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Secret Scripture, The - on Playaway

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1 star:		(5)

 

 

In his distinctly Irish novel, set in County Sligo and Roscommon, a mental institution, a perhaps century old woman, Roseanne Cleary McNulty, pens a diary of her long life, which she hides in her room under the floorboards. Retrieving the notebook only when it's safe, Roseanne reveals a deeply loving relationship with a father who dies far too young and a mother who withdraws over time into the solitude of a troubled mind. Presbyterians, the Cleary's are an anomaly in Catholic Sligo, Joe Cleary dominating the landscape of his daughter's formative years. Reeling from his death and her mother's complete disinterest in the world around her, Roseanne is a naïve young woman, unprepared for what awaits, falling quickly in love with Tom McNulty. Tom and his brothers, and their domineering mother are the faces of the stubborn, loyal Irish rebels who spend their years fighting for independence, closing ranks against outsiders.

Much at work in Roseanne's life is a priest, Father Gaunt, a man invested in his own arrogance and misogyny, who visits his hatred and mistrust of women on the innocent Roseanne. It is through Gaunt's efforts that Roseanne's marriage to Tom is ruined, no one of consequence to protect the girl, left staggering at the blows fate has dealt. Having been institutionalized for over half her life at the time she writes her memoirs, the remarkable thing about this character, as so beautifully rendered by Barry, is her inherent generosity of spirit and disinclination to harsh judgment of those who have wronged her. And while Roseanne is writing of her father and her marriage, Dr. Grene is charged with determining the future placement of his patient, Roscommon soon to be vacated and completely demolished. Unwilling to interrogate a woman whose face still carries the remnants of her exceptional beauty, Grene becomes fascinated by the small details he uncovers, hints that the truth may differ from Roseanne's recollection of her past.

Alternating these two stories (Dr. Grene beset by a terrible personal loss while investigating Roseanne's life), the author reveals an Ireland in turmoil, a beautiful woman caught up in a family enacting their part of that troubled history, cast out by the venality of a priest. It is Roseanne's great tragedy that her striking beauty is wielded as a sword to annihilate her world, her fond recollections of father and husband- at least for a time- the only buffer against the cruelty of the world. Roseanne's story is important because it is her voice, among many, that speaks to the plight of women ill-used by a hypocritically moral society and a Catholic church that has the power to ruin a life with one harsh judgment. Barry delivers an extraordinarily dear character in Roseanne and an empathetic doctor in Grene, setting the stage for a denouement that weaves these two lives intimately together, each in need of solace: "There is something greater than judgment. I think it is called mercy." Luan Gaines/ 2008.

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.

Roseanne Clear is an ancient woman living in an Irish asylum to which she was committed "for social reasons" after she bore an out-of-wedlock child. She has been a resident for so long that no one knows how old she really is or exactly what the circumstances of her commitment were. The "secret scripture" of the title is Roseanne's narrative of her life, written on scraps with a pilfered pen and hidden under a loose floorboard. At the same time her story is unfolding, the psychiaitrist who heads the institution is slowly putting together a competing narrative of Roseanne's life. The asylum is closing -- Ireland's version of de-institutionalization -- and the terms of Roseanne's commitment must legally determine where she'll be placed next.

In the end, the two narratives come together in a wholly surprising way, but not before surveying Ireland's brutal and complicated history of political and sectarian violence from the establishment of the Free State up to the present. The author turns a particularly cold eye on the devastating grip that the Roman Catholic Church held on Irish society and politics for the better part of the 20th century. Although I've cited its political and historical scope, the novel tells its story in wholly personal terms. At various points the novel is funny, magically poetic, tragic -- and often all three: a great read.

Once you've read "The Secret Scripture," go on to read "The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty" -- a prequel, sort of, of this novel.

ebastian Barry has done it again. I love his work and this one is no exception. I couldn't even talk after I finished this book (which is rare...I always have something to say, just ask my husband!), and I was a wee bit choked up. So...you may want to have a tissue at the ready. I read this in just about 3 hours and couldn't stop reading it except to fetch cookies I was baking out of the oven every 12 minutes. A beautiful book and one that really made me a bit angry when I think about it...the treatment of this young woman by a Catholic priest was just sad.

