The world is small. Room is smaller.

The 11×11 corkboard-lined shed in which Jack and his mother reside contains all of life’s basic necessities — food,

bed, clothes and a place to wash. It’s also the only part of the world Jack has ever known.

Emma Donoghue’s “Room” tells the story of a young woman’s seven-year abduction through the eyes of her five-year-old son. Their daily lives at the mercy of their captor, “Old Nick,” come alive through Jack’s confused and innocent narrative.

The push and pull in “Room” comes from a dual struggle. Ma needs to make Jack understand there is a world outside of Room. Jack is adjusting to a barrage of new information — other people exist, outer space is not directly outside of Walls, Ma is not safe. It’s Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” confined to the space of abuse, and as such raises some interesting questions.

In the novel, Ma decides to treat images on TV as “just pretend” and things in Room as the only items in existence. The metaphor can be stretched to how we present reality to not only children, but ourselves. Is a lie, even when used to hide a terrible truth, justified?

Ma also decides on revealing the truth to Jack to make him her accomplice in escaping. And so, with his world turned upside down, he has to trust his only companion and flee the only place he has ever known based only on reassurances that Room is not safe.

Donoghue has creating harrowing reading. It’s not hard to identify with both characters’ needs, and want to respect Jack’s need to cling to Room at the same time as wanting to push him toward the door.

And the novel’s division between escape and recovery is part of that same push and pull that Jack and Ma feel. When the two are liberated from their prison, the characters are still confined — Jack by the perceptions created by his incarceration, Ma by the suffering she experienced at Old Nick’s hand.

And when the shock and anxiety of the last seven years makes Ma suicidal upon their escape, it’s not hard to understand why. This reader felt herself torn between wanting to push Ma to do her duty as a mother and to protect her emotional privacy as a victim of rape and abuse.

But their newfound freedom does not only bring up the pain of their escape. It also brings up questions of how society treats victims of trauma, neglect and abuse.

The press constantly clamor for Ma and Jack’s attention. Ma’s family’s insensitively insists on her instant recovery. Jack is unable to recover as quickly as Ma would prefer.

All of these believable proddings on the part of the forces surrounding Jack, Ma and their escape speak to a rushed expectation in reactions and emotional response in people. The world Ma and Jack have reentered is almost as unfeeling as the one they have escaped, and as Ma spent most of her lifein that world, she mimics it perfectly.

“Room” is more than a horror novel of abduction. It’s a novel on perspective. Anyone who wants to understand human nature when hurt and cornered should read this book.

Just read it with the door open.