|
The Secret Scripture | 
| Author: Sebastian Barry
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Category: Book
List Price: £16.99
Buy New: £8.49
You Save: £8.50 (50%)
New (27) Used (3) Collectible (5) from £8.04
Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 527
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 300
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.2 x 1.5
ISBN: 0571215289
EAN: 9780571215287
ASIN: 0571215289
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.co.uk Review
The acclaim that has greeted Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture is varied and enthusiastic, and it's not hard to see why. When Frank McGuiness praised it for âraw, rough beauty’ and described Sebastian Barry's fiction as âunique’ and âmagnificent’, this claim was no hostage to fortune; just a few sentences of the prose here will convince most readers of the justice of those words. As in the best-selling A Long Long Way, Barry is concerned with the imperatives of telling a story, but in a literary form that is rich with both psychological understanding and a skilful conjuring of time and place.Roseanne McNulty may (or may not) be on the point of nearing her 100th birthday -- but there is little certainty about this fact. In her twilight years, her destiny is uncertain, as the Roscommon Mental Hospital -- her home for so many years of her life -- is on the point of closing. As the fateful hour approaches, Roseanne spends her time of talking to her psychiatrist of many years, Dr Grene. The relationship between the two is strangely interdependent, and the doctor is also attempting to come to terms with the death of his wife. As we learn more about the two principal protagonists, we are presented with a rich and subtle picture of human relationships -- and the (often unintentional) damages that we all do to each other. The form of the book consists of the separate journals of Roseanne and Dr Grene, and we gradually learn about Roseanne’s family in Sligo in the 1930s. What emergence is a poignant personal history; it is also a subtly ambitious picture of nothing less than the Irish psyche at a particular point in its history. There are echoes here of another great Irish chronicler of the human condition, William Trevor, and The Secret Scripture is no worse for that. --Barry Forshaw
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
A tale of survival beautifully written November 17, 2008
Roseanne Clear is approaching one hundred years of age and has lived the majority of her adult years confined in Roscommon Mental Hospital. As she approaches the end of her life she decides to write about her early years, secretly keeping the manuscript hidden from her psychiatrist.
He is Dr William Grene, who has also has been at Roscommon for a long time, most of his working life in fact. As he approaches retirement, the pending closure of the hospital requires him to make a judgement about the future needs of all his patients. When he comes to examine Roseanne's background he finds few of her records have survived and he opens a cautious dialogue with her to understand her past and how she came to be committed. As he does so, he decides to keep a diary of what transpires.
As their guarded and ultimately trusting relationship develops, we come to know a little of the prejudice and sectarianism of Sligo in the two decades leading up to the Second World War. Roseanne's Presbyterian family is neither loyalist nor republican but, more importantly, is beyond the pale of the Catholic church. Of all the influences in her past, it is Father Gaunt's committed intolerance and determination to decide the fate of all his flock which eventually holds most sway.
This is a novel about lonely and courageous survival. For Roseanne, it is about outliving brutal treatment and institutional exile. For William, it is about his own failings with his patients and his broken marriage.
Barry's wonderful dialogue and use of language is mesmerisingly beautiful and yet it portrays raw horrors. Sadly, he lets himself down with an obvious denouement in the last twenty pages, but don't let this detract from a marvellous book.
The silent witness November 6, 2008
This is the first book I have read by this author and I greatly enjoyed the energetic prose, style and philosophical musings. Barry strikes me as a genius at describing internal landscapes and internal dialogues . This trait however, in my estimation, works to his disadvantage as his scenes based in the external world are not as strong and in some places quite weak, and so create an imbalance in the overall quality of the work. For me, the apparent difficulty in differentiating the two voices was only rescued finally by the plot ending.
Unlike other reviewers here, I didn't see that this story was so much about Ireland, apart from being set there; I interpreted the issues as those common to all oppressed peoples and the challenges their collective and individual psyche's encounter as they emerge from their servitude to differentiate and discover their collective and individual identities. That Roseanne and her family suffered as symbolic of the foreign element was not surprising ( and contrary to Barry's fictious account, a poor ( on the scale of the widespread penuiary of the peasants) protestant was a rare one, even then,)given the repressed hostility of generations for their protestant english oppressors.
However, what Barry could have elaborated on and in doing so made this an even greater work, was the bludgeoned consciousness of Dr Greene, which without reference to its' roots, presented him as an emotional psychopath. More powerful than the clergy and church have ever been in Ireland, the medical fraternity commanded and still do worship and its' attendant scarifices (not only in Ireland is this the case unfortunately)
The question the book left unanswered was not why Roseanne was treated as she was ( this is well accounted for in the annuals of psychology), but what was Dr Geene's justification- why did he not behave as a human being, with the agency and power invested in him - how do we understand this inertia and disconnectedness in the educated man presented without the handicap of a dyfunctional family or other obstacle to his maturing character? We read he had an enlightened boss, one for whom Jung and Laing had great influence, but we fail to get even a morsel of evidence of how this manifested in practice. I fear Barry left too many questions unasked and so unanswered and so while it is a book that stays with you long after yo have finished reading it, in my case the lingering emotion is frustration.
 An Irish Hardy November 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I read this more as book about the power of fate than a reworking of a theme of anti-Catholicism. In fact, it put me more in mind of Thomas Hardy than anything else. We maybe know where it's all heading but we follow the journey.
It's possible to characterise `The Secret Scripture' - like `The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty' or `A Long Long Way' - as "revisionist", and the book may please or displease some readers according to their political proclivities.
But for me this misses the value of Barry's work. As well as an ear for the beauty of language, he has an outstanding gift for characterisation and a deep if understated compassion. While well-rooted in an Ireland of a certain period, his novels touch far deeper, universal matters.
The Secret Scripture October 29, 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
 Beautifully written, shame about the plot October 27, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I can see why this made the Booker shortlist - it's beautifully written with some lovely turns of phrase and observations. Even though it's not the sort of book I usually enjoy, I could appreciate the quality of the prose. The story is written in two voices; that of an elderly woman in a mental hospital, and that of her doctor. The imminent closure of the hospital necessitates a review of the circumstances that had her committed more than 60 years previously.
It's an original enough premise and the story moves well between the inter-war years and the present. But I had a few problems with the story itself. There seemed to be holes in both the stories of Dr Grene and Roseanne, and I couldn't accept the 'what is history anyway, we make it up as we go along' line as a satisfying explanation. Significant events, such as the death of Dr Grene's wife, were brushed over. There were also gaps in the story of events leading to Roseanne's estrangement from her husband, which meant that the whole thing ended up not ringing true.
Unfortunately, the novel ended with a ludicrous plot twist - though not an unpredictable one - I'd guessed it was coming many chapters before. This threw the holes in the earlier narrative into sharper focus and meant the whole novel lost credibility in my eyes.
My final impression is of something beautiful but ultimately rather daft, like a Rembrandt portrait of Mr Blobby. I often criticise authors for knowing what to write but not how to write it - in this case the reverse is true. If you love the quality of writing more than what's actually written, you will love this book. But I suspect a lot of readers will be irked by the same plot holes as I have been.
|
|
|
| |
