Forensic accounting meets Kill Bill in the form of compelling heroine Ava Lee

Ready for a breathtaking rush starting with multi-million dollar purchase orders and dodgy accounting practices (um … ho hum?), segueing to financial transactions of varying legitimacy and 24/7 international banking activities bouncing from Toronto to Seattle to Hong Kong to the British Virgin Islands (hmm, OK …), sharply punctuated with more than a dash of Kill Bill (what …???) You’re in for a singular and suspenseful globetrotting ride with Ava Lee, one-of-a-kind forensic accountant and collections expert employing unique accounts receivable practices. Ava is the compelling heroine of The Water Rat of Wanchai, the first in an eagerly anticipated crime fiction series from Ian Hamilton.

Ava Lee is a young Chinese-Canadian forensic accountant who specializes in recovering large debts. She works closely with a Hong Kong-based “uncle” who is extensively connected, possibly with the Chinese criminal underworld. In The Water Rat of Wanchai, Ava takes on an assignment to retrieve money swindled from a business financing substantial purchase orders for a seafood distribution company supplying a major US retailer. A fairly straightforward case necessitating perhaps some minor negotiating and intimidation swiftly becomes complicated and possibly deadly when Ava runs up against and struggles to hold her own against a Caribbean-based crime kingpin who is seemingly business-like and even charming, but also amoral and menacing.

The Water Rat of Wanchai is a brisk, entertaining read. There is sufficient detail to capture the essence of every global stop in Ava’s journey, from Toronto to the British Virgin Islands. The storyline touches just the right amount on but is never too heavily freighted with the technicalities of the transactions along the way. The action is explosive whenever it occurs, is never couched in a fashion too unsettling for even the mildly squeamish, but is still offered up in suitably brutal and authentic form. The suspense is well concocted and genuine.

Hamilton obviously adores his intelligent and refreshingly self-aware heroine, and she quickly captivates the reader. Her resourcefulness, aplomb and, where necessary, outright sangfroid has brilliant flashes of other singular and often cinematic heroines, from Reese Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick to Uma Thurman’s unforgettable Beatrix Kiddo. Still, Ava Lee is ultimately her own unique being, and Hamilton leaves the reader wanting more of her and wanting to learn more about this enigmatic and forceful young woman.

How wonderful then to know that Hamilton and House of Anansi Press has astutely set the Ava Lee story in motion with four books queued up. A second book will appear this summer, and two more are slated for 2012. The Ava Lee series is the first offering of a new House of Anansi Press crime fiction imprint called Spiderline, and things are clearly off to a strong start.

Hamilton has left numerous doors enticingly ajar to further explore Ava’s family and personal life, get to know more of her professional associates and perhaps contend with repeat engagements with those with whom she’s tangled in this first installment. For example, Ava’s work associate Derek remains largely offstage in this book, but it would be intriguing to see him onstage in future installments. At any rate, readers captivated by this first encounter with Ava Lee won’t have long to wait.

Thank you to House of Anansi Press for providing a review copy of The Water Rat of Wanchai, by Ian Hamilton.

At first glance, it seems Nicola Barker has left behind the dark, menacing, labyrinthine world of Darkmans for sunnier, simpler climes – a quaint, pleasant village, the setting of Burley Cross Postbox Theft. Then again, whether you know this author by reputation or by past experience with her singular collection of works, do you really think she would pen a straightforward, conventionally charming epistolary novel along the lines of, say, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society?

Any such misapprehensions are quickly set aside as the first letter detailing the village’s recent postbox (mailbox) theft case is teed up … and devastatingly tees off on its recipient. That first letter is ostensibly a directive from a police sergeant to a police constable, instructing the constable to take over the investigation of the theft and recovery of a box of mail shortly before Christmas. That missive rapidly takes on strange intensity and personal viciousness, seemingly for nothing more than perverse reasons, as Sergeant Everill taunts Constable Topping on besting him in everything from job promotions to romance. Everill’s odd, manic outbursts carry with them more than a shade of the troubled Dory from Darkmans, a character who was possibly clinically schizoprenic. Before the reader can figure out what to make of it, the book rolls on into the seemingly random collection of letters that make up the recovered postbox plunder.

