Book review

(TOI Crest, Saturday, September 19)

ROOM by Emma Donoghue

Sometimes all it takes is a little imagination to make something better than it is. Add a few real-life ingredients, stir in a little helping of ‘what-if’, let it simmer into a nightmare and it is lifted beyond the realm of the mundane into an award-winner, or a potential one. Room is a little like that. On the longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2010, it acts as a kind of literary sledgehammer to bring home the nasty realism of events that have been unfolding the world over – the captivity of young women for many years by some man who could be a stranger, could be a father, but is, almost always, a twisted psyche. There was the Josef Fritzl in Austria, who imprisoned his daughter Elizabeth for 24 years, raped and physically abused her, fathering eight children, one miscarried, one murdered by neglect of illness. Then there was Jaycee Lee Dugard of California, missing for 18 years, held in a small tent in a backyard, with two children from her captor. Lydia Gouardo was locked up by her legal (but not biological) father for 28 years and had six children with him. In Mumbai, two girls were rescued last year after ten years of abuse by their businessman father. Many more such horror stories have been unearthed each week, some even beyond the limits of a sane imagination.

Emma Donoghue taps into this nightmarish vein in Room. In some ways, the writing and the story are simplistic and naïve, without the flavour of genuine emotion or any kind of sophistication of narration. But in that itself there is a chilling feeling of things that should never happen. The matter-of-fact honesty of the child’s telling of the tale gives it more impact than it would have if told in the voice of an adult. The five year old Jack sees the world as he knows it, as he was born into it, not comprehending that it was a captive existence that violated all laws and norms of a ‘civilised’ life in a modern world. And he speaks of it in the same way, knowing only that life, but having to accept that it was not, in some way, what life is and should be.

The story begins with an everyday, as Jack knows it, but for one special thing: he is five. It will soon become an eventful day, since this is the day that Jack will escape from the only space he knows, his small world, Room. For him, Room is home, with Wardrobe, Bed, Rug, Thermostat, Rocker, Kit, Table, Shelf and more. They are all old friends, the beings he is growing up with. He has to hide in Wardrobe when Old Nick comes in. And when Old Nick is gone, Jack can come out and be with his mother, snuggled against her warmth, seeing the bad marks on her neck…And then one night he has to be dead. Not real dead, but pretend dead, made cold with water and rolled up in Rug, so that Old Nick will take him out in his truck and he, Jack, can run away and tell Police to rescue Ma, his mother, who has two names but he can’t remember what they are since they were in the paper that Old Nick took away during the Great Escape. It works, with a few mishaps. Jack and his mother are saved from their cell, taken to a medical facility for help. There, more truths emerge. The story comes together when, with a chilling honesty, Jack says that Old Nick hurt him “two times”. A collective breath is held – by the doctor, by Ma, by the reader – and then released with “When I was doing the Great Escape he dropped me in the truck and also on the trees, the second was the hurtest.”

It has been seven years of captivity for Ma. She was taken in a parking lot when she was a student, when Old Nick pretended his dog was ill and needed help. And she was kept in a small room, Room, 11-foot square, with a little television set and minimal facilities. Her teeth have rotted for lack of care, she loses a child, buried under the roots of a tree in the yard outside, and then has Jack, who becomes her world and her sanity. She is a character in agony, her emotions untold yet somehow felt through her son’s voice as he speaks of her being sick, of her face being stripey wet, of her not waking up one day…

Perhaps a grown-up voice for this story would make it sound like a bad screenplay. Maybe the simple frame of reference of a child makes the tale more effective, albeit rather sickly sweet in parts. But the relationship between mother and child, bonded by solitude, captivity, breast-feeding and small aspects like flipping Mattress on Fridays, eating with Meltedy Spoon, brushing Teeth to dazzling white and making sure there are no germs, is touching, genuine, charming. In the reading, in the understanding and in the news-linked basis to the story, an essential truth echoes on: No one should go through the nightmare again. Not another Jack, not another Ma.