Emma Donoghue's "Room"

When I picked up Dublin writer Emma Donoghue's Man Booker longlisted novel a few weeks ago, I put it down after a few pages. I had picked up the clues dropped casually, naively, by the book's narrator. He has, after all, just turned 5 the morning we meet him. His name is Jack and he lives in "Room" with "Ma". What got to me was when he says her teeth are all black. He doesn't want to have teeth like her and so he counts his own teeth obsessively.

The rotten teeth triggered something in my memory, Elizabeth Fritzl, whose father Josef imprisoned her, was said to have had black teeth when she was found. She also had a five year old son Felix who emerged into the world, "Outside" as Jack calls it. So "Room" clicked. Room was in fact a prison, a woman kidnapped, "Old Nick" who would visit her most nights the abductor, Jack the product of it.

 I put the book down. I was in Donegal on my holidays. I could hear normal life around me, my two girls downstairs, fighting over which Peppa Pig dvd to put on, I wanted to think about whether to cook dinner or get a takeaway, whether it would stop raining and I could get the two down to the beach for air. I didn't want "Room" in my head. I went downstairs.

Back home after the break away I went back to it again. Then something happened. I fell in love, miraculously seduced. In the midst of a horror my mind was struggling to make sense of, here was a chatty, free spirited, inquisitive 5 year old. Jack told me about his day, his favourite toys, why he loved to watch Dora the Explorer and why there was no one else in the world like "Ma". And through him we glimpse Ma, and what is happening to her.

And then there was no one in the world like Jack. I was hooked. So when we're brought back to reality with the "beep beep" of the steel door of their prison signalling Old Nick was there my stomach lurched and I willed Ma to get Jack into the wardrobe as fast as possible. "Wardrobe" is his hiding place, so he can't see what is happening.

But he could hear though.

And then comes the escape. One reviewer said she punched the air. It is a marvellous moment.

Listen to tonight's interview here with Emma Donoghue on Arts Extra.

"Room" is published by Picador