It’s not particularly surprising that Emma Donoghue’s Room, with its harrowing and controversial story told through the voice of a five-year-old boy, met with criticism when it was published in 2010. The story of Jack and his ‘Ma’, imprisoned for years in a small and scarcely provisioned room by a mysterious, malignant kidnapper known darkly as ‘Old Nick’ has, understandably, invited comparisons with recent real-life cases including those of Elisabeth Fritzl and Natascha Kampusch. In some quarters, Room was simply dismissed out of hand as sensationalist and opportunistic, and a significant amount of the attention that the novel has received has centred on its concept, rather than the skill with which that concept has been realised.
Of course, it’s impossible to argue that the horrors of Room are themselves safely restrained within the realms of fiction – as the Fritzl and Kampusch cases have shown, Donoghue’s subject matter is all too real, and this feeling of ‘fictionalised reality’ makes the novel all the more chilling and uncomfortable to read. However, this particular story is neither melodramatic nor tawdry, and Donoghue preserves the strength, hope and resourcefulness of the victims as a constant throughout the novel. It is this constant that makes Room a compulsive read – we want desperately to see Jack and Ma freed, to see them protected, to see the end of the perverse, pathetic ‘Sunday treat’ for which Jack has learned to be so grateful, and the end of deliberate power cuts to teach the two a lesson for perceived ‘disobedience’. It’s not because we’re being drawn in by a sequence of ghoulish tales of abuse, neglect and manipulation that we read on, but because Donoghue shows us that Ma and Jack, while being absent from the world, aren’t lost to it. Ma isn’t just keeping Jack alive – she is teaching him, stimulating his mind, encouraging his development and his creativity, even casting him as the hero within his own bedtime stories. She hasn’t given up on her son, and there’s no way Donoghue is letting the reader give up on him, either.
Jack’s narrative voice is inconsistent and jarring at first, and the sense that Donoghue has had to describe an unusual case of child development within an extremely limited environment (no encounters with other children, a world within one room, emotional bonds with ‘Rug’ and ‘Plant’ rather than people) is unavoidable. Getting used to this narrative style demands perseverance especially if, like me, you’re not a reader who is particularly used to a child’s narrative voice. It may well have been much easier on Donoghue had she told this story from the point of view of Ma, who has been kidnapped and horribly mistreated and is now forced to raise her child in a captivity which, for her, is not entirely the norm. However, this would also have been the fastest route to voyeuristic, broad-strokes shock-lit. Having known the truth of what existed ‘Outside’, Ma could not have told this story in quite the same innocent, observant, optimistic way; she knows too much of Outside to be a sufficiently delicate narrator. Jack’s voice tempers the horror of the story with the hope which emanates from his own enthusiasm for the world he has accepted within the tiny room in which he was born and has lived his entire life. In fact, it is really the reader who brings the sadness to Jack’s storytelling, because we know what he is missing where he does not.
The latter part of the story sees Jack trying quickly to adjust to five years’ worth of missed learning, change and development. This is also where we begin to observe Ma’s character development, as her circumstances change in a way which forces her to feel previously repressed emotions whether she wants to or not, and it is at this stage that the fact that she is still only twenty-four years old herself really becomes apparent. Jack’s profound emotional attachment to the inanimate things within Room is one of the saddest features of this second part of his story, and it is interesting that the possibility of his being unable to develop properly only really emerges as a prominent issue at this later point in the novel. A range of experiences throw Jack’s disadvantages into stark relief but are, broadly speaking, indicative of something positive – his journey will be long, but it’s not impossible to believe that he’ll get there. Sadly, it eventually seems that it’s Ma’s future which is far less certain. In this regard I would have liked a less open end to the novel – it ends abruptly and at a point where there is clearly more story to be told – but as a conclusion it is at least thought-provoking enough to avoid completely disappointing the reader.
We all draw lines in our minds which mark out the limits of our own comfort and what we consider to be appropriate material for fiction, and it isn’t difficult to appreciate why some readers feel that Room is in something of a wilderness where these lines are concerned. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) the accepting nature of Jack’s infantile, innocent voice, this is a necessarily fearful, microcosmic story – horrible events aren’t incessant within the novel, but the tension of waiting for Old Nick’s visits and other developments is constantly palpable because there is so little else within Jack and Ma’s environment. But it is not without positivity. Through Ma, Donoghue has presented an inspiring interpretation of the determination and strength of maternal love in some of the most adverse circumstances imaginable. Jack, too, is a joyous embodiment of the emotional openness and dynamic nature of young children. The sensitive, frank and understated method by which Donoghue has told the story of Ma and Jack deserves to be recognised, even though the premise of the novel is so deeply unappealing. Room is a thoroughly unpleasant read, but it may help us, in some small way, to think beyond the shock of such chilling crimes to how their victims can live through and beyond them.
Rebecca Jones
