Emma Donoghue's Room

Emma Donoghue’s Room was getting a lot of blog press last year as well as it won a number of literary awards and was shortlisted for The Governor General’s award 2010 and the Man Booker prize 2010.

 

I bought into the hype and added it to my to be read list, talked it up to people as a book I really wanted to read, had heard was really good.  Well I finally read it over the Christmas break, and it is good.  Just not as good as I’d led myself to believe it would be.  Room just doesn’t live up to the hype.

 

Told from the point of view of five year old Jack, we discover he and his mother live in Room, a small shed in the backyard of the man who abducted Jack’s mother seven years earlier.  The first third of the book explores the day to day life of Jack and his mother, the weekly schedule of chores they keep, the hour of TV Jack is allowed to watch each day, the books they read over and over and over, and the various Sundaytreats they’ve received in the past and what should be asked for next Sundaytreat.  Each night at nine o’clock, Jack must be in bed, in the bottom of the wardrobe because that’s when “he” would visit and Jack would count the creaks of the bed on his fingers, waiting until it was safe to come out and join mommy in bed.

 

It’s a disturbing life, made more so by the fact that it’s told from such an innocent perspective.  Jack knows of no other life.  Everything outside Room is either on TV or in Outer Space.  He has no concept of the real world and so when his mother devises a plan to escape, a plan in which Jack must be the hero and bring the police to free his mom, he has to learn very quickly that more exists outside Room’s four walls than his mother ever let on.

 

I guess this is where the plausibility of the book broke down for me.  The time line is very brief, between the hatched plot and its execution, all hinging on Jack’s ability to escape from the man and alert the authorities, people he’d only ever known to exist in TV land.  While having the story told from Jack’s five-year-old perspective added an interesting twist, there were just some details that when revealed, were hard to take coming from that perspective.  I think the book may have worked better if both Jack and his mother’s voice could have been heard.  But that said, it’s still a book worth reading.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L J