The Secret Scripture
by Sebastian Barry
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Book Reviews of The Secret Scripture
Book Review: Beautifully written book exploring the relationship between a mental patient and her psychiatrist
Summary: 4 Stars
The Secret Scripture is a novel of haunting beauty told through the alternating perspectives of Roseanne McNulty, a centenarian patient in a mental hospital near Sligo, Ireland, and Dr. William Grene, Roseanne's psychiatrist tasked with determining Roseanne's true history and mental state.
Barry's prose is beautifully meditative, infused with a delicate spirituality and optimism. Long, meandering sentences alternate with sentence fragments and questions, as if directed to an audience, and present tense mixes with past. The result is a free-flowing, lyrical style that defies concise description. Essentially, it's poetry masquerading as prose. In this characteristic excerpt, Roseanne describes her father:
"My father's happiness not only redeemed him, but drove him to stories, and keeps him even now alive in me, like a second more patient and more pleasing soul within my poor soul. Perhaps his happiness was curiously unfounded. But cannot a man make himself as happy as he can in the strange long reaches of a life? I think it is legitimate. After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it."
Both McNulty and Grene narrate their lives in this musical, untethered prose, and the effect is quite captivating.
The relationship between patient and doctor is mostly formal--lines aren't crossed, unmentionables aren't discussed, secrets aren't breached. Nevertheless, the two share an unlikely intimacy arising out of their contemplative personalities and common experiences. In large part, The Secret Scripture is an examination of the vagaries of memory. Both McNulty and Grene become less sure of their cherished memories over time as each provides evidence to refute the memories of the other. Ireland's troubled history plays a role in the story as well, particularly in Roseanne's reminisces. In the end, Barry's writing far outshines his plot, which he resolves all too neatly. Fortunately, with such stunning writing, plot is mostly beside the point.
Book Review: Dark and deep
Summary: 4 Stars
This novel was one of a stash of books I took on holiday with me recently. I have to confess that at first my heart fell down into my flip-flops as as dark upon darker elements of Ireland's history and culture paraded out across the pages. The Catholic/Protestant divide hangs a pall over events from the outset, accompanied by the degradations of poverty, cruelty to children, fear of sexuality (women's especially), institutional abuse and so on. Barry stirs them all unsparingly into a strong brew. However the style is mesmeric and the story gradually drew me in.
I had some difficulty with Roseanne, the main character's voice.She tells her story in strange, stilted language. Nobody I know speaks like this, neither older people, nor Sligo people. Maybe Barry intended to give her heightened rather than realistic speech, or maybe he meant to underline that she was writing rather than speaking much of the time. It grated on me for a while but again this evaporated into absorption into the story.
Roseanne's story is told in alternating sections: extracts from her own memoir-in-progress, tucked under floorboards away from prying eyes, and a progressive assessment of her state of mind by the doctor attending her in the institution where she has lived for a number of years. By her own admission, Roseanne's account is a struggle to remember and to understand. The doctor's assessment morphs into a kind of inquiring biography, as he becomes more and more fascinated by her story. The theme of the novel, beautifully explored, seems to be the difficulty of giving a true account of events, and how a person's life, or even a country's history, remains a mystery which can never be fully explicated.
There are some plot weaknesses, including a final, coincidential twist that I found both predictable and incredible. I think it's a pity the author didn't resist tying things up in this particular way. However, the book has many memorable scenes and gives much food for thought. It's sad, dramatic, intense, and well worth reading.
