Emma Donoghue's Room is one of the six books shortlisted for the 2010 Booker, and certainly the tale of little Jack and his Ma is remarkably well-wrought, and good reading from start to finish. Room is unusual for several reasons, but the most interesting of these is that the language it uses is largely that of a five-year old boy, thus making the narration also an exploration into language and how a writer works at crafting things out of it.
Room is about five-year-old Jack and his mother, ‘Ma.' It's also about Old Nick — the man who kidnapped Ma, when she was 19, keeping her confined in a fortified garden shed, raping her repeatedly over the years that she's been in there. But make no mistake, Room is not a rape and confinement tale because the story-teller is little Jack and the story tells of what he makes of the world. In effect, for the reader, there is always a certain distance from Ma and what she's been living with; we see her as Jack sees her: all he knows of Old Nick is that he comes at night, by which time he's usually “switched off in Wardrobe.” On the occasions when he is not, he can hear Old Nick making the bed creak and he counts the creaks to make him fall asleep. We know what the creaks are of course, but we have no idea what the count will be, and when it comes in, in Jack's child's voice, make no mistake, it's shocking.
Play of words
Shock and horror, however are not the main notes – it is wonder and a goosefleshy thrill as Donoghue works magic with her words to creates Jack's intense universe, in which his sense of connection to everything around him is made clear through his Upper Casing them: Wardrobe, Room, Skylight, Rocker, Kit on Shelf, Mirror, Meltedy Spoon and so on. It is through language that Jack and Ma have voiced up a whole world in Room, though Old Nick's done everything he can to keep the world out and them in — sound-proofing the room, installing a security lock on the door, fencing the floor of the room and meshing up the skylight. Ma's made determined efforts to teach Jack to read and write, and to find ways to make him engage with language through, stories, rhymes riddles as a child his age would. And language takes on a whole other timbre here in Room where Jack and his Ma have instinctually used it to engage with a world that's almost completely invisible to them.
Jack has just finished his fifth birthday when the book begins and Ma has just chosen to break to him the news that what's in Outside is actually a ‘real' world, with real people and not Outerspace, as she's allowed him to believe. She's decided to tell him all this now, because she wants them to escape from Room and needs Jack to play an active part, as that's their only hope of escape. The plan is so simple it seems doomed to fail, but it doesn't and they are rescued out of the little world of Room with its Upper Cased things, into the vastness of the real world. Old Nick is caught and locked up.
The rest of the book is about how the two have to learn to live in the real world, where their upper casing comes undone and they have to learn about new relationships, not only with things and with people, but also with language. Room has three movements: the first is before Ma tells Jack about the real world outside Room , the second is when she tells him about the world, saying that she is now “unlying” her earlier lies, and the last part, in a sense, is the two of them negotiating between these two. For both Jack and his mother, it's a painful time struggling to find a way to bridge the comfort and the self-containedness of Room and its clear language and the disorientation and variety of the real world with its confusing language. Donoghue gives us a sense of the precariousness of this time, a sense of how at times it becomes so difficult that Jack wishes he were back in Room, and how Ma has to struggle not withdraw.
Pleasure to read
Room is that rare book, brilliantly conceptualised, expertly crafted and grippingly plotted; that it also has a sub-text in which the reader gets to go on a language-expedition is a bonus. Whether or not Donoghue eventually wins the Booker, with this book, she's made her skill very evident.
Room; Emma Donoghue; Picador; £7.50