Basic plot: Roseanne Clear McNulty is probably a hundred years old, and lives in a mental institution which is about to be torn down. She is being assessed by the head of the place, a Dr. Grene, who has to decide if she's able to make it on her own on the outside. She in turn, has been writing a record of her life and keeps the thing hidden in her room under the floorboard. In this diary she tells of not only her life, but indirectly of the politics and troubles of Ireland. She loses her father at a young age, has a troubled mother, and has to take on life completely unprepared. Her life is ultimately ruined (I won't say how) by an Irish priest named Father Gaunt -- who obviously hates & mistrusts women and takes it upon himself to turn her life completely upside down at a time when she was happy. At that time, the priests of the church wielded a lot of power, so much so that they held the lives of people in their hands. But ... no matter how badly things were for Roseanne, and although her memory may fail her at times, she tries so hard above all else to be fair in her memories ...even to those who were less than kind to her. But Roseanne's story is one of two in this book -- Dr. Grene has his own demons with which he must grapple.

An amazing story; it's easy to see why Sebastian Barry's work keeps getting nominated for literary awards. He's an incredible writer, and his glimpses into Ireland's upheavals and the human costs of the troubled times are staples in his books. I can most highly recommend this book to anyone familiar with Barry's writing, or to anyone interested in Irish fiction, or to those who want to put a human face on Ireland's suffering, or to anyone interested in the (as the book cover blurb puts it) "stranglehold" of the Catholic Church on the Irish people. Although maybe a tad melodramatic toward the end (hence the hanky) I loved this book and I won't soon forget it.

So many novels these days begin well, and then give the impression that the author is thoughtlessly coasting. This book is pure poetry, superbly written, and gripping throughout. An excellent read. A pity that there are no other works by this author on Kindle!

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.

Before she died, my 98 year old grandmother, sinking into the bog of dementia, said to me: Everyone sees this ancient skin, wrinkled, my fingers bent and swollen, my hair falling to nothing, but I am a girl inside this skin. I feel exactly the same in my mind and my heart as I did at twenty.

I never forgot it, and now that my time is coming and my own skin thinning, I understand exactly what she meant.

This novel about the enduring power of the human spirit in the face of unrelenting tragedy and betrayal, struck me to the heart. I found it incredibly moving and was riveted to the page.

There is something about being a survivor that wounds you, takes away whole pieces of you, but despite the pain and horror, makes each small aspect of life a triumph. For Rosanne, it was the daffoldils and the roses, and the sunlight on her window pane, for others, a sunset, the pleasure of an ice cream cone in summer, the smell of just cut grass. I saw a fox in the dark night when I was driving through the village last week; it had another small animal in its mouth, trotting merrily past the pavement in front of me. I had never seen a fox before. I felt so lucky, so deliriously happy, to have seen it, as Rosanne felt with the new opening daffoldils from her window in the assylum.

To see this beauty and feel this intense pleasure in ordinary things is a triumph over the brutality and ugliness that living in society can bring, as is the ability to retain one's humanity - kindness, compassion, understanding, empathy. To see the world in a grain of sand....

Barry's writing is like wild strawberries bursting in your mouth, each sentence is to be savoured, and the poetry and cadence of the Irish way of speaking, whether it is the Gaelic or in English is so beautifully, so powerfully, so accurately given to us to see and hear and take away to keep. I remember listening to the Irish aunts and uncles I knew as a child, thinking that their conversation was like poetry. And it was.

I saw a few negative reviews as well as the many positive ones, and it may be that in the age of television and high speed internet, that something like this that takes its time to unfold and reveal its mysteries, like Rosanne's daffolils, can seem to some as frustratingly slow. I found the pace perfect for the unravelling of Rosanne's life story, that grew more gripping each time I turned the page.

I feel grateful to the author for having written it, and for the enriching experience of having read it.

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.

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.

With the exception of my re-reading J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, The Secret Scripture was the best book I read in 2008. I couldn't put it down. A must-have for your library.