The Secret Scripture [Paperback]

Roseanne McNulty is an old, old lady. Most of her life has been spent in mental institutions. As the book opens, no-one is really sure how old she is, why she was committed to an institution in the first place and whether she still needs to be in one (if she ever did).

The hospital where she now lives is due to close and psychiatrist William Grene has to decide what should happen to her. Official records are either missing or so scant as to make the old lady seem little more than a ghost.

But Roseanne has not always been a ghost: she was once a little girl; a young woman; a wife; a mother. This flesh and blood Roseanne is preserved in the "secret scripture", a hand written account of her early life kept hidden beneath a loose floorboard in her room. So whilst Dr Grene follows the sparse clues left by what remains of her in the outside world, the reader gets to hear Roseanne's story in her own words.

This is a masterful exploration of the way in which place, time and circumstance can impact on the lives of ordinary people. In this case the place is the West of Ireland and the time is the Irish Civil War and its aftermath. Roseanne's circumstances are that she is female and the daughter of a Protestant father and a mentally unstable mother.

Despite its background, this book is not about the use of institutions as a means of social control in Ireland (or anywhere else) and readers who are expecting something along those lines may be disappointed.

The writing and characterisation are firmly in the 5 star bracket, but the denouement will have you tearing your hair out, so 4 stars overall.

Nevertheless, a good read. This was my first Sebastian Barry and it inspired me to read more.

Sebastian Barry's Booker 2008 shortlisted The Secret Scripture is the first novel of his I've read. It is written in the form of logs kept by its two main protagonists, Roseanne McNulty, a frail old lady of around 100 years who has been in mental asylums for most of her adult life, and William Grene, Roseanne's psychiatrist, who is approaching retirement. The setting is a small town called Roscommon near Sligo in Ireland.

Roseanne is writing her history - as she remembers it - because she knows her life is nearing an end. William Grene is keeping a diary because his private life has imploded with the disintegration of his relationship with his wife Bet. He also has the task of assessing the patients of Roscommon mental hospital to see which can be released into the community when the hospital is pulled down and rebuilt at another site with far fewer beds. Because of this, he needs to ascertain the reasons for each patient's admission - whether they are truly 'insane' and in need of continual care in an institution, or whether they are potentially able to be re-integrated back into the community.

Thus starts a curious friendship between the two, based more on empathy than on communication. Roseanne keeps her written account of her life secret by hiding it under the floorboards and only allows Dr Grene to coax tiny fragments of her past from her. For his part, William Grene is content to not traumatise Roseanne with intrusive questioning, but the mystery of her past starts to haunt him.

The interspersing of Roseanne's and William Grene's written accounts draws the reader slowly into both their lives. Roseanne's sections are written in a more archaic tone than Dr Grene's because of her age, and the prose in her testimony is almost poetic at times, dreamy and nostalgic. In its tragedy and wistful, fragile flashes of beauty, it is reminiscent of John Banville's prose in The Sea. Roseanne's writing reveals not only her own difficult life but also much of the social and political history of Ireland from the 1920s on. As with Maggie O'Farrell's The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, the reader reels from the revelation of the ease with which women could and were locked up in asylums. The grim realisation of how much life has changed for women is also never far away.

My only gripe with this book is a tiny one about the fact that authors do so much research into so many aspects of their work but almost always neglect the area of accuracy of medical facts. There are many references to Dr Grene having been a 'penniless student studying psychiatry at a hospital in England' or of him having been 'a few months out of college' before his arrival at Roscommon. The fact is, you don't go to 'college' to study psychiatry, you go to medical school where you study some psychiatry with all the other specialties like medicine and surgery and paediatrics, and after that, you're out of college for good and if you want to specialise in psychiatry you do so by working your way up the career ladder in hospitals while swotting at home for professional exams. I gave Barry the benefit of the doubt on this, assuming Grene was just a few months out of medical school before moving to Roscommon, but it transpires he was in his mid thirties when he arrived in Roscommon, which would mean an extraordinarily long spell at medical school. Plus there's a reference to him being inspired to 'read psychiatry at Durham' - well, there was certainly no medical school at Durham in 1983 so there can't have been one in the '60s when Grene would have been a student.
Elsewhere there is reference to the fact that Grene's 'degree wasn't exactly glittering' which is another inaccuracy - medical degrees are either pass or fail, they're not graded (first, two-one, etc) like other degrees. Finally, there's a nonsensical comment from Greene about a character with throat cancer being 'old enough for such a cancer to move very slowly', as if age of onset had any consistent relationship with aggression of a malignancy (which depends on spread of cancer at diagnosis, number of lympoh nodes affected, metastatic involvement of other organs, cell type, site, etc.)

The only other mild criticisms is that the twist at the end is so unlikely as to almost be implausible, but it's testimony to Barry's writing that instead of flinging the book across the room as I'm wont to do with other unfeasibly neat, glib endings, I read it instead with a lump in my throat.

So, pedantic nit-picking aside, this is a gorgeously written book, almost brittle and transluscent in the delicacy of some of its prose. The misery of existence in Ireland in the early to mid twentieth century means that it is not an easy or uplifting book, but it is worth reading nevertheless.

****0

I have just finished this book and found it a brilliant read. As an ordinary reader, I sometimes find Booker prize winners heavy going but this one gripped me from the start. I had to keep reminding myself that this was a work of fiction and not a true story. However, it is true in the sense that this kind of thing used to happen in Ireland and not that long ago. Roseanne's story would break your heart for all those poor people who ended up in asylums because nobody wanted them or they were an embarassment to their family. Would recommend this excellent book to anyone.