Despite her name, Roseanne Clear is hardly transparent. A wary reticence and sincere befuddlement tend to muddy her conversations with Dr. William Grene, senior psychiatrist at Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, whose commonplace journal renders him a co-narrator of The Secret Scripture. Their interaction, complete with its silences, works its way into their respective self-searching accounts of life, forming the loose catechism of the novel … Circumstances require that the doctor and his patient play cat and mouse. He is intent on assessing her competence and discovering her history, while she dissembles self-protectively, ‘a foul and utter lie being the best answer’ when he asks about the circumstances of her admittance … Many angelic references and much religious imagery are to be found here (slaughtered lambs, for example), but at the root of it all is the lambent quality of experience, not religion per se. Much of the real joy of reading Barry is in the bobbing freshet of his language.
Roseanne tells the story of how she, once a great beauty, came to be put in the home. Dr. Grene describes his own private anguish, the break-up of his marriage over his single infidelity, and his wife’s death, interspersed with his notes on Roseanne’s case. At first his story pales next to Roseanne’s, with all its elements of passion, murder and betrayal, and there are times in the book when it seems doubtful that these two apparently distinct narratives can ever resolve themselves into a whole novel. But not to worry ... These lives are reimagined in language of surpassing beauty.
Roseanne's voice is urgent, colloquial, strange, a song of insinuations, non-sequiturs and self-corrections. It sifts the troubled memories it purports to be organising while always keeping faith with the impossibility of the task. Shards of stories intrude; fragments of lost narratives jostle. Half-forgotten quotations and scraps of ancient folklore blow around her mind like old leaves. Is she chronicler or creator? How much is reliable? … Dr Grene is both detector and hider of truths, and he finds himself in paradoxical reversal with his baffling patient, speaking to her of his own losses and hurts. But the book is arranged and imagined with immense tact, so that it is never unbalanced by its ironies … As often in Barry's work, Irish history is a malignant omnipresence, its antediluvian hatreds and innumerable betrayals forming not so much a backdrop as a toxic sludge through which the characters must wade, as best they can.
The Secret Scripture reads, at times, like a play utilizing the familiar device of patient and psychiatrist, and one wonders if Barry didn’t first consider the material as a drama. The novel, perhaps a tad more complex than it needs to be, is composed of three contrapuntal parts: Roseanne’s memories, Dr. Grene’s observations, and their conversations … The subjective nature of memory and how it shapes our perception of the past are two of Barry’s major themes … Sebastian Barry’s achievement is unlike that of any other modern Western writer, a tapestry of interrelated works in different mediums woven from strands of his past and that of his country. The Secret Scripture fits seamlessly into a vision that seeks to restore with language that which has been taken away by history.
Roseanne appeared briefly, but crucially, in a previous Barry novel, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty. Now almost 100 years old and incarcerated in a dilapidated mental hospital in rural Ireland for almost seven decades, she is writing her story secretly, on stolen paper that she hides under a floorboard … She is surely telling the truth — as she knows it — and we are immediately drawn into her story, enthralled by wistful, lyrical reflections that carry darker intimations … The diffident Dr. Grene has his own secrets — an infidelity, an unhappy marriage — which leach into the notes he keeps of Roseanne’s case and which gradually reveal his life to be a more commonplace tragedy than hers. Both patient and doctor have, in a sense, grown old together.
For much of the novel, it is Roseanne's heart-breaking account of her life that dominates and drives these pages. Born in Sligo to a Protestant family, she paints a vivid picture of the love of her life, her father, and their early years together … Braided in with Roseanne's narrative is what Dr. Grene calls his ‘Commonplace Book.’ His prose is less lustrous than Roseanne's and, in addition, he has the hard job of telling a less dramatic story … As his story unfolds we gradually discover that Roseanne's history, with all its tragedy, may not be quite what it seems. Best of all, in the final part of the book, Dr. Grene turns out to have his own story, which intersects with Roseanne's in a satisfying manner.
In The Secret Scripture, Irish novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry has created a wondrous character in Roseanne, who is secretly writing (and burying under the floorboards) not so much a memoir but an accounting of her life and the events — a few joyful, but far too many others devastating — that brought her to this place … This is a powerful story, and [Barry] tells it compellingly. But he is after bigger game: capturing the mutability and unreliability of memory and how its imperfections alter what we believe is true.
The more Dr Grene learns about Roseanne, her young life, and her reasons for being under his care, the more he admires her resilience, her quiet fortitude, her lack of bitterness. The more, too, he begins to uncover the buried history of Ireland in the last century, a country in which there were thousands of Roseannes, women who were 'disappeared' into asylums and convents when they fell pregnant outside wedlock or were abandoned by their husbands. This, by now, is familiar territory for Irish writers, both of fiction and memoir, but Barry illuminates it anew by interrogating, through these two intertwining, and often contradictory, narratives, the nature of memory - and of writing itself … This is a book that is essentially about the haziness of history and the ways in which memory can help rescue us from the past by allowing us to reimagine it. A kind of Freudian history of Ireland, then.
Barry writes vigorously and passionately about his native land. The story is told antiphonally, alternating narratives between a secret journal (hidden beneath the floorboard) kept by Roseanne McNulty, a patient in a mental hospital, and the ‘Commonplace Book’ of her psychiatrist Dr. Grene, who’s dealing with serious issues of grief after the death of his wife … Barry beautifully braids together the convoluted threads of his narrative.
The latest from Barry pits two contradictory narratives against each other in an attempt to solve the mystery of a 100-year-old mental patient. That patient, Roseanne McNulty, decides to undertake an autobiography and writes of an ill-fated childhood spent with her father, Joe Clear … Written in captivating, lyrical prose, Barry's novel is both a sparkling literary puzzle and a stark cautionary tale of corrupted power.
