room - Emma Donoghue

How bizarre was this book - i mean, not only that it was written from the point of view of Jack, Mr Five, a wee boy that has never seen anything else, lived anywhere else but in 'room'. His all world is room, the objects in it, Ma, and old Nick (nasty Nick ?). Everything else is TV.
And as we know, TV is not real.
But that wasn't the most bizarre. The weirdest thing is to get into his shoes socks, into his head, and look at the world as it would appear if we suddenly encountered it at five, being educated and literate, but totally ignorant, sensorially naive.
The weirdest thing is to feel for that boy, to understand and agree that life in room is so much safer, so less scary, so much more appealing in a way, that being 'scave' [scared and brave], that getting out of your comfort zone day after day is so hard sometimes. Bizarrely, life in the confinement of room doesn't seem so awful after all.
Freedom is scary, freedom hurts, crawling into wardrobe seem like the best option, if best is safest.
So, if Dora had a map to go through life, i guess the 2 first steps would be: safe (room), then scave (escape, encounter the unknown, step out). What comes next is probably... a middle way ? I don't know, i'd need to ask Dora, because since some TV is real after all, maybe she is too !

Note for later: it will be interesting to see whether the narration ages - there is a whole lot of references to current pop culture - how will it feel in 10 years time ?