There’s nothing more intimidating to a writer than a blank page, so WordPress provides a daily question to help out. I don’t often answer these, but I liked this one from a few weeks ago because I had an immediate answer.
This entry will, by necessity, contain major plot points about the Emma Donoghue book Room. If you don’t want to know what happens, skip over this entry. The question is:
If you could rewrite any book’s ending, which one would you choose?
The novel was published in 2010, drawing many elements of its plot from the Joseph Fritzl case, which first emerged two years earlier. The narrative is written from the point of five-year-old Jack. He’s spent his entire life imprisoned in a single room with his mother, and the only other person he has met is their captor, known as Old Nick.
Room could easily have been a horror, with ample opportunities for Nick to inflict graphic torture on either of the other two, and it would have been a deliciously cruel ride. However, the book keeps this action strictly off-stage. It instead looks at how they escape from the room and deal with the aftermath, including unwanted media attention and the jailing of Nick.
But ever since I saw the film adaptation, released in 2015, I’ve felt the ending to be lacklustre. Jack – at his own request – revisits the room, but he no longer finds an emotional attachment with it and says his goodbyes.
In the TV series Black Mirror, every episode includes a final twist that falls broadly into three types:
- Writing off previous actions as pointless or futile.
- Showing there was a detail missed that might have changed the outcome.
- Implying that things are about to become worse.
In the case of Room, I’ve long thought option 2 would round off the narrative nicely. A second room could be discovered below the one we’ve seen in the story so far, which would only have been accessible via a cleverly-disguised entrance.
Inside that room would be another mother and child lying dead because they haven’t been visited since Old Nick was arrested. The implication would be that he never mentioned them during the trial process, perhaps reasoning that he was in enough trouble already. This means the police have no reason to consider this possibility while searching the house. That said, we don’t particularly need a reason for Nick’s motivations.
The problem would be how to present this in the narrative. Because the story is told by a five-year-old, it would be challenging to convey such a complex idea through his eyes. The film adaptation, by contrast, is much more in the third person, so this would work well as a shocking final scene.
I don’t think we’ll ever see a sequel to Room, but I enjoy a one-off narrative, which is what attracts me to it. If it ever happens, though, Emma Donoghue is welcome to make contact and discuss shares of writing royalties.
Gavin Cameron 