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Bookish and Awkward is GeorgeFM's weekly book review and literary romp. Brought to you by the good folks at Time Out Bookstore, and presented in an enthusiastic, if not somewhat gushing fashion by Michelle Langstone, Bookish and Awkward is your weekly date with all things wordy and worthy.
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30 August 2010
Room
By Emma Donoghue
Picador 2010
"Room is a book to read in one sitting. When it's over you look up:
the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days".
I could not agree more with this appraisal by author Audrey Niffenegger. Room is an astonishing piece of fiction, one of those great rarities that somehow manages to be terrifying, warm, funny and desperately sad all at once.
Jack and his Ma live in Room. Room is a shed in a garden, converted into a prison cell by the man that abducted Ma when she was 19, and locked her away. Jack is the product of rape. Jack is five years old, and he has only ever known the world inside this Room. He thinks the outside world is made up, something in the television.
After his birthday his Ma begins to think that maybe he is old enough to help hatch an escape plan, to finally free them from their tiny hell. She shatters the world as Jack knows it, introduces the concept of a real world and everything contained in it, and then she teaches him how to feign death, and ultimately bring about their release.
Room is a novel in two parts — before, in captivity, and after, released into the world. It is simply fascinating - unbelievably compelling, un-put-down-able, and topical. In Jack, the narrator, we have the most remarkable storyteller — his journey from the bliss of innocence to the terror of knowledge and adaptation is so engaging, it is impossible to stop turning the pages.
If you ever wondered what life would have been like for Joseph Fritzl's hostage and her children, this goes some way to answering your questions. This is a compassionate study of how a soul who has never known anything of the outside world, adjusts to it upon meeting it for the first time.
By turns harrowing and heartbreaking, but also enchanting, Room is a novel set to create a literary storm. Donoghue is on the long-list for the Booker Prize and good luck to her. What a brilliant book.
