The Secret Scripture

Centenarian Roseanne Clear McNulty has been confined in a mental institution in rural Ireland for over four decades. The institution is being replaced, and her psychiatrist, Dr. Grene, must determine if she should be released or sent to the new smaller facility. Roseanne is writing her life story, hiding it under the floorboards of her room. Dr. Grene is writing his “Book of Commonplace,” a journal of sorts, recording observations about Roseanne and events in his own life.

This book is a deep character study of two individuals set against a backdrop of political and religious rivalries in Irish history. The plot revolves around the reasons Roseanne was initially confined, leading to up to a decision regarding her mental health. The show more story is artfully told, gradually revealing more information to uncover the secrets of the past. It explores the relationships among memory, fact, history, and the stories we tell ourselves. The writing is evocative. The prose sequences are reminiscent of a Victorian novel, though the time period covered here is the early 1900s through 2007. It is an emotional book about trauma, loss, betrayal, injustice, aging, and hope. I found it beautifully told, thought-provoking, and memorable. show less

Are you an honest person? Truly?

Perhaps you instinctively think “Yes”, even as you realise you are not always scrupulously so, often for the best of reasons. Often. But not always.
One can’t be totally honest all the time, can one? Can one?
What is “truth” anyway, but a social construct?!

“What's wrong about her account if she sincerely believes it?”
“There is no factual truth.”
It matters more that the person is “admirable, living, and complete” - what a curious trio of adjectives.

In a post-truth era, on a big day for possibly “fake news” (a euphemism for lies and propaganda), our collective ability to recognise truth slips ever further from our grasp.

Stories

This is stories of centenarian Roseanne’s lives. The show more tides of two world wars and a civil war bring opportunity, fear, birth, death, deceit, despair, and change - crashing, crushing, on the shores of Sligo.

She’s approaching her 100th birthday, and has been in asylums for around seventy years. Dr Grene has to gently uncover Roseanne’s story to see if she should move to a new, smaller institution or if the truth will set her “free” for care in the community (a term he knows is inaccurate).

This isn’t really about madness versus sanity (though it’s an issue for many characters) or even incarceration. It’s about telling stories – to hide the truth as well as to reveal it.

Roseanne and Dr Grene are both writing accounts of the past, especially Roseanne’s past, in part to avoid considering the future. Each is unaware the other is doing so.

The reader experiences layers of contradiction, distance and distortion from the passage of time, deep trauma, and efforts to protect from shame or guilt.

And then there is a third written testimony, from Fr Gaunt, and remnants of official records (“A little apocryphal gospel”) which readers get second hand via Dr Grene, and which are further muddied when the doctor realises he’s filling in gaps that Fr Gaunt did not. Another layer of embroidery.

And what about the unknown hand who brought all the narratives together? How do we untangle the truth? Which version of the tower and feathers and hammers is true? Could it even be both?!

Why are they writing?
No plot spoilers, just background notes and detail.

• Roseanne wants “an honest-minded history of myself” because “My secrets are my fortune and my sanity.” She has experienced the dire consequences of gossip and presumption more than once, so “There must be accuracy and rightness.”

• Dr Grene’s writing is an extension of his work, a distraction from personal loss, and “a sign of ongoing inner life” that triggers ideas and insight.

• Fr Gaunt’s “desire... to tell the story illuminates it. He is unburdening himself, as he might a sin.”

A person without stories that outlive them becomes lost to family, lost to history, “sad black names on within family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark”.
Roseanne’s father relished telling stories from his life, but mother is “singularly without stories” and eventually mute. She vanishes from the story.


Words
No plot spoilers, just background notes and detail.

The writing it beautiful and lyrical (see quotes below, especially about sea, ran, weather, and light), but some words have special weight. The pages are infused with religious people, language, and symbols (a priest, the church, visions that might be angels, and roast lamb in a sacrificial context).

• Is “Roseanne’s Testimony of herself” her title or someone else’s?
• Is “secret scripture” an oxymoron – and who calls it that?
• What is sacred about it – the story or the telling of it?
• Dr Grene’s record is merely his “Commonplace Book”.

Perhaps because she has been deemed unclean by some, Roseanne notes cleanliness a great deal:
• “My father was the cleanest man in all the Christian world.”
• Father Gaunt is “cleaner than the daylight moon” and later, his “cleanliness made me fearful”.
• Dr Grene sits on Roseanne’s bed “as if it were the cleanest bed in all Christendom”.
• And she only writes her notes on clean sheets of paper.

