Only when I got the idea for Room did I realise that I had three and a half years’ worth of things to say. I was a youngest-of-eight who had never had a job that required set hours or responsibility, and motherhood broke and remade me.
From day one – or middle-of-the-night one, rather – I found child-rearing fascinating. To tone down some of the horror, and distance Jack’s story from Felix’s, I made him a well-nourished only child, the captor a stranger rather than his ma’s father, their home a locked shed with a skylight and ventilation somewhere in the US.īut the novel really started years earlier, when I gave birth to the first of our two kids.
By the time I parked, and grabbed a napkin to scribble down my thoughts, I knew my novel had to be from the child’s point of view, would begin on his fifth birthday and be split into two halves by the escape, and would be called (in an echo of womb) Room. If you choose to read The Wonder just make sure you have enough time set aside you’ll want to get through it as quickly as possible.I got the notion to write Room in 2008 when I was driving to a book event and mulling over a news story from a few days before about a five-year-old called Felix Fritzl, rescued from the Austrian dungeon where his mother had raised him and his siblings. What can a miracle look like? Is a miracle always for good? At the heart of the story is a deep and formidable Catholic faith and while I’m not Catholic, I felt that Donoghue was largely respectful of both her characters and her readers when dealing with the faith. Donoghue also finds that balance of mystery – what if Anna is telling the truth. Lib has her secrets to hide and biases to bring to her task and these are slowly revealed as her connection to Anna becomes more and more complicated. The Wonder is immensely readable and Donoghue does an excellent job of bringing place and characters to life. Lib, an atheist, is determined to discover the secret of Anna’s “miracle” but, in true Donoghue fashion, it is much darker and more complex than expected. Anna’s family claims a miracle and Anna is certainly devout enough but others, especially Lib, are skeptical. She learns that she has been hired to observe Anna, a young girl who allegedly has not eaten in four months and yet is perfectly healthy. Trained by Florence Nightingale herself, Lib is fastidious and cynical, a stranger to this country so close and yet so different from her own. Lib Wright arives in a tiny, rural Irish town, hired from England as a private nurse for exactly two weeks. Although vastly different stories they share a powerful sense of tension and showcase how compelling a writer Donoghue is. Having read Room a few years ago, this is my second read from Emma Donoghue. The Wonder – Emma Donoghue (Harper Collins, 2016)
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