Room is narrated by Jack, the five-year-old boy who the captive woman has borne by her kidnapper. Because his mother is so fiercely protective of him, consigning him to the wardrobe each night before the kidnapper makes his appearance, the boy witnesses very little of his mother's rapist, and so details of the abuse do not make it into the novel. This was a wise choice on the part of the novelist. Reading it, I felt as though Donoghue was protecting the dignity of the female character (who we know only as 'Ma') from our scrutiny of her trauma. Although Ma is obviously a fictional construct, her story is based on those of real-life victims, and I did feel that Donoghue was writing with a respectful sense of distance.
Jack is an unusual and tricky choice of narrator - brought up alone by his mother, in an 11-foot square room, he has no concept of other people (apart from his shadowy impressions of the kidnapper, who he views as a kind of devil figure), or of the outside world. All his knowledge has been acquired from his mother, who was 19 when she was abducted, and from the television he is allowed to watch twice a day. His vocabulary is advanced, due to the intense relationship he has with his mother, but his syntax and sense of grammar is often childish - 'You cutted the cord,' he tells his mother, recounting the story of his birth. These inconsistencies of language have drawn criticism from other reviewers, but I'm not sure that I mind them. I work with young children myself, and even those with sophisticated vocabulary will often make mistakes with tense. I think Donoghue has pulled off something extraordinarily difficult in telling a dark and adult tale from the perspective of a very innocent boy.
That's not to say I think it's without flaws. The first half of the novel, bound as it is in the consciousness of a small child and a soundproofed room, is limited in plot. The minutiae of the mother and son's daily routine becomes tedious - as of course it would do to the two prisoners - and I found myself flicking forward to see if the whole novel was set in the room. It wasn't, and that was what encouraged me to keep reading - to find out how the escape was engineered.
This brings me to what I believe is the second flaw of the novel. The escape, 'Plan B', as Ma and Jack refer to it, was a hugely risky undertaking, and one that I am not convinced a devoted mother such as Ma would have encouraged Jack to attempt, even in the depths of her desperation. That said, she was clearly frightened that the two of them might perish anyhow due to the chilling caprice of their neglectful captor, and perhaps she saw this escape attempt as the better option. I felt that, as a woman with an awful lot of time on her hands, she would have been more meticulous and measured in her planning, rather than the sudden, panicked, fallible plot she went ahead with. I also felt that the escape itself was under-described, although this could be put down to the fact that it was Jack's first foray into the outside world, and he would quite naturally have been utterly overwhelmed.
A much larger portion of the novel than I had expected was devoted to the pair's recuperation after their escape and rescue. The bewilderment of the inevitable media onslaught is deftly portrayed through Jack's eyes. I did feel that some of the media reportage was too insensitive to be credible - I'm thinking of the newspapers' christening Jack 'Bonsai Boy', of the coldly academic discussion of the victims on television, and of the incredibly unsympathetic chat-show interviewer - but then, I read the Guardian and not the tabloids, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about.
Jack's story really came into its own at this point, as Ma struggles to negotiate the schism between the girl she was and the victim and mother she is now, and begins to succumb to depression, and Jack has to find his feet (literally: he cannot manage stairs, and he cannot walk in shoes) in the outside world without his mother's guidance. The relationships with Ma's family were portrayed with interesting complexity, although I did frequently lose patience with Grandma, who seemed to have no patience whatsoever herself with her very damaged grandchild, and who seemed to be exclaiming every five minutes that she 'couldn't cope' with his behaviour.
The ending, with Jack and his mother returning to the Room for him to say goodbye, felt appropriate and poignant. The difference of their reactions upon their return to their place of imprisonment - Jack's warm exploration of the place that was once so familiar, in comparison to his mother's physical nausea - is both striking and deeply unsettling. But Ma's determination to allow Jack to say goodbye to what he sees as his former home, and her ability to put his needs above her own in this, is testament to her strength as a mother, and ends the novel on a real note of hope for their relationship.
I don't think I'd read this book again. The quality of the writing did not quite make the cut for me, and I am a little surprised that it made the Man Booker shortlist. However, I did sit up till nearly midnight reading the first half, and finished the rest of it the next morning, which says a lot for the page-turning quality of the story. Donoghue is sensitive in her treatment of the subject matter, so I would have no qualms in recommending it to someone who I thought might be interested in this kind of literary-light fiction.
