Room: A Book from the Headlines and Perhaps Also from the Heart

I finished reading Emma Donoghue's Room a few days ago and I've been puzzling about it ever since. 

The novel, which according to Donoghue's website has now sold more than a million copies, was nominated  for and/or has won a raft of prizes including the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (for best Canadian novel), the Commonwealth Prize (Canada & Carribbean Region), the Canadian Booksellers’ Asand the Orange Prize.  In addition the American Library Association gave it an Alex Award (for an adult book with special appeal to readers 12-18) and the Indie Choice Award for Adult Fiction.

That means, I guess, that a lot of people found it compelling reading.  As did I. But what's the point, I found myself asking.

Donoghue's narrator is  Jack, a five year old who has been imprisoned since his birth with his mother in Room, a reinforced, sound-proofed garden shed.  She makes him sound like a kid, giving him the same grammatical quirks most children that age struggle with, such as how to form the past tense of words like "got"--is it just "got" or "gotted?"

Ma is everything to Jack, as mothers frequently are to pre-school children.  But we quickly learn that their connection is orders of magnitude stronger than most because she is the only person he has ever seen. Even though  Old Nick, Jack's father and their jailor  visits Room most evenings, Ma protects Jack from him: the only people he knows anything about are those he sees on television.

How they escape from Room occupies the first two-thirds of the novel.  Donoghue makes it every bit as exciting as the best action movie, and she also lets us know that having watched Dora the Explorer can be very useful too.  The rest of the book deals with how Jack and Ma learn to live Outside.

This is where a few question have to be asked.  It might be easy to dismiss the first part of the book as a light weight adventure lifted almost bodily from the headlines: there are after all  terrible stories of the man in Cleveland who held three young women hostage for a decade, and before that men in California and Austria.    But Donoghue isn't interested in why such things happens, she concentrates on Jack, whose existence isn't terrible, thanks in large part to Ma's efforts to keep him from  Old Nick. 

This part of the book reminded me of Montreal writer Ann Charney's account of her own escape from imprisonment at the end of World War II.  In her novel Dobryd (a very good book BTW) she tells how she  had been hidden in a barn along with a dozen adults for two and a half years when the sector of Poland where they were was liberated by Soviet forces.  Her memories of the time are not unpleasant, though, because she was cosseted and played with, in part to keep her quiet, but also because she symbolized life to those in hiding.

Similarly Jack regrets leaving Room a little because Outside has a terrifying number of choices to make.  Nothing is certain, everything changes, Ma isn't always there. 

This is, perhaps, the point of the book, what rescues it from being just light suspense reading.   There are many varieties of danger and captivity, Donoghue seems to be saying. Those of us on Outside may not recognize what traps we are in, or what threatens us.