Names may tell us something:
• Clear is the surname of Roseanne’s family, but their history is opaque.
• Grene, the doctor’s surname, is an important colour, as well as being associated with Ireland generally.
• Gaunt can never be good, can it?
• Roseanne loves flowers, especially roses, as does Dr Grene’s wife, and when he visits Roseanne’s old house, he finds and plucks a rose.

Roses are not the only hybrids. It’s significant that some people are part English and part Irish.


Poisoned Chalices

Female beauty and sexuality are poisoned chalices in a society where only women are shamed and punished for the consequences of both. Mere existence “Caused him… displeasure and disquiet at the nature of a woman.”

What Matters in The End?

I guessed the main twist (and others) well before it was revealed. I didn’t mind. But what did dilute the book’s power was the rushed but detailed explanation of the complex chain of events, involving many people, that made it possible. Far better had it been chance (fate) or merely unexplained. More credible, too.

If one strives to be the architect of one’s own life, it’s not much of a stretch to be the curator of one’s own history, editing a little along the way, is it?

And if you trust or blame fate instead, perhaps you have even more cause to write yourself a happier beginning, middle, and end.

I ask again: Are you an honest person? Truly? Is anyone?

Quotes

No plot spoilers, but hidden for brevity and easy scrolling. They’re worth the click, though. It’s not just the setting that is typically Irish, but the writing, too.

History, Memory, Truth, and Stories Quotes

• “No one has the monopoly on truth.”

• “History… is not the arrangement of what happened… but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.” Fabulous in more than one sense.

• “The written word assumes authority but it may not have it.”

• “I thought others were the authors of my sort of misfortune.”

• “A child is never the author of his own history.”

• “I am only the midwife to my own old story.”

• “Memory… if it is neglected becomes like a box room… the contents jumbled about.”

• “Everything I remember… may not be real... There was so much turmoil… I took refuge in other impossible histories, in dreams, in fantasies? I don’t know.”



Sanity and Madness Quotes

• "Madness… has many flowers, rising from the same stem."

• “Learned a sort of viral madness” is often the fate of long-term inmates of the asylum. The worse cases are “sleeping towards death, crawling on bleeding knees towards our Lord… I whisper a prayer to hurry up their souls to heaven.”

• “In here, amid the shadows and the distant cries, the greatest virtue is silence.”

• “Sane to a degree that makes sanity almost undesirable.”



Beauty Quotes

• “A more beautiful girl Sligo never saw, she had skin soft as feathers” and “green eyes like American emeralds”. The sort of beauty “no man can protect himself against”.

• “My mother suffered strangely under her halo of beauty.”

• “Beautiful once, but beauty ended.”

• “All that remains of me now is a rumour of beauty.”



People and Relationships Quotes

• “He had that rare ability to let things ease in himself in the company of a child, and be stupid and gay in the parched light.”

• “It is no crime to love your father.”

• “My pride in her was my pride in myself.”

• “Now we are two foreign countries and we simply have our embassies in the same house. Relations are friendly but strictly diplomatic. There is an underlying sense of rumour, of judgement, of memory, like two peoples that have once committed grave crimes against each other, but in another generation.”

• “We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach.”



Sea, Rain, Weather, and Light Quotes

Humans came from the sea and therefore still long for it. Many characters walk the shore for peace or escape, and one is dramatically rescued from drowning.

• “The rain drives everyone indoors and history with it… our world in its inner truth is so wet, the surprised greens of the fields and hills seem to burn with a sort of bewilderment, a wonderment.”

• “Always the deluge of rain falling... making the houses shiver and huddle like people at a football match. Falling fantastically, in enormous amounts, the contents of a hundred rivers. And the river itself... swelling up, the beautiful swans taken by surprise, riding the torrent, being swept down under the bridge and reappearing the other side like unsuccessful suicides, their mysterious eyes shocked and black, their mysterious grace unassailed.”

• “Sideways spring sunlight, that seemed to have crept in through the window-glass with an almost apologetic delicacy.”

• “The wind was dancing about… so you didn’t know where the rain would catch you.”

• “Rain striking the surface of the road and leaping about with a sort of anger.”

