Review by New York Times Review
In this novel, a 100-year-old and her doctor mine a life's secrets. IF Auden was right that "mad Ireland" hurt Yeats into poetry, then Yeats lucked out. It hurt Roseanne Clear into the asylum, for decades. Roseanne is the central character in Sebastian Barry's latest novel, "The Secret Scripture," which charts her path through the violent upheavals of Ireland's past century. Still institutionalized at age 100 and scribbling her life story on scavenged paper, she uses Auden's very word - hurt - at the outset of her tale. It's not the only sign that Barry has Yeats on his mind. Roseanne was a great beauty in her time, as was her mother; both lives are pitted by despair and quite possibly incarnate the "terrible beauty" Yeats saw born in the Easter uprising of 1916. Ireland's national history - the Rising during the Great War, the war of independence following it, then a civil war following independence, all in quick, murderous succession - is the moil under the surface of Barry's novels, and "The Secret Scripture" is no exception. Despite her name, Roseanne Clear is hardly transparent. A wary reticence and sincere befuddlement tend to muddy her conversations with Dr. William Grene, senior psychiatrist at Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, whose commonplace journal renders him a co-narrator of "The Secret Scripture." Their interaction, complete with its silences, works its way into their respective self-searching accounts of life, forming the loose catechism of the novel. Grene, nearing retirement, notes that he arrived at Roscommon 30 years ago and that Roseanne "was old when I got here." Since the hospital is to be closed, it falls to him to determine which patients will be accepted at a new but smaller institution and which will be loosed on the world. Yet when Grene floats the possibility of "freedom" to Roseanne, she experiences "dread like a sickness, a memory of a sickness." "The gaining of freedom is always accomplished in an atmosphere of uncertainty," Grene tells her. "In this country at least. Perhaps in all countries." "Murder," she replies. "Yes, sometimes," he admits. That exchange, which takes place early in the novel, typifies how personal fate and national fate are incestuously bound in Barry's work, too closely - threateningly - for his characters' serenity or safety. Roseanne well recalls the civil war, "how murder could travel sideways and take other lives all unbeknownst." Indeed, the "very cleverness and spreadingness of murder" may have gathered her father within its compass; his death by hanging is a fate she has brooded over for more than 80 years, despite a priest's assurance that "grief is two years long." Circumstances require that the doctor and his patient play cat and mouse. He is intend on assessing her competence and discovering ner history, while she dissembles self-protectiveiy, "a foul and utter lie being the best answer" when he asks about the circumstances of her admittance. She does wonder, "Why still in me, that dark dark shame?" yet when the impulse to divulge something arises, she balks: "He interprets things, which is dangerous, extremely." Even so, Roseanne and the doctor have a rapport. She looks on him with bemused affection: "The beauty of Dr. Grene is that he is entirely humorless, which makes him actually quite humorous." Grene, bereaved for reasons of his own, questions the moral efficacy of his field - the "culde-sac nature of psychiatry" and "the come-around-the-back-of-the-house of it, oh yes, the deviousness" - as well as his own competence, fearful of "having done nothing for the inmates here, of sentimentalizing them." Once, Roseanne notices "immaculate" tears in his eyes (religious words sprinkle the novel freely) and lays a hand on him, which the doctor experiences as "benign lightning, something primitive, strange and oddly clear." Roseanne is almost preternaturally happy, given the bleakness of her circumstances. She had a child out of wedlock whose whereabouts are unknown (revealed in her slant way: "I am not an entirely childless person"); her father may have been killed in reprisal for his own acts, a history she won't acknowledge ("It is no crime to love your father"); and her husband's family, in collusion with the local priest, nullified her marriage and committed her to the asylum (Grene's investigations show the priest "sane to such a degree it makes sanity almost undesirable"). And yet, and yet. . . . What accounts for her happiness? The secret scripture. Religious as that might sound, broadly it is Barry's homage to the holiness of life, in which experience and narrative are inseparable, a concept manifold in what he has written in this novel and previously. "The Secret Scripture" is most closely aligned with his 1998 novel "The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty," whose protagonist was exiled from Irish life in a very different way. Eneas, a brother of Roseanne's husband, encounters her in both novels - most fatefully in "The Secret Scripture," which was a finalist for this year's Man Booker Prize. Many angelic references and much religious imagery are to be found here (slaughtered lambs, for example), but at the root of it all is the lambent quality of experience, not religion per se. Much of the real joy of reading Barry is in the bobbing freshet of his language. A Quaker woman for whom Roseanne once worked "would give me her shy smile, and I would be jubilant, jubilant." Despite the madness, you will be too. Art Winslow is a former literary and executive editor of The Nation.