Spoiler Alert: Since this is a critique, it is bound to contain some spoilers. If you do not wish to read any spoilers about the book, please look away now.
‘Room’ is a book that I read recently and loved instantly. I was breaking my head to try and find an apt and succinct description of the novel and did not find any better than the review made by Audrey Niffenegger, author of ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’, who said, “Room is a book to read in one sitting. When it’s over you look up: the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days.”
Let me try and describe the book in short. It is a story about the relationship between a mother and her five year old son, Jack. Both Jack and his mother, whom he affectionately calls ‘Ma’, are kidnapped by ‘Old Nick’ and locked in a Room. Ma tries to protect her son, who was born in the Room, from ‘Old Nick’, and conceals from her son the fact that they are actually locked inside and that there is a whole wide beautiful world out there to live in. As Jack grows, his inquisitive nature forces Ma to spill out the truth about the Room and the world outside, which Jack, in his innocent way, calls ‘Outside’.
The book then goes on to explain the beautiful relation that a mother has with her son, and the sacrifices that a mother makes for her son. As much as I would like to comment about the beauty of the book, I will not do so because this post is meant to be a critique. If you need a summary of the book, the innocence of Jack, and the problems that the writer must have faced in writing such a book and how she overcame them, have a read here.
Before being critical, I would like to make it clear that I liked the book very much. It is a must read, and it deserves all the fame and accolades that it gets. However, there are some important points that I would like to make, which would have brought the book even more fame and success, like actually winning the ‘Man Booker Prize’, for the year 2010 (The book was a finalist in the competition).
The first point that I would like to make is about the unraveling of the truth. Ma, who had initially kept the secret of the real world from Jack, had to tell him the truth as she could no longer convince the growing and questioning Jack. The book does not give much importance to the unraveling. Very little space is given to the part where Ma lists out the truth about the things in real world. It would have been nice if the author had expanded this section of the book by showcasing, in much more detail, the hard-to-believe emotion of Jack. Jack finds it hard to believe when Ma tells him that there is a real world outside. He thinks that Ma is lying to him.
The ‘Room’ part of the story ends half way through the book. (Spoiler alert). Jack and Ma escape from the Room after they successfully execute their escape plan. This part of the book was extremely thrilling and scary. It was just un-put-down-able. For me, the book ended the moment they escaped. The fact that the book was called ‘Room’ and that there was nothing about the Room, after the escape, was hard to take.
The second half of the book explained about how Jack copes with living in Outside. Jack finds it hard to accustom to the outside life. Everything seems new and strange to him. There are a lot of questions going on in his head and he does not have answers to most of them. He does not understand why his public display of innocence is cute, and hence funny for the adults. He does not understand how he could have a book, ‘Dyllan the Digger’, and still find it in a store (he thinks there is just one copy of everything). He does not understand why paparazzi are like vultures, and many other such things that are commonly understood by people living in the Outside.
While all this was happening, there is very little mention of Ma. For me, the story is as much about Ma, as it is about Jack. The fact that she lived all alone in the Room, before the birth of Jack, has been overlooked. She mentions how not a single day had passed without her thinking about escaping, how she had made different plans, of which none were successful. The book would have got more 'meat' if Emma had explained about the plans that Ma had made when the character was locked up in Room all by herself.
The reunion of Ma with her mother was hardly given any importance. After spending seven years, away from her parents, there was not much joyous interaction between Ma and her parents. I would have liked to see a happy reunion between the two.
Apart from these points that I have listed out, I felt that the book was very well written. It captured the innocence of a child very well. Extreme effort must have gone into the writing of this book and I applaud Emma Donoghue for doing a good job for most of the book.
P.S. Certain mid-sentence capitalizations are intentional. It is not a typo or a grammatically wrong sentence. If you have read the book, you will know what I mean.
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