There are three types of epistolary novels (1): monologic (giving the letters of only one character), dialogic (giving the letters of two characters), and polylogic (with three or more letter-writing characters). In addition, a crucial element in polylogic epistolary novels (such as Dangerous Liaisons) is the dramatic device of ‘discrepant awareness’, wherein the simultaneous but separate correspondences of the heroines and the villains create dramatic tension. Burley Cross Postbox Theft is an arresting amalgam of all three, capturing connections made and missed.

Many of the diverted letters are comic monologues about life’s petty annoyances, ballooned into hyperbolic diatribes. Other monologues capture loneliness, longing and yearning. The inventory of the ill-fated Auction of Promises is a unique monologue of good intentions going horribly awry.

The book as a whole is a cacophonous polylogue, seemingly random at first but falling together in interesting, startling and often heartrending fashion as each letter is opened. The interjections of an opinionated translator form a kind of dialogue with her interpretation of one letter for which the need for translation is not entirely clear. Finally, the collection of letters is framed by a dialogue of sorts between assigning sergeant and investigating constable, where PC Topping renders both the final word as well as a singularly soul-redeeming monologue.

Throughout, Barker populates this written – sometimes scribbled, sometimes meticulously typed and tapped out – chorus with characters who run the sympathetic gamut, from quirky, forlorn and wistful to bewildering, manic and kinda scary, to the edge of irredeemable. And this is just as Barker would have it for the readers willing to hang in with her often dense, often thorny, always rewarding stories:

‘There are writers who exist to confirm people’s feelings about themselves and to make them feel comforted or not alone. That’s the opposite to what I do. I’m presenting people with unacceptable or hostile characters, and my desire is to make them understood.’(2)

Not only does she make her disparate tangle of souls understood by the end, but Barker sews it up elegantly, organically and in a way that is both uplifting and just a touch satisfyingly vindictive. It’s delicious.

In this day and age – and Burley Cross Postbox Theft is firmly set in the present – why should anyone care if some random bits of paper get lost in the increasingly dismissed and antiquated post? Barker addresses that in fine fashion, too, as part of PC Topping’s summing up of the postbox theft mystery:

“Let’s see … I know that pubs are on their way out (hundreds are closing every week), that they’re merely a sad reminder of things past (the way we once were, The Good Old Days), just like ‘community spirit’ is, and communities themselves, and churches, and local bobbies, and pickled walnuts, and brass bands at fetes, and tall hedgerows, and handwritten letters, and home-cooked meals, and sparrows, and boredom, and books, and gob-stoppers, and ladybirds, and innocence … Yes. All for the high jump. All for the chop. All nearly eclipsed, now (may they rest in peace), by a much bigger, brighter future, in twenty-four-hour digital HD.”

But just as PC Topping didn’t buckle under Sergeant Everill’s verbal assault when passed the postbox theft assignment, so his seeming rueful lament for a world quickly passing by is actually no lament at all, but a gentle yet pointed reprimand. Just as he plausibly disentangles the postbox theft and sorts out who needs to see which of the misdirected missives, his self-effacing tidying up at the end seems to more profoundly echo E.M. Forster’s beloved call to “only connect.”

Notes

1. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistolary_novel

2. ‘I won’t make you feel better’
Nicola Barker revels in giving her readers hostile characters in odd locations. No wonder she’s addicted to Big Brother …
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/apr/29/fiction.features3
by Alex Clark, The Observer, April 29, 2007

Here are the books I read in 2010, with links to reviews where I have them. This is an exhaustive, all of list, not a best of list … although there are some “best of” in there … you can guess! It feels like it was a year of lively reads indeed.

