The Secret Scripture – Sebastian Barry

In creating this most Irish of novels Barry manipulates the history, culture and geography of that country with some subtlety, treading daintily around those issues which are too easily (sometimes cynically) wheeled out to indicate Irishness. The apotheosis of the whole is the voice of Roseanne, the primary narrator, which is irresistibly Irish both in syntax and terms of reference, and perfectly beautiful, perfectly engaging. (I was taught for several years by Irish nuns and recall their inflections and expressions with, for the most part, affection.)

Roseanne is one hundred years old and has spent most of her life in one mental hospital or another. In her journal she records the tragic and traumatic events of her young life, but her purpose in doing so is hinted only in her musing digressions. She might be writing for family (does she have family?), to grasp at posterity, or to restructure her former life into a more comfortable form. Her personal reasons are less significant than the themes which her writing highlights: history, memory and truth.

‘The terror and hurt in my story happened because when I was young I thought others were the authors of my fortune or misfortune; I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves.’

The story is the least interesting and, arguably, least important aspect of this novel, as demonstrated by Dr Grene. (Roseanne’s psychiatrist.) The plotting features two storylines, past and present, which will, to some extent converge. The present day story demands that Dr Grene make a report on Roseanne’s mental state, which he proceeds to write with reference to Roseanne as and when she fits into his own story. Thus Dr Grene’s factual account is embedded within a personal history of himself. Even the documents obtained by Dr Grene are relayed through the imperfect medium of his memory. In Grene’s narrative the development of theme supersedes narrative exigency.

Barry gives his two narrators distinct voices, but the differences are subtle. Roseanne is the more Irish of the two, where Grene is initially detached, dispassionate. As he becomes more involved with his patient his Irishness seems to become more pronounced. While both protagonists search for truth Roseanne gives the sense of trying to pick a best fit account of memories which are not entirely coherent. Dr Grene, at least initially, seeks incontrovertible, unequivocal truth.

Overall, the writing is rich and full of motifs. Some motifs pervade the novel, while others peter out, and many are paired with memorable imagery, peppering the prose with small explosions of flavour which tempt the reader to create their own narrative within a narrative.

An image of an hammers and feathers thrown from a window is a recurring image within the book (and a fine example of the vivid imagery at which Barry excels). The hammers and feathers are supposed to be an experiment demonstrating that the rate of acceleration due to gravity is independent of mass. Accepting that to be true we still know, as Roseanne and her father apparently do not, that the hammers will fall quickly while the feathers will float.

‘The feathers are drifting away, drifting, swirling away. My father is calling and calling. My heart is beating back to him. The hammers are falling still.’

Whenever the hammers and feathers reappear it is sure to follow that something that has seemed certain has been cast into doubt. Hammers and feathers are bound up with a tragic theory of Roseanne’s father’s death. The phrase ‘soften the blow’ springs horribly to mind, in respect of feathers in conjunction with hammers, and this is a concept that permeates the whole hammer sequence. It is this potential for levels of interpretation that renders the novel so enjoyable despite its melancholy content and dubious revelations.

The reveal/twist is not this novel’s finest moment in terms of credibility. However, the ‘who-dunnit’ aspect is handled creditably. Not an actual ‘dunnit’ but the clues to the reveal are workable, and suspense is maintained effectively.

Fortunately this is not a novel which relies on story. It is Dr Grene who makes the startling discovery pertaining to Roseanne, and the really interesting implication of the revelation is what he intends to do with it. Will he tell her or will he not? There is an interesting dichotomy in the narrative between psychiatrist and psychologist. Dr Grene is a psychiatrist, but we see him in a role which is more indicative of psychology. That is one lead I reluctantly pass up, though I suspect that it could be related successfully to Irish political content which I have also shockingly bypassed.

Towards the end of the novel Grene goes off on an expositional odyssey. This is the kind of authorial high-handedness to which one might, under normal circumstances, take grave exception. Grene talks about the dangers of over-interpretation, individuality of perception, and the true import of unreliable narration. He does this in the guise of psychologist, but it also relates directly to the reading experience.

Roseanne’s narration tells us everything about her, regardless of its accuracy.

Here is Roseanne, on the subject of the rats her father kills by a fiery and, in her first account, living immolation during his brief rat-catching career:

‘At any rate he was opening the traps, grabbing the rats one by one as I said and now I think of it, giving each a rap over the head before the flames, that has just popped up in my head as a picture, thank God, and chatting away to me, and maybe it was because he was not able to give it his full concentration, because I was with him, but didn’t one of the rats escape between the trap and the knock on the head, wriggling out of his fingers suddenly, skirting the astonished Bob, who had nary a chance to react, and was gone back towards the orphanage in a dark blaze of blackness, but with that characteristic galloping motion…’

The quote may capture fluidity of memory as it occurs. It certainly illustrates an essential truth about Roseanne.

I wonder about all those motifs, in light of Dr Grene’s warnings about over-exuberant interpretation. Does Barry give us enough rope to hang ourselves? Even with that thought in mind it is impossible to resist the implicit references to writing and reading technique. As memory is subject to distortion, so are words themselves, specifically here, given names. Some characters have more than one name, one name recurs in a variety of unrelated circumstances. It feels like a nod to deconstructionism, and shifts the sands of reliability still further from under our feet.

In some respects Barry sits on the fence but in the face of his determined onslaught on the notion of an absolute and universal truth it is hard to see what other approach could be justified.

Hopefully, I am giving the impression of a book of endless possibilities.

Roseanne, as a married and then abandoned wife, lives under the shadow of Knocknarea, the summit of which is topped by a huge cairn… Implicit in the following are themes of perspective, incarceration of women by men, the organic nature of story-telling, and its longevity. Queen Maeve herself is symbolic of women’s power and sexuality.

‘At the summit there was no one at first sight, except maybe the ancient bones of Queen Maeve under her burden of a million small stones. From far away in the lower fields, by the sea of Strandhill, her cairn looked distinctive but small. Only when I walked up to it on my tired legs did I realise what an enormous thing it was, the labour of a hundred men, gathering from the mountain long ago the strange harvest of fist-sized stone, starting maybe with the queen under a few carefully laid slabs, and slowly, like single turves added to a turf stack, like single events added to an epic story, making the great mound for her to sleep under. I say sleep, but I mean moulder, diminish, vanish into the hill, creeping down in moisture underground, feeding little hints of heather and moss.’

The Secret Scripture was a Booker short-lister which lost out to Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger. Having read both I cannot feel that the right book won.