Book review: The Room and the World

Book: Room
Emma Donoghue
Picador
322 pages
Rs399

The 2008 story of a young girl incarcerated by her father, raped and eventually bearing him seven children has been turned by Emma Donoghue into a thriller. The entire story is narrated, in the present tense — itself an unusual narrative mode — by five-year-old Jack, the woman’s child from her captor.

The Room is Jack’s world. Various objects have names: Bed, Television, Rug, Watch, Shelf, Door, and of course, Ma. Jack describes his meals, his television viewing, the games he and his mother play, and the Scream. The Scream is surely the most horrific of Donoghue’s inventions: initially the imprisoned woman had stood on the chair and screamed at the skylight, hoping somebody would hear her and rescue her. With Jack, it has become a game.

The first half of the novel, with some great atmosphere, is set within the space of the Room, eleven feet by eleven feet, with reinforced steel and no windows. On some nights, Jack knows that ‘Old Nick’ visits them, and spends time in bed with his Ma — he counts the creaks — even as he himself lies inside the wardrobe. The Mother’s only concern is: keeping Jack alive and away from her captor. The suspense is killing: will Old Nick, who knows Jack exists but has been prevented by the mother from ever seeing him, harm the boy?

For Jack, the Room is a space of continual wonder; for him, it is neither big nor small, it is all there is. Donoghue makes a success of the child’s perception of the ‘world’. The mother’s inventiveness in the face of a poor diet and paranoia — when she quarrels with the captor, he shuts off their electricity for three days and they have begun to starve by the time he restores it — keeps her sane, and her son occupied. One day she happens to reveal to Jack that there is an Outside that is real, that what he sees on TV is a version of what really exists outside the Room.

Jack initially refuses to accept this ‘real’. The mother realises that at least Jack will have to escape, and hopefully rescue her. Through an ingenious method — to reveal it would be a spoiler — Jack gets out, and she is rescued as well. For the first time Jack encounters the Outside. The latter parts of the novel are about his negotiations with the Outside — people, places, objects, as he fights to assimilate all this, and stay close to his Ma. The mother-son bond comes under constant onslaught as the world begins to intrude, and Jack must learn that his Mother is also of the Outside.

Jack is, of course, precocious, and has a truly amazing vocabulary for a five-year old (including cutesy descriptors like “Ma leans out of Bed to switch on Lamp, he makes everything light up whoosh”), but his cognitive abilities are severely impaired when he goes outside. It is also interesting that Donoghue refuses to pay attention to the captor after he is arrested, and thus refrains from giving us anything about him at all.

So what makes this a good novel (but not a great one)? The minimalism of Donoghue’s style and language somehow connects eerily with the condition of incarceration. How does one imagine what a child, who has never seen the world, makes of it? (Recall here Craig Raine’s brilliant poem, ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’).

Donoghue pulls it off, quite effectively. The mother-son bond, frightening, dramatic and touching in equal measure is the crux of the tale. In a sense it is a growing-up tale, about Jack’s education in the Room and Outside. It is also a parenting novel, and Donoghue manages to convey to us the inability of the child to understand the trauma of parenting.

The subject matter is that of a thriller, the form sparse and appropriate, the tone dramatic, and the victim theme is in place as well. By not telling us till much later how and why mother and son are locked into the room, Donoghue gives us a brilliant, claustrophobic mystery. Where the tale fails is, ironically, in the Outside, where Jack’s faltering attempts to navigate the great world are described far less convincingly than the life inside Room.

The novel of sentiment is back, and clearly situates the child in hazardous situations to enhance the emotional quotient (and I am thinking here of John Boyne’s recent The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas and Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book), and Donoghue’s novel is a gripping first read.

The writer teaches English at the University of Hyderabad