1. Sink Trap – A Georgiana Neverall Mystery
   by Christy Evans

2. Matter
   by Meredith Quartermain

3. Invisible
   by Paul Auster

4. This is Water – Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
   by David Foster Wallace

5. Man Gone Down
   by Michael Thomas

6. The Museum of Innocence
   by Orhan Pamuk

7. Awake
   by Elizabeth Graver

8. The Ordeal of Oliver Airedale
   by D.T. Carlisle

9. The Bishop’s Man
   by Linden MacIntyre

10. Outliers
    by Malcolm Gladwell

11. The Children’s Book
    by A.S. Byatt

12. Solar
    by Ian McEwan

13. The Last Woman
    by John Bemrose

14. Nox
    by Anne Carson

15. Chronic City
    by Jonathan Lethem

16. So Much For That
    by Lionel Shriver

17. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
    by Alan Bradley

18. Coal and Roses
    by P.K. Page

19. Pigeon
    by Karen Solie

20. Useless Dog
    by Billy C. Clark

21. The Certainty Dream
    by Kate Hall

22. The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle
    by Monique Proulx
    (translated by David Homel & Fred A. Reed)

23. The Imperfectionists
    by Tom Rachman

24. Migration Songs
    by Anna Quon

25. Grain
    by John Glenday

26. The Sun-fish
    by Eilean Ni Chuilleanain

27. 2666
    by Roberto Bolano

28. A Single Man
    by Christopher Isherwood

29. Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems
    by Randall Maggs

30. Far To Go
    by Alison Pick

31. Gould’s Book of Fish
    by Richard Flanagan

32. Fauna
    by Alissa York

33. Freedom
    by Jonathan Franzen

34. Sandra Beck
    by John Lavery

35. Annabel
    by Kathleen Winter

36. The Death of Donna Whalen
    by Michael Winter

37. Room
    by Emma Donoghue

38. Ghost Pine
    by Jeff Miller

39. L (and things come apart)
    by Ian Orti

40. The Bone Cage
    by Angie Abdou

41. Windstorm
    by Joe Denham

42. An Object of Beauty
    by Steve Martin

43. Burley Cross Postbox Theft
    by Nicola Barker

I start 2011 with the following books started in 2010 and still in progress:

• Voltaire’s Bastards
  by John Ralston Saul

• Maggot: Poems
  by Paul Muldoon

• Patient Frame
  by Steven Heighton

• The Mill on the Floss
  by George Eliot

In 2009, I read 52 books, inspired a lot by great discussions and suggestions I found amongst the book blogging and reader community on Twitter. I didn’t match my 2009 total – not even close, really … but then, I have to ask again (as I did a year ago) are total numbers of books or pages really the point? What do you think?

Dangerously dedicating oneself, body and soul – two contrasting views of elite performance in Black Swan and The Bone Cage

‘Tis the season for awards buzz that sparks as one year wanes, and blazes into the new year. In the movie realm, Black Swan is igniting that Academy Award spark. The movie is a psychological thriller about a young ballerina sacrificing and striving for the pinnacle role of her profession. On another level, the story of actress Natalie Portman’s physical and mental dedication to making the role authentically her own has been intriguing and even inspiring. As reviewer Roger Ebert observed:

“The tragedy of Nina, and of many young performers and athletes, is that perfection in one area of life has led to sacrifices in many of the others. At a young age, everything becomes focused on pleasing someone (a parent, a coach, a partner), and somehow it gets wired in that the person can never be pleased. One becomes perfect in every area except for life itself.”(1)

‘Tis also the season for continued buzz in the Canadian literary realm – a buzz that revs up for the fall literary awards – and it’s fair to say that buzz is just as intoxicating for many as the Oscars. Really. Intriguingly, there are some striking parallels between Black Swan and one of the Canada Reads contenders.

The Bone Cage by Angie Abdou is about young and not-so-young elite athletes striving for their own pinnacle, a place on the Canadian Olympic team. The story is traced compellingly through the alternating and eventually intersecting trajectories of speed swimmer Sadie and wrestler Tom (Digger to family, friends and teammates). Abdou draws persuasively on her own competitive sports background (she swims at the Masters level, her brother was an Olympic wrestler) to build as convincing and approachable a story as Black Swan is fascinating but utterly rarified.

