The Secret Scripture

Book Review

Sebastian Barry

The Secret Scripture is Sebastian Barry's fourth novel, and follows on the heels of A Long Long Way, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005. It, too, is a novel of remarkable assurance and pathos, and reveals a novelist in command of his powers of insight and storytelling.

The story is told through two narrative strands. In the first, Roseanne McNulty, almost one hundred years old and an inmate of Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital , records the story of her life on bits of paper she found in a supply closet. She hoards her papers and illicit pen under a loose floorboard in her room.

The second narrative strand is written by Dr. Grene, a psychiatrist for Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital . A new facility is being built, and Dr. Grene is required to assess all of his patients to determine if any of them are fit to return to society.

Roseanne McNulty grew up as one of the most beautiful girls her small town of Sligo , Ireland , had ever seen. Her memories include those of her larger-than-life, operetta-singing, motorcycle-driving father, a man who seemed more suited to the stage than the graveyard where he worked as a keeper.

Roseanne's memories are intertwined with the story of an Ireland struggling to come to terms with violent conflict between neighbors. When some lads were caught in a skirmish with some Free Staters in a mountain bog outside of town, they brought a dead brother to Roseanne's father to provide a proper Christian burial. Roseanne was visiting her father at the cemetery at the time, and was sent for the town's Catholic priest, Father Gaunt, to perform the last rites. When members of the new military, “the irregulars,” burst into the small room in the graveyard and threatened Roseanne, her father, and the priest with gunfire, the priest blamed Roseanne's father. The religious and political strife affecting Ireland was a backdrop, not only to Sligo , but also to all of Roseanne's recollections.

Not long after the incident at the graveyard, at the instigation of Father Gaunt, Roseanne's father lost his post and was forced to take up the career of town rat catcher. After that, Roseanne and her mother had to struggle to make ends meet. Life was never the same again. Roseanne summed up her father's fate in these words:

“There are things that move at a human pace before our eyes, but other things move in arcs so great they are as good as invisible. The baby sees a star winking in the dark night window, and puts out his hand to hold it. So my father struggled to grasp things that were in truth far beyond his reach, and indeed when they showed their lights were already old and done.”

After Roseanne's father dies, her mother sinks irrevocably deeper into mental illness, and Roseanne must find a way to support the two of them. Father Gaunt, that great benefactor of her family, informs Roseanne that she should marry an obese widower in his fifties, a man who soon afterwards attempts to force himself on her. Roseanne flatly refuses to obey the priest, and instead takes a job in a café in town, eventually marrying a dashing young man in a band at the town's beachside dance hall, Tom McNulty.

Roseanne and Tom were in love, but the forces that tragically separated them were fueled by the prejudice and pigheadedness of the times. To reveal any more would ruin the plot of this novel, but it can be said that the events that led to Roseanne's incarceration in Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital were infuriating and should never have happened.

The character of Roseanne is exquisitely drawn. She remembers her past with girlish amazement, but never loses the wisdom and weight of her years. She readily admits that she is perhaps an unreliable narrator, and her story is punctuated with sentences that trail off, or corrections made to details previously uttered.

What makes Roseanne so likeable, and therefore believable, is her irrepressible will to live, to survive despite all of the adversities she has faced. She addresses the reader directly in these moments of sustained hope, even though she acknowledges that she is not sure if there will even be a reader of her pages, or who that reader might be.

“I think all we can offer heaven is human honesty. I mean, at the gates of St. Peter. Hopefully it might be like salt to kingdoms without salt, spices to dark Northern countries. A few grams in the bag of the soul, offered as we seek entry. What heavenly honesty is like I cannot say. But I say this to steel myself to my task.

I thought once that beauty was my best possession. Perhaps in heaven it might have been. But in these earthly fields it was not.

To be alone, but to be pierced through with a kingly joy, now and then, as I believe I am, is a great possession indeed. As I sit here at this table marked and scored by a dozen generations maybe of inmates, patients, angels, whatever we are, I must report to you this sensation of some gold essence striking into me, blood deep. Not contentment, but a prayer as wild and dangerous as a lion's roar.

I tell you this, you.

Dear reader. God keep you, God keep you.”

Roseanne's voice is wild, spiritual, simple, and trusting. Barry has written a strong character that shines through the pages of his story.

Dr. Grene's story is more subdued, and at first contains merely clinical notes of his sessions with Roseanne. Gradually, as his personal life begins to fall apart, he leans on her as more of a friend, and finds that his sessions with her force him to reconsider his own life.

As his interest in Roseanne's case grows, Dr. Grene seeks out her case records, and finds a document written by the local priest in Sligo , full of details that greatly contrast Roseanne's tale. In Father Gaunt's version, for example, Roseanne's father was in collusion with the young men who brought a dead body to the cemetery, asking for last rites and a Christian burial. A memory of Roseanne's in which her father demonstrated to her the difference between dropping a bag of feathers and mason's hammers from a high tower is altered and painted as a threat to drop the hammers on Roseanne's head. Despite the discrepancies, the reader is indulgent towards Roseanne, and it is to Barry's credit that he is able to overcome questions of her narrative reliability with her characterization.

As is the case in most books with twin narratives, the two strands come together at the end of the novel in surprising and satisfying (if perhaps unlikely) ways. The running theme of redemption plays out in the lives of both Roseanne and Dr. Grene. This breathes new life into one of the statements Roseanne makes at the beginning of her testimony of herself:

“Those we love, those essential beings, are removed from us at the will of the Almighty, or the devils that usurp him. It is as if a huge lump of lead were lain over the soul, such deaths, and where that soul was previously weightless, now is a secret and ruinous burden at the very heart of us.”

Barry's writing is eloquent and full of empathy for both of his main characters. He has surprising turns of phrase, like the black river that “if it had no grace for mortal beings, it did for swans…”

The Secret Scripture is a hauntingly beautiful telling of two people caught in time, searching for redemption in their different ways, but also of an Ireland caught in its past and striving for its future. It is deserving of a spot on the 2008 Man Booker Prize shortlist.