• “The rain was like huge skirts, swirling and lifting.”

• “The galloping sound of the sea, as it rushed in eagerly to take the empty places in its arms.”

The famous Metal Man is “Solid and eternal… faithfully and stoically pointing down into the deep water.”



Other Quotes

• “A cold town. Even the mountains stood away.”

• “Any effort at gardening… is an effort to drag to earth the colours and importances of heaven.”

• “Grief is two years long.” So says Fr Gaunt.

• “My head was aflame with the deep dark pulse of grief, that beats like a physical pain, like a rat got into your brains, a rat on fire.”

• “At close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.”

• “His veritable gospel was Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne.”

• “Slight as a watercolour, a mere gesture of bones and features.”

• Café women “like veritable hens in a yard… the chat and gossip rising from them like dust from a desert caravan of camels.”

• “Accents like beer bottles being smashed in a back lane.”



Image Sources

Hand on Bible:
https://goo.gl/images/52IiZm
Poisoned chalice:
https://s3-eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/centaur-wp/moneymarketing/prod/content/upl....
Metal Man, Coney Island, near Sligo:
http://seafishingsligo.ie/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/metal-man2.png
The truth will set you free (John 8:32):
http://pictures.agodman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/RM-john-8-32-and-you-shal....


See also

Maggie O'Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox also features the mysteries surrounding an elderly woman who's lived most of her life in such an institution that is about to be closed down. See my review, HERE. show less

"There is seldom a difficulty with religion where there is friendship."

Religion and politics are rarely cosy bedfellows and nowhere during the 20th century in Western Europe is this more evident than in Ireland with its sectarianism. In "The Secret Scripture" Barry tries to expose some very painful truths done to the country and its inhabitants in the name of religion.

Set in Sligo the narration is shared between Roseanne McNulty, a centurion who has spent over sixty years in a psychiatric institution, and her psychiatrist Dr Grene. Roseanne's records have long been lost but as the hospital nears closure, Dr Grene must try to assess whether or not she can be rehabilitated back 'into the community'.

Roseanne is reluctant to confide in Dr show more Grene but writes down her secrets and hides them under the floorboards. She is an old lady with secrets to hide, whose memories may not be truly accurate and who may or may not have been committed for good reason. What is not in any doubt is that she has been the victim of those who should have had her welfare in mind. Roseanne’s story is uncomfortable because although she may be fictional, her situation is not.

Roseanne comes from a Presbyterian family, her mother is English and when her father, who had once been a Police officer, dies she finds herself with nobody to speak for her. Even the reader is encouraged to distrust her, her view of events is undermined by what scraps of documentation remain. Dr Grene must decide which of his patients were committed on social rather than medical grounds.

The scars of sectarianism run deep in Ireland and Roseanne is an obvious metaphor for the country itself. She too bears the scars of crimes wrought by religion, she sought sanctuary in marriage to the man she loved but her past and the local priest would not let her. Roseanne's own faith is disregarded and she suffers because she refuses to convert to Catholicism.

Whilst it's easy to see Roseanne's story as simply a tale of how local priests were often omnipotent and that women were often the victims of their power, this book is also a timely reminder that the old too have stories of their own. They may now live in a home, have no immediate family to visit them but they too have histories, loves, losses, beliefs and therefore deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.

"We are never old to ourselves. That is because at the close of the day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body."

I should point out that this is actually the fourth in a series about the McNulty family and I haven't read any of the previous books. This may influence my opinion but I still think that this book stands on its own merits. This is a book that leaves you with as many questions as answers and whilst I found the ending as the author tries to tie up the loose endings too neat and twee for my taste it was still well written. It also annoyed me that Dr Grene ultimately decided to keep the truth from Roseanne at the end like so many men who had preceded him.

It isn't always any easy tale to read, some of the events are quite disturbing and heart-rending yet there is also love and hope, that events within it can one day be consigned to the history books. show less

Wow, this was quite a good book. The narration on the audiobook was really excellent. Very interesting, compelling, and well-written look at old Ireland, which was not very long ago at all. Especially relevant given the Irish abortion referendum in the last week. The power of the church to control and supress women is just one theme here, but an important one.