Black Swan unfolds against a stark black and white backdrop, splashed with highly symbolic pink and blood red, and keeps up that striking visual assault from beginning to end. The Bone Cage uses different and instantly more pervasive sensory cues, where the book’s pages seem almost redolent of sweat and chlorine from the outset. From the beginning, Abdou takes you under the skin of her singular characters and taps into how they’re feeling in every sense of the word, from the physical satisfactions and strains to the emotional exhilaration and tribulations. From the beginning, you take in the flesh of the dancers in Black Swan, both at its most beautiful and at its most damaged and grotesque, and you see their conflicts, but it’s all surface. While this is perhaps comparing apples and oranges, it could also be said this is a fair contrasting of the accessibility of the storytelling and believable forging of the characters in the two works, regardless of the medium. Black Swan is gorgeously, frostily played out at arm’s length, whereas The Bone Cage draws you in warmly.

Ebert’s observation about Black Swan points out that the elite performer strives to please, and notable in that comment is that the performer doesn’t seem to have the actual support, emotional or otherwise, of others. Nina literally and/or figuratively (really, it’s hard to tell – this is a psychological thriller and so I don’t think this is a spoiler) kills off everyone who could possibly offer her solace and support in her quest, not only making her victory her own in the end, but making it *exclusively* her own. In vivid contrast, The Bone Cage delves deeply and convincingly into the team dynamics, friendships and family relationships that do inspire the athletes to please, but even more, provide the athletes with invaluable safety nets on many levels. In Black Swan, perhaps Barbara Hershey’s tragically botoxed face elicits some sympathy as Nina’s well-intentioned if claustrophobically supportive mother, but she can’t hold a candle to the earthy, flesh-and-blood presence of Sadie’s stalwart grandmother and Digger’s slightly embarrassing but steadfast father.

It’s Sadie’s palpable connection to her grandmother that best captures the dichotomy of the body’s power and fragility, and serves as a harbinger of Sadie’s own unexpected confrontation with her physical, emotional and even spiritual limits. In Black Swan, bodily fragility or threats to bodily supremacy create downright horror, but the challenges Sadie, Digger and their respective teammates face are couched with depth, subtlety and resonances such that anyone, of whatever physical prowess, can feel some empathy.

Both Black Swan and The Bone Cage explore the relationship between elite performers and their “shelf life” and constrained time in the spotlight, and their consciousness of being part of a competitive continuum of those preceding and following. And again, Black Swan‘s assessment of that reality is tinged with horror, while The Bone Cage confronts it, admittedly, with a mix of disdain, anxiety and resentment, but presents everyone on that continuum (such as Sadie’s predecessor Lucinda and heir apparent Katie) with subtlety and understanding.

Both Black Swan and The Bone Cage make sorrowful classical references to the body as a type of prison to be transcended. The obvious foundation of Black Swan is the spell cast in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake – it’s integral to the story, it is the story. By contrast, one minor shortcoming of The Bone Cage (a multi-layered reference to battle armor in Beowulf) is that attempts to give the intersecting stories some additional heft with classical references feels uncomfortably tacked on rather than an organic part of an already impressive whole. The Browning, Yeats and even the Ethel Wilson references are all technically congruous with Sadie’s background, but they’re all rather superfluous and don’t really add to the richness of the story.

Nor does the fleeting reference to Tom Buchanan add – well, what was it supposed to add to the ending of The Bone Cage? But before you can accuse Abdou of taking it all too seriously, she ends on a note that is both earthy and whimsical. I wish the same could be said for the end of Black Swan.

Black Swan‘s Grand Guignol ending is chillingly drenched in perfection in every sense, and that perfection is explosive but also finite. You’ve been entertained, but you’re glad it’s over, and you feel no need to wonder about the obsessively dedicated ballerina you’ve observed with fascination, but have really not come to know. The Bone Cage‘s wistful ending is ambiguous, tinged with hope and various possibilities. You wonder what happens next for the young athletes. (Maybe Abdou will consider updating us at some point …?) Black Swan is a twisted confection, but The Bone Cage is the real deal.

