Room reviewed by Penelope

Someone from MacMillan UK, came into the bookshop earlier this year with Penguin's key account manager Jean-Luc Morel- and when I asked him what was the most exciting book they were publishing this year - he said, without any doubt : Room by Emma Donoghue. He said it would change the future of novel writing.Or something of the sort, so of course it was the book I read first when I decided to read the Booker longlist .

I had to force myself to read this book. And then as they said on the back blurb - it would be read in one sitting: I went to sleep at 3am the following morning - having just finished it. It is such a horrendous read - that one has to read it - if one can, in one sitting.

The story, of the child, narrated by the child is extremely irritating and frightening and bewildering at first as the child is the narrative voice in the story and he was born into the room and has no knowledge of the outside world. Therefore the rug he was born onto is called Rug, not the rug, the table is Table. His mother decided to bring him up this way, they have a television and what exists on television is in the television. This is what makes the novel so clever, the mother and the child live in a room, where they are held prisoner by a madman who has kidnapped the mother when she was nineteen and locked her into a shed in his garden. When the child turns five - they (the mother and child) pretend our child-narrator is dead, the man takes the child out to get rid of the body - the child escapes. The police get on the case right away and the mother is freed - this is one third of way through the novel - so one immediately relaxes and carries on with the story. The rest of the novel deals with them in the outside world.

What makes the novel a different novel is not only the 'heart of darkness' element of an abusive in the most frightening sense of the word relationship, in face of the intimate relationship of a mother and child, the mother who had to survive for the child- what makes the novel different is the author's clever use of a story that actually happened to make a vehicle for a us to relate to the whole interesting thought about the mother and child relationship (introduction to the world - as in the way Winnicott wanted us to think about) but also she brings up the whole idea of the world behind closed doors, and the world in the public eye, and one of the parts I liked best was in a television interview - the young freed mother turns the focus of the interviewers questions from the sensationalist side of her situation to the reality of the many many people who are out there right at this very minute, in prison, without trial, without hope. One thinks of the woman in Iran, who anyday now faces death for alleged 'adultery' and who may be stoned to death. So this novel, is a good one - it has you, the reader, one foot in the murky, yucky story, and one foot ready to think once again about the world.