Book Review: Don't miss this fine novel from the Booker short list
Summary: 5 Stars
The interesting thing about "The Secret Scripture" isn't its subject matter. That will seem familiar: Ireland in (primarily) the 20's and 30's: poverty; civil war; small town secrets and cruelties; a cold and manipulative priest. Barry's technique of using alternating voices (the mental hospital patient, Roseanne Clear, and the staff psychiatrist, Dr. Grene) is not an unusual one either; it is the same device that Pat Barker uses in her "Regeneration" trilogy. Barry's great achievement in "The Secret Scripture" is to make the familiar seem utterly new. In part he does this through the use of conflicting narratives, the cold "official" record written by Father Gaunt and the memories secretly written down by Roseanne. In part, he does it through the way he draws lesser characters, like the McNulty mother and brothers. And he does it by the lyrical way in which he recreates the Irish landscape, as if no one had ever written about it before. The image of the Metal Man, pointing forever out to sea, is an indelible metaphor for the story of Roseanne Clear. I disagree with many of the assessments of this novel in other reviews. For some the ending is too melodramatic, the narrator too unreliable, the plot too unconvincing. The memories of Roseanne Clear are reliable, convincing and compelling precisely because of her situtation. She's been locked away from the rest of the world for decades, with nothing to contemplate except the things that have happened to her. Her memory is undimmed because the events of ordinary life have not gotten in the way. It is as if she were gazing down through a clear pool at the same patch of sea floor; so well does she know it that she can see it in the most minute detail. You will not be disappointed by this novel. Adiga's "The White Tiger" won the Booker prize, but this novel is equally good.Book Review: Faux-literary and Unbelievable
Summary: 2 Stars
I hate to be the first reviewer to throw water on this Booker-shortlisted novel, but so it goes.
This novel is the literary equivalent of Oscar-bait, those middle-to-high-brow movies that come around in December and display solid acting and deep characters yet are not that challenging or complicated. Perhaps we could call this Booker-bait.
Barry is clearly an accomplished writer and a master at poetic prose. The Secret Scripture drips with poetic little aphorisms and bon mots that make the reader admire the writer's craft. But the plot line develops rather leisurely and when the reader is done admiring the wordsmithing, there is not much else to admire.
For me, the biggest impediment to enjoying the novel was its overall structure. Barry presents the novel as a series of diary entries, but I simply couldn't swallow the idea. No one writes such epic diary entries, or conveniently includes background information in their personal notebooks. The reader would have been much better served with a typical omniscient narrator than this hackneyed epistolary structure. (The Booker winner, The White Tiger: A Novel (Man Booker Prize), also has a simply unbelievable structure, but since that book is a farce, the reader can let it go. The Secret Scripture takes itself much too seriously to simply move on from this flaw.)
Don't be disuaded from reading this book if you enjoy impressive literary language, beautifully painted settings, and psychological depth. But if after 50 pages you want to throw the book against the wall, don't say I didn't warn you that its substantial flaws will continue to irritate until the end.
Book Review: Redemption
Summary: 4 Stars
There are tragedies flung at us by the gods such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Then there are those tragedies visited upon us by ourselves. This is a tale of the latter.
In dark and gorgeous language Barry tells the story of an old woman, Roseanne McNulty. From childhood Roseanne was set on a path that inexorably led her to stray outside the strict conventions of 1940s Ireland. Unwittingly, she becomes the victim of a merciless society bent on rigid conformity and determined to exact its revenge on those who flout its dictates. For those whose picture of Ireland in the "old days" is one of rose-covered thatched cottages, the revelation that so much pain resided behind the walls of many of those dwellings may come as an unpleasant surprise. But those of us who have lived in Ireland and particularly have witnessed its relatively recent confrontation with so many of the dark secrets of its past, Roseanne's tale has the gut-wrenching but undeniable claim of authenticity.
Barry summons the voice of Roseanne perfectly. As the narrative gradually shifts from Roseanne to the psychiatrist, Dr. Grene, who has tasked himself with the mission to discover the elusive truth about Roseanne's past, Barry also captures Grene and his mid-life turbulences beautifully. This is not a plot-driven novel which is just as well: my only complaint is that I found the plot, such as it is, to require some hard work by the reader in suspending disbelief. But it is a minor matter in a book that concerns itself with issues such as history, mercy and the very nature of truth. In the end, Barry's characters eloquently present the argument that redemption is indeed possible.
I stongly recommend this book.