Even though her novel Room, about an abducted 5-year-old boy and his mother confined to a single room, is short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, author Emma Donoghue doesn’t feel right about placing a wager, at the 3-to-1 odds that British bookmakers have placed on her, to capture one of the top prizes in the literary world.
“No, I’m far too superstitious to do that. I think The Gods would immediately smite me. Some friends of mine have, but I haven’t,” says Donoghue, who was The University of Western Ontario’s writer-in-residence in the 1999-2000 school year.
“I was actually thinking of betting on one of the others so I’d have something to celebrate anyway.” She finds humour in the fact novelists have become part of gambling culture. “It’s hilarious, isn’t it? The Booker is sort of the point where literature becomes sport.”
On Oct. 12, Irish-Canadian writer and Londoner Donoghue and her partner Chris Roulston, associate professor of Women’s Studies, Feminist Research and French at Western, will be dressed to the nines. The black tie, Academy Awards-style Booker Prize night at the Guildhall in London, England, is a must-attend for short-listed authors. “It’s like the Oscars for novelists. I’ve never had my name in the same sentence as the Man Booker Prize before. They have a seriously glamorous ceremony. Nobody knows who wins it until they announce it.”
Being a fair competitor and genuinely interested reader, she is reading the complete long list of Man Booker Prize nominees. “I’m just reading the Peter Carey novel (Parrot and Oliver in America) now. It’s wonderful. I have no particular expectations of winning this thing. They’re all wonderful writers.”
In the Short List of six authors, Donoghue, with dual Irish and Canadian citizenship, feels honoured to have two countries claim her as their own. “I can’t believe I’m the only Canadian. It’s thrilling for this immigrant girl to be in any sense representing Canada … in Ireland they’re claiming me as Irish as well.”
The competition is truly international. The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland or Zimbabwe. The last Canadian to win the Booker was Yann Martel for Life of Pi in 2002. Past winners also include Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje.
A main theme of Room is “the examination of parental love from the point of view of a 5-year-old.” Her son Finn was 5 when she wrote it. He’s now 6. She also has a daughter, Una, 3.
Having written from various perspectives in past novels, such as the point of view of a male English earl, the author wasn’t particularly intimidated by writing in the voice of a child. “Aristocrats are far stranger to me than children are … you have to do a lot preparatory work before you’re able to get into their head. Once you’re in their head, once you figure out how they speak, then you go for it.”
In this case, she had Finn close at hand and was “able to listen very close to him and his language, have a very good instinct about the kinds of things he’d be interested in and the kind of things he would notice.”
Although, the character Jack in the book is very different from Donoghue’s son. “My son was flying all over the world before his first birthday so he’s sort of socially sophisticated but kind of clumsy. But Jack in the book is carefully blowing egg out of each eggshell. But they share a certain kind of bumptious 5-year-old boy energy. So it was absolutely crucial to have my kids around when I was writing it.”
Unlike the late John Fowles’ novel, The Collector (1963), which gives the reader insight into the abductor’s mind, Donoghue wanted to offer a different perspective.
“Since John Fowles’ novel there’s been such elaborate literature on the psychopath in literature … I was much more interested in the survivors, in the power of normality to overcome extraordinary evil.”
Although “Emma Donoghue” sounds like the perfect writer’s name, the author thinks otherwise. “I’ve always found it very pedestrian. Emma to me is too common a name. I know it has literary antecedents but it’s very, very common and Donoghue is a bog standard Irish name.”
Even so, when posed with the question of whether she was predestined to be a writer, Donoghue feels she’s following a path. “It has certainly felt like this was what I was put on the Earth to do. I don’t have any other skills that anyone would pay money for.”
Being writer-in-residence at Western was a great opportunity for her to meet a “cross-section of Ontarians,” not only university students but interested people from far afield consulted her about writing.
Any advice to young writers for seeing through to completion ideas for novels? “It’s a bit of a cliché but rewrite. My first novel, Stirfry, I wrote seven times. Seven drafts. It got a little bit better each time. Even though I was starting to get sick of it, it still made the book better. I started writing it when I was 19 and I think it was published when I was about 24.”
Modest as she is, Donoghue celebrated the news of being named to the Booker Short List by going to the bakery and buying a peach pie.
