Room Emma Donoghue

High-concept novels that revolve around a completely original premise or narrative viewpoint can be tricky to pull off. There’s always a danger that the end result will be little more than a glorified gimic. But when they work – like The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Lovely Bones and The Book Thief, to name but a few – the reader is presented with an unforgettable reading experience.

Room, by Emma Donaghue, is just such a novel, fully living up the hype surrounding its acquisition by Macmillan, and destined to enjoy a prominent position on book shop shelves for many years to come. The novel is narrated, from start to finish, by a five-year-old boy – a five-year-old boy who has spent every second of his life to date locked a twelve-foot-square room. Jack’s mother, ‘Ma’, was kidnapped at the age of nineteen and imprisoned in the shed of her kidnapper and repeated raper – a scenario remeniscent of the real-life incarceration of Elisabeth Fritzl. It is a situation that Ma is desperate to escape from; for Jack, it is all he knows.

Jack’s life when we first meet him is very simple. ‘Room’ is the whole world to him. Very young children have no concept of a world that exists beyond what they can see immediately in front of them. For Jack, this limited vision has been magnified and extended. In his eyes, there is nothing beyond ‘Room’ – just him, Ma and the objects around them. Jack knows his world inside out, from his friends, Rug, Remote and Duvet, to the daily routines that govern his existence. Ma has devoted all her time to educating and entertaining her son within the confines of their prison, and he is a happy, intelligent boy who enjoys his life. So when Ma begins to hatch a plan for their ‘Great Escape’ and reveals to Jack the existence of ’Outside’, his world is turned upsidedown.

Room works as well as it does for two main reasons. The first is the bond betwen Jack and Ma. In the wrong hands, Room could have been a morbid and depressing depiction of a horrifying ordeal. But Emma Donaghue has chosen instead to tell a life-affirming story of a mother and her child, whose love for eachother knows no bounds. Despite everything, Ma has succeeded in bringing up a child who approaches even the simplest things in life with joy and enthusiasm. Their relationship, be it in the all-encompassing, all-dependent life they live together in ‘Room’, or in the more diluted existence they must share in ‘Outside’, means everything to Jack, and is what holds the novel together.

The second triumph of the book lies in the voice of Jack. It is, throughout the novel, utterly convincing – both as the voice of a five-year-old boy, and as the voice of a child who has never stepped foot outside of the room he lives in. The reader is submerged completely in Jack’s consciousness; his thoughts are simple and optimistic, and his language is the imperfect but charming expression of a still-developing mind. Many novels have been narrated by children, but very few by a child as young as Jack. Emma Donaghue has taken the wise decision to step back completely from the narration, allowing her innocent, honest and loveable creation to solemnly guide the reader through the story. And it is this very lack of narrative sophistication that ultimately makes Room such a sophisticated book.

To find out about other books in the charts, have a look at the UK’s 20 bestselling books.