Random Readers Book Club #2 – ROOM by Emma Donoghue

As promised, I am coming to you now with a book review on Emma Donoghue’s slightly chilling book “Room”.

This book met with mixed reviews at our club last night. Some found it a difficult read as it is written entirely from the POV of a young child – who turns 5 in the first few words of the story. Some whizzed through it because it was so simply written. All of us, though, were able to agree that it was a tough subject, and forced a lot of reflection on the current state of the world.

A brief synopsis, as always:

5 year old Jack lives with his mother in a tiny 11x12 foot box, known to Jack as Room. A popular slogan found for the book goes “Room is all there is”. Jack has never been outside of Room. He was born there, and grown up there, and as far as he knows, there is no other world beyond Room. His mother ensures he develops both physically and intellectually by dividing their days into specific time slots for numerous and varied activities. These activities range from ‘gym’ where they do physical activity to “repeat” where they watch T.V. and the mother mutes it every once and awhile for Jack to repeat everything he can remember, thus developing his vocabulary.

Half of the book is spent developing these two characters, and describing in great detail the painstaking effort Jack’s mother puts into his development. This is then constantly overshadowed by an eerie sense of foreboding when they do much more sinister activities such as “scream” where they stand as close to the skylight as possible (the only vessel for natural light) and yell and scream at the top of their lungs. Or the strangeness of the mother flicking the light on and off at night for varying intervals of time. And finally, the visits from “Old Nick” throughout which time Jack is always hidden in the wardrobe, safe from the old man’s eyes. All of this leaves readers with a sense of uneasiness that builds until the reasons behind Room and their complete captivity is revealed.

While I will not delve into the plotline too much so as not to reveal the story, I will say they do eventually get out of Room, and are then forced to re-enter society. This becomes a task so enormous to Jack that he is then prompted to say the heart-wrenching phrase “In Room I was safe, and it’s Outside that’s the scary”.

The book left us all a bit empty as it does demand readers sit within their own unease for a good 54% of the book, and then forces them to confront the state of the world, and what people can be capable of. All from the innocence of a young boy’s mind, making it all the more heartbreaking. It also opens the door to many philosophical questions about the nature of our lives, and how much of our physical environments are tangible, and how much of them are merely our perceptions?

While I enjoyed the metaphysical and psychological aspects of the book, I did find it to have moments when it was a little disjointed. It seemed strange to me that this mother would spend so much time and effort to teach her child and protect her child and yet, once they re-entered society, she seemed to do a 180 and was suddenly very impatient with him. She would demand so much of Jack, seemingly frustrated that he was so slow at adapting to this strange new world. There was also discussion last night about the way they were able to get out of Room and how the process seemed to be a little far fetched. Many a CSI moment to it, and was a little hard to believe.

All in all, it was a great read. I liked the POV for the reason that it did offer euphemisms for some acts I was happy to turn my proverbial blind eye. There were also some beautiful imagery and similes/metaphors interwoven, one of which I’ll share below:

“When I tell her what I’m thinking, and she tells me what she’s thinking our ideas jump into each others’ head like coloring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green.”

Lovely.

I also enjoyed the psychological look at how Jack would adapt to being outside of Room and trying to take on his new environment. Interestingly, while there was appropriate attention paid to the obvious immaturities with regards to social responses, the book also focused on the less obvious things of his challenge. Such as the fact that Jack had severe spatial problems, and would constantly be bumping into things. Having lived for 5 years in the same 11x12 foot space, he was so familiar with that environment, he didn’t develop that part of the brain which recognized new physical objects and created the process of learning how to avoid them.

Another poignant image was when the news and media began calling Jack the “Bonsai Boy” as in, Stunted Growth. He was mature in his vocabulary, math, etc. healthy and seemingly perfectly preserved like the bonsai tree. Yet, he was also stunted in that he had not developed in so many other (social) ways.

Emma Donoghue does a wonderful job with this book, and I do give her credit, though I also found some aspects at times uncomfortable and hard to face. Having said that, I believe that this was the point of the book, as Emma did not mean to leave anyone with the warm and fuzzies after reading. Though it does end with the promise of a new life for our mother and son, it still forces us to recognize there are dark facets to society, and the effects are so far reaching, we cannot even fathom.

Thank you all for reading, and I hope you’ll come back in a month for our next book “Everyone is Beautiful” by Katherine Center. Kudos to Robyn for choosing, as the name suggests, what promises to be an uplifting great summer read.

Thanks again, and we’ll see you all soon!