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* From the first page, Barry's novel sweeps along like the Garravogue River through Sligo town, taking the rubbish down to the seas, and bits of things that were once owned by people and pulled from the banks, and bodies, too, if rarely, oh, and poor babies, that were embarrassments, the odd time. We are in the head and the journal of 100-year-old mad Roseanne McNulty, locked up for decades in an asylum in rural west Ireland. She has begun writing her life story, hiding it nightly beneath her bedroom's creaking floorboards. Simultaneously, her putative therapist, Dr. Grene, who barely knows her, much less her history or prognosis, begins an observation journal about her. The asylum is to be downsized, and he must determine whether she is sane enough to live on her own. He attempts to reconstruct the reasons for her imprisonment, as it turns out to be, and that pitches the novel into the dark depths of Ireland's civil war and the antiwoman proscriptions on sexuality of the national regime Joyce famously called priestridden. Barry weaves together Grene's and Roseanne's stories, which are ultimately the same story, masterfully and with intense emotionality that nevertheless refuses to become maudlin. Another notable part of Barry's artistry is the sheer poetry of his prose, now heart-stoppingly lyrical, now heart-poundingly thrilling. An unforgettable portrait of mid-twentieth-century Ireland.--Monaghan, Patricia Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Playwright Barry's touching novel turned plenty of heads upon its release, as an elderly mental patient documents her life and times in County Sligo, Ireland, while her doctor uncovers a remarkably different story of her existence. Wanda McCaddon's British dialect is no hindrance to her remarkable portrayal of protagonist Roseanne McNulty, as she leaps into character with a stunning, perfect Irish accent that captures every nuance of the West Coast dialect. McCaddon's performance is among the best of the year. Her believable portrayal is perfectly modulated and nuance-filled, creating a stunning listening experience. A Viking hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 31). (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
With this work, renowned Irish playwright Barry furthers his reputation as a great novelist as well. Set in a Roscommon mental hospital, the novel centers on 100-year-old Roseanne McNulty, who secretly records her life in a hidden journal. In sometimes painful detail, she describes a heartbreaking childhood in Sligo, affected triumphantly and tragically by events unfolding in the world beyond: two world wars, the emergence of the Irish Republic, and the often devastating influence of the Catholic Church on the lives of people in need. Her entries alternate with the writings of Dr. William Grene, a kindly if distant psychiatrist attempting to assess Roseanne's mental health. For both, writing is revelatory. Their stories beautifully unfold like blooming roses, breathtakingly revealing the ties that bind them. The prose is rich, and Barry's gift for description and especially dialog are considerable. Readers familiar with Barry's work will recognize people and places from other novels, notably the protagonist of The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, who plays a tenderly rendered key role in this highly recommended title.--J.G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A subtle study of psychology, religion, family and politics in Ireland. This is not, as the title might suggest, another Da Vinci Code clone. Barry (A Long Long Way, 2005, etc.) writes vigorously and passionately about his native land. The story is told antiphonally, alternating narratives between a secret journal (hidden beneath the floorboard) kept by Roseanne McNulty, a patient in a mental hospital, and the "Commonplace Book" of her psychiatrist Dr. Grene, who's dealing with serious issues of grief after the death of his wife. Roseanne has always been something of an outsider, her father a cemetery-keeper and rat-catcher but most importantly a Protestant in a land largely hostile to this religious orientation. Although Roseanne remembers a happy childhood, in which she was the proverbial apple of her father's eye, he becomes involved in the political and military entanglements of Irish political life. When Roseanne grows up, she becomes the wife of Tom McNulty, but through a series of misunderstandings--as well as through the machinations of the grim-faced and soul-destroying priest, Fr. Gaunt--she is as good as accused (though falsely) of adultery with the son of a political rebel. Out of malice toward Protestants as well as out of a misplaced moral absolutism, Fr. Gaunt has her marriage annulled--and, using nymphomania to explain her "condition," has her locked up in the asylum. Dr. Grene gets interested in her story as well as her history, and in tracking down her past he finds a secret that she has kept hidden for many years, a secret that affects them both and that intertwines their families. In a final assessment of Roseanne--after she's spent decades in the asylum--Dr. Grene determines that she is "blameless." She responds: "'Blameless? I hardly think that is given to any mortal being.'" Indeed, blamelessness is a state no one achieves in this novel. Barry beautifully braids together the convoluted threads of his narrative. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