I would recommend both the movie and the book, truth be told. As I remarked to a friend recently, though, “I would recommend Black Swan … I just don’t know who I would recommend it to …” No such problem with The Bone Cage. I would recommend it, too, and unreservedly to anyone who enjoys a good, engaging story with believable characters that either welcomes you with credibility and authenticity to a world you might know, or introduces you unthreateningly to a world you might not.

Notes:

1. Black Swan review by Roger Ebert
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20101201/REVIEWS/101209994

L (and things come apart), by Ian Orti, is a haunting novella about a disintegrating marriage, a disintegrating mind, or maybe both. L (and things come apart) is an extended prose poem about a new relationship springing from the ashes of a lacerated and incinerated relationship. L (and things come apart) is all this and more.

Cafe owner Henry seems to acquiesce to being cuckolded and humiliated by his nameless wife, a museum director, who invites her lovers to interminable dinner parties in the home she shares with Henry. Henry seeks solace in longer hours at his cafe, where he enjoys the company of his quirky customers and rents an upstairs apartment to an attractive, enigmatic woman named L. L is quietly mercurial and troubled, and possibly being pursued. Henry is attracted to her and wants to help her, but perhaps cannot, as his world seems to be figuratively and literally crumbling.

Orti has constructed a dark, enticingly murky tale that might or might not be a romance. The book is deceptively rich and complex in form and imagery despite its comparative brevity. Matryoshka dolls of story fragments and images are repeated and reopened within other stories and images. New life and stories rise out of the ashes of previous lives and stories. Old rooms and houses renovate themselves magically overnight. Plants rapidly overgrow a burned-out cafe (is this real or imagined?), possibly out of season when the seasons seem to be out of sync to begin with … and on and on.

As Henry struggles to keep his modest business operating, and his modest and increasingly fragile psyche functioning, the city around him is tumbling into disarray. Is there a transit strike going on, or has the climate come irreparably unhinged and the citizenry is banding together and protesting? And what about the mammoths?

Enormous impossibilities marching towards them one large impossible step at a time: elaborately decorated, fully tusked, long-haired mammoths. How many he couldn’t tell, but they were in rows of two, surrounded on either side by the people of the city. Their bodies swayed with each imposing step. Henry searched people’s faces for some explanation or at least a sign of terror, but he found neither.”

Is Henry indeed coming apart – but gently so, hence the absence of terror over the improbable things happening around him – and in the process, are his images and memories of the key people in his life also shattering and fragmenting? In the end, perhaps his cruel, unfaithful wife is not what she seems. Are she and L and a mysterious other woman at the dinner parties all facets of the same person? Orti leaves enough shimmering clues and suggestions that each reader can draw his or her own conclusions.

As it culminates, L (and things come apart) reveals its circular structure, similar to the likes of Under the Volcano, with which it shares a hypnotic quality. This is a book that will be something new and fresh with each re-reading, which it deliciously invites.

Thank you to Invisible Publishing for providing a review copy of L (and things come apart), by Ian Orti.

A brief synopsis of The Death of Donna Whalen would seem simple on the surface, and would also seem to separate swiftly those who would read such a story from those who would not. Based on a true case, the story is about a spirited but troubled young woman who meets a premature and very violent end. Her troubles prior to her death included dealing in behaviours and with people who were truly or reputed to be dangerous. It would seem clear who was responsible for her death. End of a cautionary tale, grimly told …?

Not at all. Drawing on a daunting array of records from the real-life trial of the suspected murderer – court transcripts, police wiretaps, police and news reports, letters, diary excerpts and more – author Michael Winter has distilled them into a singular account of a murder case and its attendant tragedy that is not at all what it seems. Its transcendent approach to capturing this story should and will also draw in readers to the book who might normally eschew “true crime” fare.

