Book review: A room called earth
I don’t want to read books if they aren’t like this one.
Ever since I finished it, I’ve been dithering about what to start next, I halfheartedly gave a short story collection a go and cast it aside after one instalment. I want to start this again immediately.
I want to have never read it, that way I could be bewitched by it afresh.
I have felt like this before, namely at the end of The Amber Spyglass. I’ve felt pangs of grief about having to leave Middle Earth and return to my own (shabbier) version of it. But, those trilogies have something in common: they are epic quest narratives, they span hundreds of pages, multiple realms and have characters I watched grow up contained within their volumes. A Room Called Earth has nothing in common with these stories.
It is set over one night; there is no cataclysmic event that brings disequilibrium that we are desperate to see a resolution of. The main character is not doing anything obviously difficult, they are not situated as an underdog, their life is not scarily relatable, and, the other characters don’t even propel the narrative on in a way that might allow us to identify predictable story arcs and find comfort in that.
I didn’t feel sure at any point about what was going to happen next, and sometimes that was a little uneasy, because it brought out trepidation in me. But, mostly, it was delicious. Madeleine Ryan shows no interest in giving cosy nods to other genres, or hand holding us through the ‘type‘ of story this is. There are no break-neck narrative turns, but it doesn’t drift in an inevitable direction either, unless you count the fact that the night had to end.
I remember studying Drama at high school and learning about Aristotelian Unities, the theory of a prescriptive dramatic tragedy where 3 things are fixed: a tragedy should have one principal action; the action should take place over a 24 hour period; the tragedy should unfold in a single physical location. I also remember being gripped by films like 12 Angry Men and Panic Room, where nearly all the action occurs in one claustrophobic setting. A Room Called Earth doesn’t follow any of these conventions, but it leans on them to impressive effect.
The story starts in the protagonist’s home and then transitions into the environments they move between. If it was a film, it would be shot in a single take with a camera tracking in real time, no fade outs, no fast forwards. There’s something very intimate about the fact we never leave her, and that things like needing to eat and use the toilet are included.
New environments cause new factors to need to be weighed in the protagonist’s mind, and following those meticulous calculations and being privy to the impact they have on her, deepens the intimacy we feel. For a lot of the book, she is seemingly alone with her thoughts, except we are there listening to them, and it’s startling at points to feel part of a hurricane when the scene is seemingly mundane and predictable. But I want to choose her hurricanes again and again. I want her to choose them too, rather than act in a way that isn’t natural for her.
Throughout this book, we see the protagonist acknowledge that there are rules of engagement when interacting with others, pursuing romance, or trying to keep yourself safe. We listen to the reasons she eschews the rules at some points and conforms at others. I have no idea what Ryan’s motive was when writing this book, but by the end, I found myself more enamoured by the protagonist’s internal world than the one of community she moved within and wanted to explore.
As an extrovert, I don’t think any other book has ever made me feel this way, or presented such a beautiful representation of wholeness (without the character also contributing to some hugely significant act for humanity by virtue of being true to themselves). I want to be present in my own skin like this character, and A Room Called Earth made that seem like a choice I should consider making.
Examples of Ryan’s style:
“We’ve given our power over to the material world because it seems more quantifiable and manageable. Our conversations start there, and our conclusions about the world end there. The infinite, miraculous, mysterious nature of who and what we are has become a bit tedious... Let’s chat about the location where we all ‘found ourselves’ as distinct from what we found or the process of finding it”
“I’ve noticed that people who focus very intently on their bodies are largely unfulfilled and listless. Their physical existence has become a trap, and they radiate a sense of boredom so potent that it has the capacity to make life seem futile for the rest of us.”
