something I didn’t have the emotional tools to do – it gives me a way of understanding what was going on. I don’t pretend I now get it – but the authentic humanity on page after page is heart breaking and humbling.

I’m a father of young children – that colours my view of this book I’m sure – I’m convinced it is that which led me to cry on three separate occasions (including the gentlest use of the word Hallelujah I have ever seen). If you’re not a parent I don’t think that takes away from this story but in the end that’s for you to decide. Sometimes a book comes along that prods you in the heart and says “lay down the arms of your cynicism and remember your humanity”.

Room is such a book and it deserves to be read. Recommended.