Room: a different kind of true.......

The novel is called "Room", and a few pages in it becomes obvious that the action is going to take place in this room, inhabited by five year old Jack and his mother, known as Ma. Already at the outset this is no ordinary book, and no ordinary room. First of all, I notice the strange truncated language that mother and child converse in. Then the harrowing truth dawns on me that this eleven foot square room is the only world Jack has ever known, and that he and his mother are each other's entire world.

I wonder how Emma Donoghue is going to sustain her readers' interest under such confines for just over four hundred pages. Will all the "action" stay in the room, or will we ever get to see outside of it? It is a feat of inventiveness and imagination in which she does not disappoint!

The inventiveness runs right through the book, starting with Jack's vocabulary and speech. His young mother constructs a false reality for him, scaffolded by a rigid routine and punctuated by ingenious games. Ironically, she spends the kind of quality time with her son that most mothers would aspire to but never achieve. Throughout she is driven by a fiercely protective, sacrificial love, but she knows that in order to escape the room, she will have to deconstruct this false reality that has cocooned Jack for the first five years of his life.

How does one survive such an ordeal: the young mother deprived of her freedom at nineteen and subjected to unspeakable degradation; and the young son, secure in his mother's love and in the familiar surroundings of their captivity, forced to accept that there is a scarier world outside?

Stories are a different kind of true,"writes Donoghue, when Ma is explaining to her young son what is real and what is make-believe. "We're like people in a book, and he won't let anybody else read it."

The characters in this book have a reality and originality to them that stays with the reader long after the last chapter is closed. The love between mother and child is potent and charming, and Emma Donoghue has pulled off a tour de force in combining the truly horrific with the utterly wonderful. Read this book, and I guarantee you will have a greater appreciation of what is good and true and real in this damaged world of ours.