Room -- Take 2

I finished a book!  Hooray!

I'm not sure yet whether I'll be going to the book club meeting for Room or not, but regardless, I listened to the whole darn thing, unabridged.  Go me.

First, a bit about the story.  The story is told by Jack, a five-year-old who has spent his whole life within the confines of a single room.  His mother was kidnapped at the age of 19, and has been routinely raped by her kidnapper during the seven years since then.  Jack is the product of one of those nights.

Ma, as Jack calls her, has done an impressive job of making Room a place where Jack can live and in many ways thrive.  He's smart and perceptive, although the simple language of a five-year-old's vocabulary, even a smart one, tends to get a little boring.  Also, Jack calls many of the objects in Room, including Room itself, by its generic noun as though it were a proper name.  Instead of "I was sitting on the bed," it's "I was sitting on Bed."  This lack of articles gets a bit tedious, although I noticed it less and less as the story went on.

Regarding language, it's fun because there are little hints - an odd word or turn of phrase here and there - which let on that the author is actually European.

The tedium of life in Room, especially for Ma, who has experienced the outside world, is portrayed to the reader in the form of repetition; in fact, the first third or so of the story is actually pretty dull.  I had to get through three of the nine CDs before the pace picked up a bit.

But for Jack, life is still full of excitement.  Reading this book reminded me a little bit of Plato's cave allegory (which I haven't read since high school, so bear with me); the cave is actually mentioned towards the end of the novel.  For example, they have a television, and from it Jack has learned about lots of things that exist outside of Room, but he doesn't really understand what's real, and what real things look like.  He has no points of reference about how big a tree is, or what a dog's fur feels like.  He's seen pictures, but it's just not the real McCoy.

What's also interesting is to watch Jack change as he learns more about the world outside of Room, and learns to interpret things differently.  He changes his behavior based on what he learns that people expect; he learns to lie.

And one note particular to the audio version: the narrator doesn't identify any chapter breaks.  I still haven't picked up a copy of the paper book, so I'm not sure how the chapters are identified.  Maybe there are none, maybe there are some but they don't even have numbers.  In any case, I found this particularly annoying, which is odd, because it didn't really matter where in the book I was.  Maybe I like chapter beginnings and endings as a way to mark progress.

On the whole, a good read (or listen, as the case may be).  The second half was particularly compelling.  Definitely not the best I've ever read, but surely above average.