ROOM by Emma Donoghue (2010)

"Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing." - Emma Donoghue, Room

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Disclaimer: This review is constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. 

You know how I love The Martian? You know how I never shut up about The Martian? Well, I have good news: I’ve found another book that I love as much as The Martian. (That's right: another book I won't shut up about! Joy!) That book is Room by Emma Donoghue, and by another text, I don’t think I’ve ever been as thoroughly moved. I wasn’t even going to review this book, but as of writing, it’s been a week since I finished reading and I still can’t stop thinking about it, which I think might be the universe trying to tell me something. The novel is the story of five-year-old Jack and his Ma. Jack and Ma live in Room, an eleven-foot-square garden shed which, to Jack, is the whole world, but to Ma? Not quite. Ma knows the truth: seven years ago, she was kidnapped, snatched off the street and held captive in Room ever since. (I’ll let you figure out on your own who Jack’s father is.) I’m not going to pretend this was an easy book to read. On the contrary, it was painfully harrowing; often I had to stop reading mid-sentence and momentarily step away, simply overwhelmed by the two-piece family’s sickening reality. Sometimes, I felt physically ill. Other times, I felt empty, as if this book was draining the life out of me. It was an emotional rollercoaster, to say the least; definitely not one for the faint-hearted, yet still gorgeously touching, a stunning work of powerful art. Heart-breaking and breath-taking, Room was, for me, a wonder to behold. 

There are so many things I liked about this book, but my favourite thing about Room was how Jack didn’t understand what was going on. The narrative style was a daring choice on Donoghue’s behalf; rather than utilising the more sophisticated voice of Ma, who could have provided a darker, more affecting point of view, Donoghue chose Jack to be the narrator, using his limited perspective of the world and his unwitting innocence in stark contrast with the context to create that darker, more affecting POV through imagery, rather than taking the easy way out -- and it worked, astonishingly well. It was so sad to see Jack not get it. It was genuinely distressing to be reading and to yourself know what was going on, yet to have the very person telling you the story fail to grasp his reality, simply because he was too young to understand. That, in its way, made Room surprisingly disturbing. Donoghue’s use of a child’s voice and a child’s tunnel vision created this disturbing atmosphere, as we had to piece together the story through what Jack was seeing and understanding with his blunt, yet stunted comprehension of the real world -- and when it hit us that what Jack was describing was more than what it seemed, it hit us hard, as seeing a child’s innocence be mutilated always does. 

Jack’s innocence often made him disagreeable, too. Ma, obviously, understands that Room is not the whole world; she and Jack are prisoners stolen from the world, unjustly robbed of normal lives. But Jack is born in Room, and Ma realises that there is no point in teaching her son about the real world when she can’t prove to him that it actually exists. Why disillusion him with what he can’t have? Of course, once Jack starts asking questions and Ma is forced to tell him the ugly truth, said truth is extremely difficult for him to comprehend, as it should be -- he's just a kid, after all, and grossly adult things like kidnapping and captivity aren't things he should have to grapple with at his age. Yet Jack's failure to understand leads to a saddening lack of empathy. The poor kid doesn't really want to leave Room; outside is big and scary and full of People and Places and Things, three things he has literally never had to deal with. Ma, obviously, feels the exact opposite: while to Jack, Room is the perfect size, to Ma it has always been cramped, stifling, suffocating, the walls bearing down on her more and more with every passing day. She can see her life trickling down the drain as she wastes away in this tiny box, and she wants out because she knows there is an Out. Jack only knows In. Ma has a home outside of Room, but to Jack, Room is home, and he's perfectly happy there, thank you very much. Mother and son can't see eye to eye -- Jack because he's too little, Ma because she's too miserable -- and this creates friction, Ma often finding herself frustrated with Jack's lack of interest in escaping Room. Their  worldviews -- and by that I mean their literal view of the world -- differ so strongly and so vastly, a factor Donoghue lost no time in taking advantage of; Jack's stubborn nature was natural and convincing, a perfect representation of a child responding to trauma they don't even know they're undergoing, but it wasn't Jack's obstinacy that I loved so much in the book; it was because despite his stubbornness, despite what he knew and despite what he may have wanted, Jack tried his best to help Ma escape Room anyway, because that was what she so desperately desired. 

That, for me, was what Room was all about: sacrifice. Room is a book about a tiny, tight-knit family surviving on the bones of their asses; it's about a little boy running against everything he believes because his mother asked it of him. The tagline for Room is "Love knows no boundaries", and it's in Jack's sacrifice that we see it come true. Room is all Jack knows. It's where he was born, where he has grown up, where his entire world is contained -- but he is willing to remove himself from the literal boundaries of Room's walls and throw himself into the real world if it means Ma will be happy, if it means Ma will come back to him. This is where I found the ultimate poignancy and power in Donoghue's stunning novel. This book is a story about family. It’s about hardship, and suffering, and making the most out of an awful situation. It’s about learning, and not just learning, but education, too, and I assure you that there’s a difference in this book. It’s about living and growing and understanding each other, or at the very least, trying to; trying to empathise, trying to Get It, trying to do everything you can for the people you love even when you don’t Get It at all. With the force of a freight train, Room struck me and bloodied me and left me begging for mercy, but it also left me brighter-eyed, and not just because I was moved almost to tears. As author Audrey Niffenegger put it, when I finished reading Room, I looked up and found that the world looked the same, but I was somehow different. Maybe the world looked more beautiful than I remembered -- or maybe Room has taught me never to take that world for granted. God knows I’m lucky enough to be able to look out at it at all.