Winter’s innovation is that he has created an unlikely Greek chorus out of the voices that emerge from the towering stack of material that apparently lived at the back of his closet for a number of the years during which he grappled with how to tell the story. Further, out of the cacophony of confused, fearful and duplicitous voices telling their versions of Donna Whalen’s story and fate, Winter forges a distinct voice of his own. The alchemy is that he takes first person accounts, compresses them, and sensitively and acutely converts them to the third person, while still retaining accents, inflections and resonances that create an unforgettable collective voice that haunted this reader in her dreams. The result is simultaneously intimate, distancing and authentic, making the story that much more compelling. The final effect also likely replicates the maddening conundrum that law enforcement, investigators and ultimately justice faced and struggled with in arriving at their flawed conclusions.

Many of the relationships between voices and figures in the story are not explained until the end of the book. While this creates some confusion, it also adds to the effect of there not seeming to be a single, reliable voice telling Donna’s story. The reader struggles with her own trust and skepticism – which can change in waves from character to character, and from moment to moment with given characters – that is almost visceral, and therefore that much more intensely engaging.

Winter himself, as well as reviewers, have cited Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood as a point of reference and comparison for The Death of Donna Whalen. While Donna is equally groundbreaking in form, the book is really closer in spirit, form and voice to Kenneth J. Harvey’s Inside. Donna‘s collective voice is as pervasive, haunting and mercurial as Inside‘s beleagured Myrden.

Winter as author and narrative voice is often charmingly, gregariously present in his previous books, such as This All Happened and The Architects Are Here. His presence in The Death of Donna Whalen is deceptively influential, but also respectfully circumspect. It will be interesting to see what Donna does or does not do with his voice in future works. Even if Donna stands alone in his oeuvre … well, it truly stands alone, in every good sense of the phrase.

See also

Michael Winter recently talked most revealingly about his new book “The Death of Donna Whalen” on CBC Radio’s The Next Chapter
http://www.cbc.ca/thenextchapter/2010/10/michael-winter.html

Are there names we hold sacred in the CanLit canon, that must always stand alone? With all genuine and due respect, would it be profane to, say, utter anyone’s name in the same breath as the name of Alice Munro … especially if that writer has “punk” and “zine” in his literary curriculum vitae? If it is, what follows is a profane review …

Ghost Pine: All Stories True offers up “all stories true” from the life of author Jeff Miller, covering 13 years from the 1990s to almost the present. The stories are compiled from the best of his long-running zine of the same name. The stories capture Miller’s youth in suburban Ottawa in the late 1990s, to his largely economy class travels across Canada and North America, to his current home in Montreal.

Miller’s bleak or just bland urban and suburban settings are gritty and seemingly hard-edged at first, but as the stories progress (and sometimes that progress is charted over mere words, sentences, perhaps a paragraph), most are redeemed by consideration, keen observation, kindness and often inexplicable optimism. What in the world could that possibly have in common with Alice Munro’s oeuvre, where rural and small town settings often belie heartbreak, malice and even menace under a picture postcard, pastoral surface? Both are subversive, in their way, for so clearly undermining what the carefully crafted surfaces – semi-rural southwestern Ontario in Munro’s case, downtown or suburban Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton et al in Miller’s case – would seem to depict. Both imbue their settings and characters with quiet, almost mundane solidity, but, *because* they’re quiet, modest and mundane, are therefore profoundly authentic situations and people with which we can relate.

Miller’s bike couriers, security guards, struggling musicians and artists, mildly and sheepishly disaffected high school students, not to mention the person and persona of Miller himself (because all of his stories are true, remember) might seem depressed, unmotivated, ready to wreak havoc or to just give up. But they all keep going in one fashion or another and they all strive to learn and expand their horizons beyond their immediate circumstances and experiences, best illustrated by the centrepiece set of stories and fragments about “The Social Justice Club”, where a loosely assembled group of misfits strives to find a cause or purpose beyond their day-to-day high school routines. Just as it is charmingly surprising to see these teenagers struggling to understand the issues associated with East Timor or Burma, or the value of becoming a vegetarian, it is almost startling and simultaneously heartwarming to observe a young person ungrudgingly helping his wheelchair-bound grandfather to the bathroom, and then listening not only patiently but with fresh appreciation to an oft-told reminiscence.

