Book review

Sebastian Barry: The Secret Scripture

“Sligo made me and Sligo undid me, but then I should have given up much sooner than I did being made or undone by human towns and looked to myself alone. The terror and the hurt in my story happened because when I was young I thought others were the authors of my fortune or misfortune; I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves.”

Roseanne is the author of herself. She has been a patient in the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital since 1957, before that in Sligo. Now she is a hundred years old, and the hospital is due for closure. Dr. Grene must assess her to see where she is to go; this is the time of Thatcher’s policy to return as many patients as possible to ‘care in the community’ (or the lack of it). The narrative interweaves Roseanne’s secret story of her own life that she keeps hidden under a loose floorboard in her room with extracts from Dr Grene’s Commonplace Book, where he notes his own grief and self-recrimination on the death of his wife. Slowly a picture is built up of the horror and cruelty of the years of Civil War between rival factions fighting for their particular idea of independence and republicanism in Ireland of the Twenties.

Roseanne is a woman and a Presbyterian, and therefore doubly disadvantaged in the fight to have her side of history told. And the question of history, and who owns it, whose version is the ruling one, what goes down in the history books is really the secret subject of this powerful, haunting novel. The language is poetic without being precious, the two different voices are beautifully rendered, and the drive to read on and discover Roseanne’s true story is irresistible. When this won the Booker prize last year, the judges said they had awarded it the prize in spite of misgivings about its flaws, in particular they criticized the rather too unlikely secret that is revealed towards the end. But I didn’t feel this detracted from what is, after all, a story, and to be read as a story and not as a realistic biography of a real woman. Neither would I want to see Roseanne as an allegory for Ireland, that would also be wrong: it is that wonderful thing, a work of art which allows Roseanne to be more than one thing at the same time. She is real and yet a symbol of the repression and damage done to women, to the innocent, by priests, by fanatics, by the forces of war let loose on a community that is pitched neighbour against neighbour. Very moving.