($39.99, oacmillan)
Before I tell you anything, I am simply going to say that this could be the best book you will read all year.
You need to know that first up, because if someone just tells you that it’s a book about a woman held captive in a basement by a rapist to whom she has a five-year-old son, you might not want to read it. And you really should read it.
Irish/Canadian writer Emma Donoghue has somehow taken that five-year-old boy’s prison and turned it into a sort of fairytale that celebrates a mother’s love and a child’s resilience and turns what’s normal on its head (more than once).
Jack narrates his story in a closeted child’s language showing such delight in his own tiny world that you barely feel sorry for him for never having been outside. He plays on Bed, or in Wardrobe, and makes friends with Plant.
He knows he and his mother are real – they certainly have the usual mother and son problems – but the persons in TV are made of just colours.
or so he thinks, until oa reveals they are real too, and then the outside world starts creeping in, leaving Jack understandably confused.
“After dinner oa tells me Hansel and Gretel and How The Berlin Wall Fell Down and Rumpelstiltskin,” he recounts.
This is the beginning of the end of life as Jack knows it. Room might be a tiny cell, and he and oa held captive in it against her will, but the outside world – with all its germs, and judgements, and media vultures and crazies – can be a scary place too. In fact, sometimes it can make a backyard dungeon seem safe.
I won’t tell you any more except that this book is not grisly or grim. It is not creepy or pervy. It is strangely charming. And often funny. And you should read it.
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