Room – Emma Donoghue

Since childhood I have had an intense fascination with kidnappings and captivity (I also loved to visit cemeteries as a kid – is it any wonder that I went through a goth phase?). Of special interest have been those situations where a person – usually female – has escaped or been discovered after years of living in her captor’s cellar or shed, often hidden within “plan view:” neighbors nearby, occasionally even a family inside the main house. I’ve wondered how the victim survived. What instincts and coping mechanisms had to kick in? What are the long-term emotional, physical, and social tolls? Is living a normal life afterward even possible?

I had hoped that Room by Emma Donoghue would answer some of these questions. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Instead of an investigation into the heart of darkness, the reader gets a sterilized, happily ever after tale. The let down is especially intense because the first half of the book is so promising. Donoghue seems willing to push into difficult and shocking territory. Yet at the most pivotal moment, she retreats.

Room is narrated by a five year old boy, Jack, who is born into Room, the modified garden shed where his mother has been kept a prisoner for the past seven years. He has known no other reality than Room. At night his mother places him in the wardrobe while Old Nick, her captor, comes in and rapes her. She will not let Old Nick see or touch her son, who of course is biologically his son as well. Jack is hers alone, and she lives for him. Inside Room she creates an alternative world full of games and songs and stories. Jack’s language evolves within this context; Donoghue does a brilliant job of reflecting his naivety, joy, and (apparent to us, but not to him) deprivation through his vocabulary. His mother is an exceptional parent, given her circumstances, but time is running out. Jack has no future if his mother cannot devise a way to get them out.

She comes up with a plan – it is horrifying, panicky, and sure to fail. But it succeeds, and Jack and his mother are rescued. From there the novel loses its bravery. Instead of addressing the messy struggle of re-adaption (or in Jack’s case, initial introduction) to the larger world, Donoghue gives us a sweet, often comic, tale. Without Room to distinguish them, we soon find that Jack and his mother have only generic characteristics. We learn that his mother likes music, but she isn’t even into a particular genre. Even worse than her blandness, she constantly downplays what happened to them. During a television interview less than a week after her rescue, she speaks about how they aren’t special, “slavery’s not a new invention” and “people are locked up in all sorts of ways.”

No. Being kidnapped and confined to a shed for seven years, repeatedly raped and beaten and impregnated twice (the first a stillborn) by your captor – that’s an atrocity beyond description. And whether or not such a situation has occurred before, it’s still an atrocity. Saying anything less is insulting to real victims.

The last pages of the book take that insult even further. They are hard to stomach, but not because of any great insight into the human psyche. I wish Donoghue had kept the courage she had at the beginning of the novel instead of giving us a feeble attempt at making everything OK. Sometimes, in certain situations, things are not OK. Not even close. And if you aren’t going to admit that, you shouldn’t be writing about those subjects.