Room, Emma Donoghue

It's Jack's birthday, and he's excited about turning five. He lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real - only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside...

Told through the eyes of a five-year-old boy, at first Room seems to be a quirky family story about a family of mother and son. Their world is tiny, but to Jack, that's the way the world is. There's real, which is Room and everything in it, and then there's TV.

And then there's Old Nick, who is not Room and not TV. Upon the introduction of Old Nick, the perspective shifts and we discover what Jack hasn't realised: Room is a prison, and Ma is a young girl abducted and held captive in a soundproof shed. Once you realise this, you can't help but think of these real-life cases reported on the news that once uncovered were impossible to avoid, splashed all over the papers, monstrous crimes that must be exposed, and at the same time you step back to try to grant the victims privacy. With such subject matter, Room could so easily be unreadable, with an author trying to imagine the unimagineable, fictionalising a scenario that to its survivors were all too real for so many years, making the book feel intrusive or simply downright depressing. Donoghue manages to avoid this trap by using Jack, not Ma, as the protagonist, and for whom there is nothing sensational about his lifestyle - this is just the world.

Jack is a very bright child, yet he is only a child and he can only describe the world as he sees it. Through his limited vocabulary, describing what to him are the mundane realities of life, we get to understand the true horror Ma is concealing from him. As they plan their Great Escape I found myself getting very frustrated with Jack for his reluctance to leave and then his homesickness for Room and for saying or doing things that upset Ma, his mother who has been through so much trauma trying to protect him. But he is only five and this is the only world he knows.

The driving force of Room which keeps it from being morbid or mawkish is the love Ma has for her son, and her courage in trying to bring him up to the best of her ability, making a routine and refusing to give up. Perhaps in places the story seems to be too easily resolved, but you know it will never be easy for Ma and Jack to adjust to the outside world - a world which until a few weeks ago Jack didn't even know existed. Jack is still young, still learning, but I suspected it would take a long time for Ma to recover from seven years of imprisonment. Her love for Jack is consistantly shown to be the thing that helped her survive.

Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen

I first attempted to read Jane Eyre when I was about twelve or thirteen, having seen a friend rehearsing a scene from a play of it, the part set at Lowood School. Being very much into school stories at the time, I revised my opinion of "Classics" which I had hitherto dismissed as dull and not for the likes of me. "Grown-up books." I started Jane Eyre three times during my teens, each time not getting much further than Jane leaving school and starting her life as a governess. (This is relevant, honest.) The fourth time, I determined to read to the end, and succeeded, but was unimpressed by the romance part, and the gothic atmosphere and the weirdness passed me by completely. I was glad to have got to the end, and decided that I wouldn't bother with this classic stuff.

That didn't last, of course. Perhaps it was seeing part of Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility with my Mum on TV, and actually quite enjoying it. I still wasn't sure I wanted to read all the slushy stuff, however. I asked Mum for her recommendation of which Jane Austen I should start with, and she quite determinedly said that Northanger Abbey was the one for me. Not only do I share a first name with the heroine (though Miss Morland misspells hers) but Catherine seemed the most like me, as far as Mum was concerned. As she put it, "Catherine is always reading gothic novels and lets her imagination run away with her, thinking they're real." Why should that make her think of me, I don't know!

But anyway, I eventually gave Northanger a try, and enjoyed it a lot, though there was the slushy stuff. Being my introduction to Austen, I was pleased to discover that not only was it funny in places, but that I got the humour. And it was good to have a likeable, three-dimensional romantic hero, who, yes, can be a bit pompous but mainly light-hearted and teasing.

Northanger Abbey famously parodies the Gothic fiction genre, and in particular a novel called The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. I read that last year, and not only did it help me to appreciate Northanger all the more. And, having read Northanger Abbey, I could read the somewhat melodramatic and waffly Udolpho with a smirk on my face, to see the original old, creaking buildings with their long passages, mysterious servants and secret papers hidden in secret nooks and crannies. Udolpho's heroine is a virtuous, constantly-swooning orphan, its villain a tyrannical, money-grabbing uncle who does indeed torment and lock up his wife.

