Chamber of Horrors
In her literary take on the horrific case of Josef Fritzl, Emma Donoghue tries to imagine what a life of solitary confinement would look like from the perspective of a five year old child
Anne Sexton, 23 Aug 2010
Imagine your world was a single room. No windows, just a skylight; no greenery but a single sickly plant; no animals except for the insects and vermin that find their way into your prison. This the world that the five-year old Jack shares with his mother in Emma Donoghue’s remarkable new novel, Room.
“When I was writing it, I was designing their prison, deciding exactly what I would allow them: yes, television but no internet; yes, daylight but no nature. I was the captor. To look at every thing from the other side is quite a mind-bending exercise,” laughs Donoghue.
Room has been long-listed for this year’s Man Booker prize, but Donoghue has been careful not to get her hopes up.
“I can’t even think about that,” she says. “The most I can hope for is to make the shortlist.”
Inspired by the case of Josef Frizl who kept his daughter Elizabeth a prisoner in a basement for twenty-four years and fathered seven children with her, in the wrong hands this story with its catalogue of cruelty and abuse could have been little more than torture porn, something Donoghue was careful to avoid.
“What I wanted to write was not in any sense that story,” says Donoghue. “I wanted it to be streamlined and stripped down of many of the extra horrifying elements, like the incest, I wanted to pare them away and simplify it so that the book would have some of the qualities of a fairytale or fable. I wanted it to be a less horrifying confinement than any of the real cases.”
The novel is written from Jack’s perspective and it is his story. Jack’s experience of his captivity is not one of horror. Room is instead the story of a childhood lived in a confined space, allowing Donoghue to pose an interesting question: “What’s wrong with a childhood in one room? What is the missing element?”
Writing about life in a confined space where very little action can happen is no easy task, admits Donoghue.
“That was one of the very first technical worries I had. I remember a friend saying to me, ‘Oh you’ll have to decide exactly how much of the book to set on the inside. How much can readers bear?’ I was also very aware of how many pages would pass before the first bit of drama. I didn’t want the plan to be on page one, because I wanted to convey Jack’s sense of a fairly peaceful childhood where every day is pretty similar to every other day, but I knew the drama had to come in quite fast. That was a real challenge.”
Page 1/3 <Previous 1 2 3 Next>
©Hot Press 2011. Why be a member? | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy