by Kelly Pickerill
I somehow overlooked it on the longlist for the Booker prize — it was somewhere there among other titles that caught my attention, The Slap, Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas’s controversial novel in which eight characters share their stories after an inciting incident (guess what?) occurs at a barbecue, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell’s latest opus that has infected Lemuria with Mitchell fever (see here, and here, and here), Skippy Dies, a cutely packaged novel (it comes in three boxed paperbacks or one hardback) by Paul Murray that has one of the most fun dust jacket blurbs I’ve read in a while,
Why does Skippy, a fourteen-year-old boy at Dublin’s venerable Seabrook College, end up dead on the floor of the local doughnut shop?
Could it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory?
Could it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy’s rival in love?
Or could “the Automator” — the ruthless, smooth-talking headmaster intent on modernizing the school — have something to hide? (more)
not to mention the highly anticipated C by Tom McCarthy, and the (very good so far, though I feel like I’m all of a sudden reading tons of French Revolution novels . . . too many?) Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey — but when Emma Donoghue’s Room was shortlisted (along with the last two longlister’s I mentioned), I noticed, and since I had been planning on reading it anyway, I started it that evening. Evening turned to night and then to 3 a.m., and I finally decided it wasn’t worth being a zombie at work the next day to finish it, though it was still very hard to put it down.
I don’t want to tell you much about the story of Room; in fact, please don’t read what the Booker site has up about it — it reads like a TV show synopsis that someone would use to catch up after missing an episode. I will say this, though: Donoghue’s storytelling choices, the fact that she has chosen a five year old as the narrator, affords her opportunities (which she never wastes) to show her readers that the way they see the world is completely and irrevocably colored by their experiences. When I started reading the novel I thought I wouldn’t be able to make it through it — I thought I would get claustrophobic. Because I will tell you this about the plot: as you start reading Jack’s story you realize that he calls his bed “Bed” and a wilting plant “Plant” (as though they are the singular instances of those things) for the same reason he says that other children are “only TV” — because he has never been outside the twelve foot square shed that his mother has been locked in for seven years.
What would it mean for someone literally to have grown up in Plato’s cave, only seeing shadows on the wall, representations of “true” things and people and experiences, for five years of his life, suddenly to come into the world for the first time? It was fascinating to see through Jack’s eyes as his vision of what the world is really like shifts, and to gain through him the unique perspective of one who takes nothing for granted, for whom everything is new.
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