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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Secret Scripture, 29 Oct 2008
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
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66 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Open Secret, 25 Jun 2008
"The Secret Scripture" by Sebastian Barry tells the story of Roseanne Clear/McNulty through the accounts of two narrators, Roseanne herself, who is a long-term inmate in an Irish mental institution, and her psychiatrist, William Grene. At the opening of the novel, Roseanne is believed to be around a hundred years old, having been institutionalized in Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital since she was a young woman, but the hospital is due to close, and this provides the impetus for Dr. Grene to delve into the original reasons for Roseanne's admission.
Through Roseanne's own account and facts dug up by Dr. Grene, we learn that Roseanne Clear was a local beauty, but suffered as a result of being the daughter of a Presbyterian cemetery keeper who then lost his job and became a rat-catcher. The circumstances of her upbringing are complicated by the discovery, as the two narratives run in parallel, that her version of events is not necessarily the "official history". Roseanne goes on to marry Joe McNulty, but this goes tragically wrong, for reasons I won't reveal, as at this point in the novel the mystery of Roseanne's "illness" gradually begins to be solved.
Running in parallel to Roseanne's story, we gain an insight into Dr. Grene's life through his own narrative - his adultery which ruined his marriage, and the subsequent death of his wife. Grene's investigation into Roseanne's committal to the mental hospital eventually leads him to a shocking discovery - again which I won't reveal, as it is a very unexpected twist near the end of the novel.
I wanted to rate this novel more highly than I eventually did. It's beautifully written, yet the religious "moralism" and misogyny of Ireland in the past is no secret at all. There have been enough revelations in recent years for the truth about Roseanne's committal to a mental institution to be utterly predictable. One need only know such works as "The Magdalene Sisters" to be familiar with the practice of institutionalizing young women on the basis of their "immorality", often for the most trivial of reasons. This doesn't mean it isn't still a shocking policy, but Sebastian Barry does nothing new with it at all. Furthermore, the only real surprise in the novel is the "twist" near the end, which many readers will dismiss as a risible coincidence.
A smaller problem that concerned me is that the author hasn't done the most basic research on one of his protagonists, Doctor Grene: the worst howler was suggesting that Grene had studied psychiatry at university, and there are plenty of others, revealing that the author didn't feel it was the worth the time or trouble to develop even a superficial understanding of how psychiatrists train or practise. That's a shocking lack of professionalism given how many readers would spot the blunders.
Despite Sebastian Barry's obvious gifts as a novelist, I was disappointed he chose to tell a familiar story in a predictable way. I was interested, for example, in the character of Father Gaunt, the clergyman responsible for Roseanne's incarceration. He is a character who comes in and out of the novel at critical moments, having the biggest effect on the story of anyone, yet he remains a shadowy figure whose motives are assumed rather than explored. The reasons why Ireland in the past practised a policy of institutionalizing young women seem to me to be central to the book, yet that policy's origin and development isn't explored.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thank goodness I live when I do!, 6 Dec 2008
At a recent reading, a member of the audience commented that she wanted to take the book home with her only if Barry himself would accompany it. He was that good and uproariously funny! I was sitting next to a couple of friends who had already read the novel. They both commented that it wasn't at all the voice in which they had read the book. Excellent, I thought, sometimes being behind the times is an advantage after all.
The genesis of Sebastian Barry's tale begins in his own family. One day, while driving near Sligo, his mother pointed out a little tin hut and commented "Of course, that's where that woman stayed for many a year". That woman turned out to be Barry's great-aunt. A little research, the discovery that his relative had been institutionalised for social reasons and a fertile imagination combined to produce this year's Booker-shortlisted novel.
Roseanne McNulty's tragedy is a fictionalised account related to that of Barry's great-aunt; the novel his attempt to reconcile himself to being the member of a family that treated one of its own so shabbily. Roseanne is one of the lost people - Barry believing that Irish history is told more truthfully by documenting the stories of the losers, not the winners. Facts don't always lie on the surface. They must be hunted, dug out, remembered, misremembered.
Roseanne is almost 100 years old, has been institutionalised for 60+ years and care in the community policies mean her psychologist, Dr Grene, must determine whether she is sane enough to be "freed". Her history is not clear. While Roseanne creates a narrative that makes sense, it is not always factually true. It becomes clear that she has sanitised her history - possibly to remove the terror from the truth, which involves fearful and loathsome incidents replete in the Irish past.
Barry controls his novel beautifully. Past psychological policies contrasting with the present (in many ways just as insane). The narrative voices of Roseanne and Dr Grene contrasting and complimenting. Dr Grene has troubles of his own, which echo the experiences of Roseanne. The fascinating, if uncompromising, portrayal of Irish society in a time when one could be institutionalised for simply not conforming to society's expectations. The blurring of fact and fiction in the memory. Misrememberings - not lies. A mystery - the solution of which is signposted from the middle of the novel. A solution I was hoping would be avoided.
The only faux pas in an otherwise perfect novel. I'd only deduct a 1/2 star (Amazon forcing me into deducting a full one) but it rankles much more than that. Could this have been the reason why Ariga triumphed in this year's Booker?.
Final point - I would recommend The Secret Scripture to all lovers of The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox. There are common themes, yet The Secret Scripture has a broader scope, documenting not just the personal tragedy of one unjustly incarcerated, but the troubled history of the Irish nation.
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