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[The following contains plot spoilers.]

If Toni Morrison’s Sethe cut her infant daughter’s throat with a handsaw to spare her from slavery, then Emma Donoghue’s Booker Prize nominated bestseller Room (2010) makes a case for the opposite course of action, in portraying a mother who has taught her five year old son Jack to find fulfilment in a life of captivity. The novel is based loosely upon the story of Joseph Fritzl – an Austrian burgher who kept his daughter Elizabeth confined in a purpose-built “dungeon” for twenty four years, and who had fathered seven children with her by the time that the scheme was rumbled in 2008. Room is set somewhere in the U.S., and Jack and his abducted “Ma” are imprisoned inside an eleven foot squared garden shed, which has been soundproofed and sealed with a security door. Jack has spent every hour of his life in this shed and in the company of his mother. When their captor visits in the night, Ma forces Jack to lie quiet in a wardrobe, to keep him ignorant of the fact that she is being raped. We, of course, are not so lucky.

Room is effectively divided into two distinct and separate novellas: the first describes the pair’s captivity, in a taut, suspenseful, and ultimately very successful horror narrative; whilst the second takes on the formidable challenge of relating how they adapt to life after captivity. Once released from the Room, Jack struggles to negotiate his way up and down stairs and he has no concept of distance, judging people who are far away to be simply small. If imagining the intricate psychological processes of rehabilitation would deter most novelists, then add to this the fact that the whole of Room is narrated by the five year old Jack, and we have a novel which, if nothing else, gets ten out of ten for ambition. Indeed, by the standards of contemporary fiction, Donoghue is a relentless taskmaster, in forcing the novel to work much harder than it is usually accustomed to in its never-ending quest to bring new worlds to life.

Jack is significantly younger than the average fictional child narrator, but the circumstances of his captivity actually allow for a bit of leeway here. Ma has nothing to do with her time but educate her son, and this explains his “remarkably accelerated literacy.” His learning extends chiefly to his gigantic vocabulary – which occasionally raises eyebrows with words such as “commentary,” “masterpiece,” “procession,”  “paralysed,” “antigravity,” and “cyborg” – but his grammar remains agreeably wonky, and beset by slip ups such as “fasterer,” “wonderfulest,” and “colder and colderer.” Jack’s narration is largely insulated from doubts over its authenticity, because we have nothing with which to compare it. His exceedingly civilised little intellect is combined with the restless and frequently destructive curiosity of any five year old and the sensory deprivation of a “newborn.” Donoghue is essentially experimenting with the fictional narrator, and she has invented something which is totally original.

Jack’s voice almost never grates and, rather incongruously for such a dark story, his running commentary can be relied upon for a constant flow of jokes, although his inability to become truly demoralised creates a sense that he is faintly enchanted and that the darkness cannot touch him. But inevitably, with a five year old narrating, we are going to learn a lot more about Dora the Explorer than about being and nothingness. Only at the end of the novel – when Jack is touring Earth for the first time, like a Martian ambassador – does Donoghue rely too heavily on his observations to keep the narrative going, and at times it lapses into something like “Kids Say the Funniest Things.” This may be to some readers’ tastes, if not all of them, but we have come a long way since the first novella, and one may feel a wistful longing for the horror and tension which Donoghue had decided to leave behind in the Room.

Living in his shed, listening to his Ma’s stories, singing pop songs which he has picked up from the dodgy analogue television, making forts out of loo rolls and a snake out of discarded egg shells, and jumping on his bed in structured sessions of “Phys. Ed.,” Jack is living the life of Reilly. Slavery, for him, is entirely undemanding and uncomplicated, except for those times when they run out of sticky tape, or when their captor cuts off their electricity supply as a punishment. In the Room, Jack is ultimately happier and much better educated than most of the children out in the “real” world. I imagine that there are genuinely middle class parents in Britain who would adopt Room as the latest fashionable parenting manual, and create their own versions of Jack’s prison, if only to be able to belittle less progressive parents at dinner parties. “Oscar and his au pair have been locked in the shed for three months now, and he has the vocabulary of a child twice his age!” In fairness to Donoghue, she attempts similar jokes herself: Ma is told that she should write a book about her ordeal because “the whole living-on-less thing, it couldn’t be more zeitgeisty”; whilst another character tries to help with the remark that “I spent a week in a monastery in Scotland… it was so peaceful.” These are conceivably the most realistic moments of the novel.

