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The Secret Scripture | 
| Author: Sebastian Barry
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Category: Book
List Price: £16.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 179
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
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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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 Masterpiece! January 6, 2009
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I've been a big fan of Mr. Barry since reading "Annie Dunne." His insight into the Irish and Ireland is wonderfull, from both a poetic and historical perspective. Some authors are story tellers and some are masters with words, a few are both, Mr. Barry is both. This is literary fiction but it is also accessible (as I believe all truley great literature should be). Speaking of great fiction I do recommend "Misfits Country."
 Memories of Sligo January 3, 2009
The flaws of this book are well thrashed out by now (it is implausible in many ways, and not just in the Hollywood-style revelation at the end), but it is worthwhile in other ways, not least for the ponderings on the slippery nature of history and memory. The tension in the book comes from the disjuncture between the two stories, and as some have suggested it might have been better if it lay unresolved. Barry does succeed though in strikingly conveying the terrible wrongs inflicted on Roseanne, and the power of the church (and indeed of parents) is well-drawn. In summary, this is worth your time, but as long as you are prepared to put up with the ramshackle plot.
Thank goodness I live when I do! December 6, 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.
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
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
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