Austen opens the novel with a description of the many ways in which Catherine would not be classed as a conventional heroine: she comes from a normal, happy family without any tyrants in it, as a child she is a plain, scrawny tomboy, and she has more interest in playing ball games and climbing than engaging in embroidery and other sedate, feminine pursuits - even nursing sick birdies back to health! Austen's narrator comes in every so often to comment on the way the story is progressing, and how Catherine or events defy the expectations of the gothic genre. Catherine is exposed as having let her imagination run away with her when it comes to thinking that General Tilney is capable of horrors.

Henry Tilney acts as Austen's mouthpiece when it comes to the other extreme of Catherine's naivity - that (apart from her imaginings about General Tilney) she will believe only the best of people. Her ignorance when watching the flirtation between her friend Isabella and Tilney's brother is frustrating but heartwarming. Catherine is so honest and open herself that she simply can't see how anyone can be anything else. This incident is described as through Catherine's eyes, without any interjections from Austen's narrator. The reader witnesses the same scene as Catherine, yet how glaringly obvious the affair is, without any comment from the omnipotent outsider!

Though Austen satirises the gothic novel, it seems to be an affectionate attack. It is evident that she is very familiar with the books she pokes fun at, referring to specific scenes from Udolpho and other novels in the genre. Her more scathing criticism through the book is for hypocrisy - the hypocrisy of certain people found in town, who don't care a button about marrying for money, just so long as the person they intend to marry for love happen to have lots of it. It also attacks hypocrisy in literature: those heroines of novels who wouldn't dream of reading the type of literature that they star in.

And in the end, Catherine is let off the hook to a certain extent. True, General Tilney is not a murderer, but there is enough in him that recalls to mind the evil Montoni of Udolpho. Austen allows Catherine to conclude in her own melodramatic way that "in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character or magnified his cruelty." After all, Catherine's instincts were, if wrong in the details, correct in identifying somebody who was not what he seemed.

Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome

I encountered Swallows and Amazons for the first time when I was about seven. Every night, my mum would read a chapter - or two or three if we could coax her - to me, my sister and my dad who was just as keen to listen in. I remember sitting on the big red floor cushion eager to hear the next doings of the Walker and Blackett children in the Lake District, back in the innocent days of the 1920s.

Compared with today's children's fiction, or even the later Enid Blyton adventures, Ransome's books seem fairly tame and slow. But what they manage to capture is the sheer joy of being a child playing make-believe. The Swallows and Amazons don't need kidnappers, castles or dungeons - all they need is their imagination and encouragement to use it (and a boat, some tents, etc - but that comes under the heading of "encouragement" in my book.)

Swallows and Amazons is fantasy-fulfilment to a child who played make-believe in her back garden in the early 1990s. All very well pretending one's bicycle is a ship, and a clothes-horse covered in a blanket is a tent - but the Swallows and the Amazons had real boats, a real camp, a real campfire. (I had to make do with a pile of twigs, not being allowed to use matches.) Ransome captures the child's voice and imagination without talking down. Corned-beef sandwiches become pemmican. Ginger beer becomes grog. (There is a marvellous moment, when, shopping for rope and groceries - sorry - provisions - John forgets himself and asks the grocer for four bottles of grog, before being rescued by his sister Susan.) The nearest town (Bowness-on-Windermere?) is known only as Rio. And the great thing is, the parents play along. The telegram of permission from Commander Walker, their father, reads "BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON'T DROWN." And when their mother comes to call when Titty is playing Robinson Crusoe, minding the island all alone, she is quite content to be Man Friday.

But at the edge of their world of make-believe are hints that they are, after all, still children. Their freedom has limits. There is an awful moment of mother being more disappointed than angry after the Swallows' sailing-at-night escapade. As I return to the page as an adult, looking for the quote, I almost miss it. Mother's reaction is very understated - she is jolly decent for a grown-up - but you feel it as a child when she asks John, "Don't you think that was very nearly like being duffers?" On a lighter note, the ferocious Captain Nancy Blackett is caused to surrender to the Swallows, after they captured the Amazon, because of a dread of being late for breakfast.