But Room is rendered an altogether more intriguing prospect by the fact that its heart is not wholly in this satire. For Ma and Jack have really achieved the perfect union – a sort of reinforced, steel lined, soundproofed relationship. Ma has Jack’s whole world in her hands, although unlike in the garden of Eden, the “snake” is a harmless thing which is made of eggshells; whilst the Devil, their captor “Old Nick,” is desperate to keep them in the garden, rather than to tempt them to escape. Jack has been content to believe that everything Outside is not “real,” but the novel begins from the point of his fifth birthday and we are already approaching the crisis when it will no longer be possible to contain Jack’s restless imagination within a garden shed. All children eventually demand more from the world than can be provided by a mother – they go to school, enter society, and start to acquire their own property – and, in this light, Jack’s captivity is merely a more formal and unpolluted version of the natural mother-and-child relationship.

Once outside of the Room, it seems that Jack and Ma are always attended by blank assistants, or plagued by almost implausibly insensitive strangers and their “stupid questions,” and the bias in the narrative suggests that they have lost more than just a room. When an interviewer asks Ma why she did not arrange to leave Jack “outside a hospital, say, so he could be adopted,” we can only shudder at the cruelty of such a question. Jack has given Ma back the life which her captor had taken away, albeit in a new body, and without Jack, she would have only had the television to keep her sane, which would have undoubtedly proved a contradiction in terms. Ma admits that before Jack’s birth “I cried till I didn’t have any tears left… I just lay here counting the seconds.” Jack is not merely dependent upon his mother – there is actually a perfect equilibrium in their relationship. Just as Jack sacrifices himself – “dying” temporarily like Christ – in order to save his mother from captivity, his Ma’s own temporary death later in the novel will in turn release him from the captivity of the absolute maternal bond. He can no longer drink from her breast when she returns and he has lost the “tooth” which he had sucked as a sort of substitute nipple.

If Jack’s story reminds us that all children are essentially slaves and captives, then Ma’s captivity is itself a less sophisticated but more straightforward version of marriage. Indeed, she claims that she survived by becoming a “Stepford Wife.” Happily, once rid of the Room, Jack and Ma arrive in a pastoral world in which patriarchy has been apparently vanquished. The only paternalistic figure who appears in the novel is Steppa, who has no children himself and who is only accepted as Grandma’s assistant because he is wise, non-aggressive, and essentially a sort of big hairy mother. After Ma’s abduction, Grandma was abandoned by Grandpa, who was unable to support her and keep the family together. Grandpa finally materialises as a pitiful figure who cannot even look at Jack. At no point in the novel does it occur to Jack to ask who his own father is, even though he has encountered other children with male parents, such as Bronwyn and his own (admittedly adopted) mother.

Whilst we may assume that Ma keeps Old Nick away from Jack in order to protect the boy from his unsavoury attentions, Ma’s refusal to allow Old Nick to even clap eyes on his son ensures that there can be no relationship, no paternal love “even a warped way,” and henceforth that the maternal bond will remain absolute. “…you’ve never let me get a good look since the day he was born,” Old Nick grumbles. Ma insists that “Jack’s nobody’s son but mine,” and to claim otherwise would be to attribute this virgin birth to Old Nick’s paternity. Donoghue has herself reared two children with her female partner Chris Roulston, and her novel’s celebration of a wondrous mother-and-child bond, in which father figures are excluded for being either rapists or just useless, may be entirely realistic, but it has the faint aftertaste of propaganda. If Jack is now walking the Earth believing that little boys are sired by the Devil, then his education remains in many important respects incomplete.

[There is further information here and here. On similar themes, Tychy has previously analysed Mary Norton's The Borrowers here and Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn here. Ed.]