“I laughed, not with the childish glee I did the first time I heard the story many years before. But today it was actually kind of funny.

My grandfather wiped a tear of joy from his eye.”

The all true Ghost Pine stories have the intimacy of a handwritten, manually cut and pasted, collated and assembled publication – as they should. That homemade aesthetic does not, however, suggest that there is any compromise in sophistication in the storytelling. That’s again where I think the Alice Munro comparison is sound. Miller’s Ghost Pine stories have the same finely honed care and craft as Munro’s plainspoken words of bottomless depth and possibility. Both speak simply and resonantly of familiar people, locales and experiences, even though they are widely divergent on the surface.

Thank you to Invisible Publishing for providing a review copy of Ghost Pine, by Jeff Miller.

Room by Emma Donoghue offers the not-faint-of-heart reader the hermetic and troubling conceit of living inside the head of a five-year-old boy who has only known captivity in an eleven-foot-square shed. That captivity is shared with his mother, who has been in what the child Jack calls Room for seven years. She resourcefully manages to make their confined world one of surprising vibrance and great affection. Their existence is periodically interrupted by visits from his Ma’s captor, but the child is largely shielded from those visits and interaction with that menacing visitor, as much as is possible in the constrained space of that tiny world.

It isn’t really a spoiler to reveal that the child and his mother eventually manage to escape Room. It’s perhaps more of a spoiler to give away how happy (or not) they are to escape and return to (in the mother’s case) and enter for the first time (in Jack’s case) the Outside world.

The greatest strength of this book is that it is imbued with the authentic voice of a child, spiked with idiosyncrasies both normal for the narrator’s age, and with those which could be reasonably and realistically attributed to his unusual upbringing, such as precocious vocabulary or other more developmentally stunted perceptions. The question of whether the book strains what is believable and unbelievable can simply be set next to recent headlines for such real-life stories as those of Elisabeth Fritzl and Jaycee Dugard. The question of whether the book strains what is and isn’t possible is answered step by step with logical explanations for how Ma and Jack are kept confined and isolated.

So then, the book is plausible and sound in terms of premise, structure and tone. So why does it so strain then with respect to emotional resonance … or at least strains so for this reader?

Quite simply, if Donoghue had said less, with fewer detailed and sometimes rambling specifics, the book would have had greater emotional depth and appeal. Jack’s various experiences of and observations of the Outside world, while clever, undoubtedly well researched and offering new perspectives on mundane day-to-day things that we all take for granted, quickly become overkill. It likely replicates the sensory overload that Jack also experiences, but it’s just tedious for the reader. By the time Jack stumbles across some TV commentators analyzing what he symbolizes, the profundity of what he and his mother have gone through has been hammered home too hard and verges into reality TV territory – which, sadly, the real-life versions of this story do, too. It doesn’t make these episodes any less appalling or heartwrenching, but it makes you want to shut them all off.

Yes, Room pushes all the right buttons, but that’s just it: I felt like my buttons were being pushed, and I resisted.

It’s perhaps hokey to say in a review that you really wanted to like a book or movie or whatever (and heaven knows I’ve said it before). I *did* want to like Room and maybe had expectations I would based on the wave of glowing reviews (blog/tweet/civilian as well as media/industry), literary award nominations and outrage at nominations some felt this book additionally deserved.  Many euphoric reviews led me to believe that I would be up all night reading this book in one gulp, regardless of how I felt, but that wasn’t my experience. I found myself labouring to finish it, even bored at times. I appreciate the obvious craft and thought and careful validation that went into this book, but a more impressionistic and less specific account would have left room for the reader – reader by reader, to each reader’s capacity and taste, to flesh it out in an emotionally authentic fashion. Perhaps Donoghue’s choice of narrator doesn’t make that possible however, as extraordinary young Jack is wired by his age and experience to report everything copiously and literally.