Room - Emma Donoghue

Great stories tend to involve either nail biting tension, beautiful language or a plot so profound it moves the reader to tears.

Rarely do you find a novel that delivers all three, but Emma Donoghue’s Room manages to do so – and with surprising originality.

The story is told through the eyes of five-year-old Jack, who lives with Ma in a place with a locked door and a skylight, which he knows only as Room. For Jack, Room (and everything in it) is his entire universe. He has no understanding there is a reality outside of what he has experienced – or of a world outside Room.

Room is similar to John Boyne’s The Boy In The Striped Pajamas in that readers understand far more about what’s going on than the narrative character.

We know very early on that Ma has been held prisoner by a man we know only as Old Nick, and Jack is the product of her imprisonment. And she has protected her son by reinventing their existence so it seems perfectly safe and normal to Jack.

But when circumstances force Ma to reveal the truth, she can’t help but turn that world upside down if they are to have any chance of a different future.

It’s not giving too much away to say that Ma and Jack must come up with a plan to escape. And the planning and execution of their plot make for the most intense and stressful 100 pages of a novel I’ve ever read.

Seriously. I was reading this section of the book during my lunch break on a particularly stressful day at work and went back to the office more wound up than before I left! It’s unbearably tense, mostly because of Jack’s innocence and courage, and what’s at stake for both he and Ma.

It’s the deep love between Jack and Ma that drives this story (much the same way Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is driven by the relationship between the Man and the Boy).

The idea of a woman and child being kept prisoner in a suburban fortress is not original – an alarming number of these sorts of unspeakable stories seem to feature in the news each year. Yet Donoghue has found an original perspective from which to tell it: that of a five-year-old.

Through Jack’s eyes, Room is not a place of horror. It’s his world and he’s comfortable in it. He is a true innocent. So when Ma must finally risk telling him about the real world, she has to do so using the language and world view Jack is familiar with.

Jack is a sweet and intelligent boy. He’s also completely – and unknowingly – institutionalised. So when change comes he faces his own existential crises. As does Ma, who learns freedom is never simple.

Although Room is somewhat of a tense journey, it is a surprisingly gentle story with a truly beautiful message. It asks questions about truth and reality, and the nature of sacrificial love, and does so without sentimentality.

My tears at the end of this book were not because it broke my heart, but because it moved me as only great stories can. Room is a profound novel, and I know it’s another of those stories that’s going to stay with me for a very long time.

(As an aside: Ma and Jack live in a truly sustainable way inside Room. They only receive deliveries from Old Nick once a week, so must re-use and recycle virtually every single item that comes into Room. It’s quite fascinating to see how much can be done with so little when there's no other choice…)

Peter Temple's Truth - expletive inspiring...

There’s a very good reason critics have been falling over themselves to praise Peter Temple’s new novel, Truth: it’s sublime.

It’s not often I read the last page of a book, close the cover and use an expletive to express how good it was. (The colourful language was partially a flow on of the abundance of profanity in the book, and mostly the fact it really was the best way to describe how impressed I was).

Temple is a master at fusing literary and genre writing. Truth is a gritty page-turning crime novel. It’s also a surprisingly moving study of the frailty of machismo. The Australian Review’s Peter Craven said last year that The Broken Shore “is a crime novel the way Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is a western”.

Truth has been described as sequel of sorts to Temple’s award-winning 2005 novel, The Broken Shore. But while it features some of the same characters (and even gives a nod to his earlier fictional creation, Jack Irish), it can be read as a stand alone story.

The central character is Stephen Villani, a peripheral character in The Broken Shore, who is now the head of Homicide for the much maligned Victorian Police. Over a few scorching summer days, Villani must face personal and professional crises as he simultaneously deals with a series of brutal murders, corruption in his own ranks, and the disintegration of his family, all while bushfires bear down on Melbourne.

It all starts with the murder of a young woman in the city’s newest luxury high-rise, followed by horrific torture killings of three hard-core drug-dealing criminals. As Villani and his fractured team investigate, he finds himself heading into murky political waters.

Villani’s world is populated by politicians on the knife edge, charismatic entrepreneurs, well-connected journalists and seedy underbelly criminals.

For those unfamiliar with Temple’s sparse prose, it can take time to settle into his rhythm and storytelling style.

As a reader, you just have to dive in and hang on, even if you have no idea who’s in a particular scene or even why. He’s a realist in the true sense. In reality, we don’t have internal monologue to provide exposition, and so it is with his characters. But patience is rewarded – often spectacularly.

Although there are crimes to be solved – and Temple gets to them – he’s primarily concerned with Villani’s personal challenges. Truth is about fathers and sons, and damaged relationships. It’s about hard men and the frailty inherent in them. It’s about authority and power, and the way men measure each other and demand respect.

When it comes to dialogue, Temple is a master. So much is conveyed with so few words. Villani, in particular gets some wonderfully wry lines.

