Publisher: Picador (2010)

Pages: Hardcover, 320 pages

Price: £12.99

Buy on Amazon UK

Reviewer rating: 

5

Pros: 

A life-changing read

Cons: 

Not for the faint-hearted, in terms of imagining the depths of human cruelty

[WARNING: This review contains spoilers.]

I know everyone else read this book a year ago, but I’ve just caught up, and feel impelled to share what an eye-opener it was for me.

For those who haven’t already read it, ‘Room’ is about a young woman who has been kidnapped and kept hidden, imprisoned in a shed for seven years; she has a child by her captor/rapist, and the two of them escape. It's all told from the viewpoint of the little boy, Jack, who turns five years old at the start of the story - a huge challenge, but Donoghue carries it off with panache. Jack’s voice is utterly convincing: we are transported vividly into the heart of his world. The first 100 pages or so take place inside Room (the shed) which the child thinks of as the whole world, and I found this section very moving: to see how happy he is, and how his mother has made a life for him, with structure and play and learning, as well as keeping him fed and warm and clothed and clean, so that although we, the readers, see the horror of what must be the situation, he is quite oblivious to it.

What is so brilliant about the book, however, for me, is that after mother and son effect their escape Jack actually misses Room, because his Ma had (heroically and against all the odds) made him feel safe there. Thus, in the outside world not only does he suddenly have to share Ma with other people, and with her past, her other selves - and deal with all the new, frightening experiences of the outside world - but there is a big wedge driven between them because Ma (at first, at any rate) is so glad to be rid of their former prison, whereas for Jack being free is only a trauma. He misses the dirty, broken things of Room that were his special toys, his familiarity, his home.

Almost nine years ago now my partner and I adopted a little girl of more or less Jack’s age - just a few months younger, not quite five years old at the time - and Donoghue’s book really graphically made me re-imagine what it must have been like for her when she moved in with us: to be deposited in an unfamiliar, undesired place, and to resent and fear it, however much she might have been surrounded by nice new toys and story books, clean sheets, good food, and kindness. It made me think of the disorientation that we, as adults, experience on waking up in a strange hotel room, when the light is in the wrong place – and then multiply that feeling (for us, so quickly banished) a thousandfold. It made me think how, for my daughter, every smell, every sound, the shape and weight of every object, must have felt wrong, and alien, and scary.

Isn’t it the sign of a truly great book if it makes you suddenly see your own life and experiences, and those of the ones you love, in new - fresh, shocking, gut-wrenching - ways?