When I started this book I really thought I was going to hate it. In fact after only reading the first few pages I remarked to a friend that seriously, if I’d wanted to read a story written by a five year old I might just as well have popped down to the local primary school and taken a peek at the children’s exercise books.

But of course I was wrong, again, and once I’d got over my initial reaction to the narrative voice I really loved it.

Actually maybe “loved” is pushing it a bit. After all, a story about a young woman who has been abducted and imprisoned in a 12 foot square room for seven years, a room in which she has been repeatedly raped, and where she has given birth to her abuser’s child, five year old Jack, the aforementioned narrator of the novel, isn’t exactly a story to warm the cockles of anyone’s heart. But Donoghue’s skill as a writer is such that despite the macabre nature of the plot, I found myself completely absorbed in the story and unwilling to put the book down, even after I’d got to the end.

Room is a horrific tale, inspired, or “triggered” to quote the author, by the Josef Fritzl case; but far from being the exploitative, cynical money-spinner that some have pegged it as, I found it to be a compassionate and fascinating study into the mother-child bond, a bond that in this case prevails despite the deprivation and depravity of the child’s conception, and I also felt that it gave a compelling insight into a dark, nightmarish place that for most of us, thankfully, is usually well beyond our imaginings.

Because of the subject matter of Room and its parallels with the Fritzl case, there are those that have called this novel voyeuristic: and perhaps in the hands of a less talented writer that might well have been so. But I really didn’t feel that was a fair or accurate description of Room, and I’m pleased to see this challenging and wonderfully crafted novel on this year’s longlist for the Man Booker Prize.

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