When he asks his offsider, Bickerts about wellness spas, the detective replies:
“Respect your body. Think positive thoughts. Live in the moment.”
Villani: “What if the moment is absolutely shit?”

Or when the forensics guy gives his report about a crime scene: “Man near entrance is shot in the head at close range from behind. The other two, multiple stab wounds, genitals severed, other injuries. Also head and pubic hair ignited, shot, muzzle in mouth. Three bullets recovered, 45 calibre.”
Villani: “So you can’t rule out an accident?”

There are definitely a lot of characters – too many, to be honest – but every one and every piece of information provided is important. Nothing here is superfluous to the story. All the dots connect in the end. And brilliantly so.

Melbourne’s politicians, media and police hardly come up shining (and recent headlines make the bleak picture painted in Truth all the more disturbing), and yet Temple offers redemption for drug-crippled city in the form of honest, if not heavily flawed, men and women.

Truth had me marveling at its cleverness and honesty, and left me with a great sense of satisfaction at how it all came together. (As mentioned earlier, it also left me foul mouthed for a day or two – Villani and his mates certainly don’t talk sweetly to each other…).

I loved the Jack Irish series (particularly Temple's debut Bad Debts), and enjoyed The Broken Shore, but Truth is now without question my favourite novel, from one of my favourite authors.

Truth in fiction

Last week we talked about the authenticity of novelists. This week, I’d like to go one step further and talk about the notion of truth in fiction.

I’m not talking about truth as it relates to history or events in a fictional narrative; rather, I’m talking about whether or not the character’s reactions, revelations and resolutions are “true”, or based on reality.

James Bradley, in the June Australian Literary Review, points out the general notion that most narratives have therapeutic value, with arcs that feature “an uplifting journey from squalor to redemption, purpose-built to elicit the bursts of spontaneous applause that pepper American talk shows like the ‘hallelujahs’ they have taken the place of”.

Bradley argues that narratives which set out to inspire people and change lives are fantasies and fairytales, which “not only do not enrich our moral imagination but denude it. It isn’t true stories we hunger for at all, but manufactured stories that resemble true stories in every way but the ones that count”.

He says these types of “fantasy” narratives (assumedly ones involving happy endings) are “symptomatic of our culture’s growing resistance to the messiness and moral ambiguity of real life ... Our impatience with complexity, our desire for resolution, our need for clear moral messages … are the driving the erosion of the cultural authority of fiction”.

Is this true?

I guess it depends on what you want from a story (and for me this changes as often as my reading material) and how well it is delivered.

In my teens and early 20s, I think I always wanted clear resolution and happy endings. Now, in the latter half of my 30s – after experience more of life and its complexities – I’m satisified to read a story without a clear resolution, providing there’s been some sort of meaningful emotional journey by a major character, and they (and I) are left with a sense of hope about the future.

I’ve just finished reading two excellent Australian novels that manage to be firmly grounded in the “real” and yet still deliver emotional resolutions.

The first is Helen Garner’s first novel in 15 years, The Spare Room. The other is Tim Winton’s first offering in seven years, Breath.

The Spare Room is told through the eyes of Helen, a woman who agrees to support her friend Nicola - in the final stages of a terminal cancer - while the latter undergoes bizarre “experimental” treatment. Over the course of three emotionally-charged weeks, Helen becomes Nicola’s nurse, guardian angel and unflinching judge.

The novel appears to contain even more “truth” than usual: the narrator shares the author’s name, and her experience of living next door to her daughter and having recently helped a friend through the latter stages of cancer.

But instead of penning this story as memoir, Garner’s written it as fiction, which no doubt gave her greater scope in the storytelling. An interesting question for the author then, would be which parts reflect her actual experience, and which parts are fictionalised for the sake of the story.

Of course the answer is actually irrelevant, because this story rings with truth as Helen struggles with rage, grief, compassion and affection towards her friend.

Meanwhile Breath is a rites-of-passage story of Pikelet and Loonie, two risk-taking, competitive mates who team up with a gun surfer, Sando, and his fractious wife, Eva. The boys become obsessed with risk and danger. It begins simply enough, with staying under the river water for as long as possible, but moves on to the more intense physical and emotional risks posed by huge surf and confronting sexual experiences.

Like The Spare Room, Breath is expertly written. Winton captures a wonderful sense of place and uses fiction to ask questions about addiction and its costs, about risk-taking and about their long-term consequences.

In both stories, the endings are not what many might call “happy”, but the tension is resolved, and all experiences have meaning. If they were to follow the rule of being “true”, I suspect the endings for both could have been very different; which might have made them more realistic, but less satisfying.

Many literary experts would tell us that fiction (like other art forms) should reflect society and reality, but can’t we have more than one type of “legitimate” narrative?

Is it wrong to crave a happy ending, in a world where so few rarely exist?