For 24 years, Josef Fritzl imprisoned his own daughter Elisabeth in a basement dungeon below his house. Fathering seven children through his incessant incestuous rape, he claimed Elisabeth had run away as a teenager to join a cult. Three of the children — Felix, 5; Stefan, 18; and Kerstin, 19 — spent their entire lives underground.
It was this little 5-year-old boy that inspired Emma Donoghue to write Room — her 10th novel that is already on the Booker long-list.
" … it was the notion of a 5-year-old boy emerging into a world he didn't know about," Donoghue told Weekend Review from London.
Circumstances in Room are far less horrible than the real-life Fritzl and other incarceration cases that Donoghue researched for the work, as she didn't want the story to be of a child going through endless miseries and abuses.
"I was more interested in the idea that he has everything he needs, except freedom and except the social world. So it made an interesting test case for mother-love, could mother-love possibly be enough?" she questioned.
Five-year-old Jack was born in "Room" on "Rug" and lives with "Ma". He lies in the bottom of "Wardrobe" when "Old Nick" comes at night to visit Ma. When he is in "Wardrobe", he counts the number of springs squeaking away as the kidnapper rapes his young mother.
Ma was lured into "Room" by her kidnapper as a teenager and has raised Jack in this single room. Much like in the Fritzl case, a previous child born to Ma died and was disposed of by Old Nick. Jack has never seen daylight, has never kicked a ball in a field, has never climbed a flight of stairs or spoken to another human being aside from Ma.
So can mother-love actually be enough for a child, in this microcosmic, claustrophobic situation?
Not for Donoghue, whose aim was always to take everyday issues and points about being a child and being a parent and put them into a "weird spotlight" throughout Room.
At the same time, the book is a coming-of-age story, as "Jack at 5 is just starting to need more and demand more. It's one of those moments that a parent has to realise that their child's needs have changed and it's actually worth taking a risk and letting them have a bit more freedom," she said.
Donoghue was born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, the youngest of eight children. She now lives with her partner Chris Roulston, their son Finn and daughter Una in London, Ontario (Canada).
Room is told entirely from the perspective of Jack, the 5-year-old boy who has never seen the outside world.
As a technical device, writing Room from a 5-year-old's perspective is highly effective for creating suspense and tension and challenging the reader to determine what has happened to Ma. "It's more shocking in a way," Donoghue said, "but it's less of an obvious sentimental set-up."
If a woman was to describe how she was locked up and raped and had a baby, it would be akin to listening to a victim's story — "you would automatically be in sympathy mode".
From a child's perspective, however, there is "an eerie combination of moments when he is perfectly cheerful and flippant and even a bit silly, and then the next moment you drop some detail and you're shaken to the core".
Shaken to the core is a perfect description of how the reader begins to feel once the realisation of Ma and Jack's situation starts to dawn on them. The horror is realised through a child's eyes, described in simplistic 5-year-old language, the gravity of which — when deciphered by the reader — is all the more shocking.
After Jack and Ma are rescued, the young boy can't grasp the concept of waste. In Room even the smallest possession was treasured but once the two are recuperating in a secure unit, Jack has trouble understanding why waste is allowed.
"It's not just a social critique about the use of the environment but how we try and combine parenting with so many other roles. I did it myself … I wrote this book while my daughter was in daycare — we try and be friends and lovers and cultural consumers and try and get enough sleep and all these things as well as parenting," Donoghue said.
The parenting Ma has to do in Room with Jack is highly intensive. This, Donoghue ponders, is probably a very enticing thought for a child — to have the 24-hour, sole attention of a mother for the first five years of their lives. "I was interested in setting these things against each other: Ma's desires against Jack, setting this intimacy of one room against the rather bordering sensory overload of the wider world. It doesn't happen that much."
While there haven't been that many cases of long-term kidnap, the cases the Irish-born author studied for Room, of prisoners in solitary confinement, are numerous. In Room, Ma copes in an "almost superhuman" way, but after prisoners in solitary confinement are let out, they tend to "crack up" long-term and after their release "they sort of hold it together for as long as they need to and then they're often left with really crippling social problems later".
Donoghue has a 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter. While Jack is obviously very different to her own son, she drew on him a lot for the gripping novel: his enthusiasm for cartoon character Dora the Explorer, for example.
During her research for the novel, Donoghue found herself left with an awesome sense of responsibility of being a mother. She read of cases of children kept in confined settings, locked up in henhouses, basements or attics, isolated from adults and in some cases not ever spoken to.
"That's really a way to destroy a child's life … just not to speak to them. Some of those cases of cruelty and neglect of children just give me the shudders to remember," the mother of two recalled. "A lot of that stuff, I wish I didn't know … because I have an expanded view of the ways we can really damage children."
The shortlist for the Booker prize will be announced on September 7, while the winner will be announced on October 12.
