I’ll come back to those, but the interesting one is Ma’s decision to tell him that the world of television, which she has pretended until now is all imaginary, is real. In the second, over the course of a few days, Donoghue allows Jack to have more first-time experiences than in his whole lifetime so far. It’s not supposed to be too interesting, obviously, but in the first chapter there’s a birthday and – gasp – a cake. Donoghue is obviously nicely brought-up because, like ‘Ma’, she does her best to keep the awful environment bearable for us. I’m asking these questions to stop becoming bored. Room is not the same as Beckett’s play or Abe’s novel but, beyond merely wondering what might happen next – and plenty of things have already happened – a reader is bound to wonder if there’s more to it than a simple ‘What if…?’ (What if you were the child born to a woman secretly imprisoned by a nutter? What would your view of the world be? How would you use language?) Does Donoghue have another agenda? If Jack, the five-year-old, is trapped inside a room with no view of the outside, well, aren’t we all trapped inside Plato’s cave? He was a great fan of Samuel Beckett, and his novel owes a lot to several of Beckett’s dramas, particularly Happy Days (1961), centred on a woman trapped in sand with a man next to her. It became clear that Abe has an existentialist agenda going, to do with the human condition in the middle of the 20th Century. 50 pages into it I was hoping that, basically, I hadn’t got all there was to get out of Abe’s story of two people kept imprisoned in a tiny house at the bottom of a hole in the sand-dunes. Two years ago I read the 1962 novel Woman of the Dunes by Japanese author Kobo Abe.
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