Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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86 of 102 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Victim or Survivor?, 28 Jan 2009
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.
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140 of 167 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comments by Michael Calum Jacques, author of '1st Century Radical'., 10 Feb 2009
I was initially drawn to this novel merely by the title, but it did not take that many pages of reading to realize that I was going to enjoy what is, amongst other things, Sebastian Barry's study in human predicaments.
Roseanne McNulty is a forlorn centenarian as well as a long-standing resident of the Roscommon asylum in Ireland. But the status quo is soon to change and she is faced with an abrupt relocation, because the decrepit Roscommon hospital where she lives, is to be razed to the ground. Gathering together her recollections, both clear and hazy ones, she sets about writing them down into a `scripture' or chronicle, hence the work's title 'The Secret Scripture'.
These recollections compose the bulk of this novel; Roseanne's own testimony is punctuated by that of her psychiatrist, Dr Grene, thus giving the novel an interesting and unusual narrative technique. Grene is somewhere between motherly and avuncular in his approach to his patients and is beset, haunted by reminders of an unsuccessful marriage.
Some commentators have proposed that Roseanne is, in fact, a personification of combative Irish nationalism. That is to do both the character and the novel a disservice; at best it is only a partial elemental characteristic of Roseanne and, at its worst, it could distract the reader from the spectrum of other - far more subjective and personal issues which ebb in and out of the troubled waters of her mind and the rippling texture of the narrative itself.
It would, however, seem that there is some measure of autobiographical reminiscence at work within this novel - but as only the author himself would be able to disclose the precise measure of that, speculation here would be futile. If given time and a degree of energy on the part of the reader, `Secret Scripture' is a profound study of real life situations, tempered by the unavoidable effects of ancestry and close family; the subtext to most individual's lives.
The overall narrative contains vivid and sometimes unsettling and disquieting allusions (some traceable to Yeats) which do, however, remain sufficiently experiential to stay grounded in, or at least allied to, realism; those experiences of the average human being! The melancholy backdrop is the west of Ireland, beautiful country, to be sure, but it is not left untainted or as merely traditional by Barry's at times vivid and punch, at times bleak - but never dull - narration.
Roseanne's own mission to recall and record has a frantic urgency about it; mentally wrestling with a well of uneasy, distant, events. Partly forgotten conversations and quips accompanied by elements of bygone folklore tradition vie for her attention and those elusive qualities of clarification and verification. Any reader with a historian's curiosity is bound to ask the simple question; `How much of this is really what happened to Roseanne'?
And this thought and problem adds much intrigue to the meandering and sometimes ricocheting plot. There are no unqualified answers to life's woes provided by this novel, but there are many questions asked about life's dilemmas which some readers will be bound to muse over. Ireland's history, and its out workings on the modern Irish - or perhaps even the Gaelic mindset - is never far away but, as mentioned earlier, to in any way `nationalise' this work would be to prematurely compartmentalize it, to sell it short and under-represent it on many levels.
That being said, the Celtic tone and overall subtext of the narrative is unmistakable and undeniable in near equal measure. The reality of wrecked and desolate lives resounds around the forbidding histories, personal, filial and national, embedded within the rolling Irish landscape. For this reviewer, any readers familiar with the darker, brooding Celtic imagery of Bantock's `Hebridean Symphony', will recognize a similarly powerful chord sequence within the 300 odd pages of this spellbinding work.
Michael Calum Jacques
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22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Betrayal and tragedy in old Ireland, 15 Jun 2009
Don't accuse Sebastian Barry of lacking ambition. The Secret Scripture, a novel based around the reminiscence of a 100-year-old woman who has spent most of her life in a mental asylum, is an extraordinarily bold piece of writing. Roseanne McNulty, the daughter of Protestant policeman, sets out to document her troubled youth in west Ireland, amongst poverty and the turbulent politics of the early Free State. Meanwhile, the mental hospital's senior psychiatrist sets out to discover the history of this ancient, forgotten woman left in his care. The story is tragic and in some parts very moving, and the ending is genuinely shocking. Barry seizes at difficult subjects, such as the nature of mental illness, and the unreliability of memory. Unfortunately, I found that the ambition overextended the book, stretching it in too many directions. Some of the writing is prosaic and poetic, but it can also be dry, because the first person perspective limits the vocabulary and metaphors available to the characters. The book is carefully plotted, but the unreliability of the narrator sometimes makes the story seem unreal. Roseanne and the Doctor are given authentic voices, at the price of drifting towards the banal. The Secret Scripture won the Costa book prize, probably should have won the Booker, and is definitely a better book than The White Tiger, but I didn't feel completely satisfied. It is a novel that I can admire but not love.
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