THE SECRET SCRIPTURE (2008) is the second Sebastian Barry book I've read, and is also apparently the middle book of a trilogy featuring the McNulty family of Sligo. Its a compelling story told by two different narrators in journal form. One is Roseanne (Clear) McNulty, who is nearly a hundred years old and a longtime occupant of an insane asylum. The other is Dr William Grene, the resident psychiatrist of the ancient institution, which is slated for closure and demolition. Dr Green has spent most of his career there, is recently widowed and near retirement, and has formed a close connection with Roseanne, the oldest of his patients who has been there longer than he has, and he is tasked with determining which patients might be released show more back into the community. Roseanne's hidden, secret journal reveals her days as a young beauty who grew up near a graveyard which her father was in charge of, unaware that he had once been a policeman and thus an enemy of the Irish rebels and much involved in the infamous "Troubles" of the 1920s and before. As a Protestant, she runs afoul of the local priest when she marries "Young Tom" McNulty. And the McNulty matriarch doesn't approve either, sooo ... if gets complicated. Suffice it to say, perhaps, that both narrators have a way with words, and, ever so gradually, the two stories begin to come together in a most shocking and surprising manner that will nearly take your breath away. And yes, as other blurbs and reviews have noted, the language, the prose, the sentences employed herein are indeed quite beautiful. Sebastian Barry is a wordsmith par excellence. I was reminded of another Irish writer I have been following for the past several years with great interest, Donal Ryan.

Oh, and the other Barry book I read a few years ago was A LONG LONG WAY, set in the years of the Great War, was also the second book in a trilogy, that one about the Dunne family (and of course those "Troubles" are in there too). And I may have enjoyed that one even a pinch more than I did this one. Bottom line: Barry is a marvelous writer, and THE SECRET SCRIPTURE is a fascinating, riveting read.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

Although it’s been several days since I finished reading this book, I have been avoiding writing a review. I realise now that that’s because to write a review I have to notice how I am feeling when I think about the book, and how I am feeling as I do is that I want to cry.

Sebastian Barry paints a very complete picture of the interiors of two people coming to an enormous turning point in their lives. Rosanne, at 100 years old, has lived in an institution for much of her life. Dr. Grene has overseen her institutionalisation for several decades. As the time grows near to close down the hospital and move remaining patients to a smaller building, thus necessitating a cull, he needs to assess each patient's candidacy for release. In the show more process he finds himself spending more and more time in the presence of this elderly woman, and attempting to reconstruct her story, one which she refuses to tell.

They both must explore her past: what led to her incarceration, and whether or not it had occurred because she was truly mentally ill or if it had been provoked for other reasons and she should be freed.

Roseanne is a beautiful presence. I loved spending time in her head. Even with the very limited sphere of life she is consigned to she is able to find interest and joy. The narrative of course eventually reveals a painful story and my sorrow at what this woman endured, what so many of us have endured in one way or another, is real and intense.

I am not at all sorry I read this beautiful Irish book, and I was absorbed by it the entire time I read. It is not a complete tragedy, but if this book doesn’t spark your compassion, I’m not sure what would. show less

The Secret Scripture - Barry
Audio performance by Wanda McCaddon
5 stars

“Memory, I must suppose, if it is neglected becomes like a box room, or a lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not only from neglect but also from too much haphazard searching in them, and things to boot thrown in that don't belong there.”

“For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.”

Roseanne McNulty is approaching her 100th birthday. She has a story to tell, but she’s doesn’t want to talk about it. Not really. She certainly doesn’t want to answer questions. show more She’s keeping a journal, a secret scripture. She’s one very sharp old lady, is Roseanne McNulty, but the question is, is she sane? What kind of an unreliable narrator is she?

For more than forty years, Roseanne has been confined in the Roscommon Regional Medical Hospital. The decaying psychiatric hospital facility is about to be closed, decertified and destroyed. While Roseanne writes her personal history, her secret scripture, her psychiatrist tries to determine when and why she was committed. Was she truly insane, or was her confinement another hidden atrocity of political and social abuse?

So the story is told in two voices, Roseanne and her psychiatrist, Dr. Grene. I loved Roseanne immediately. She does tell her story and remember events in a way that allows her to survive. Not always factually reliable; there are gaps that leave the reader (me) still wondering about exactly what happened and who was responsible. I’m not as forgiving as Roseanne McNulty. Dr. Grene was less endearing. I found him whiny and ineffectual. He was more tolerable in written form than in the audiobook. Wanda McCaddon is not my favorite voice artist. I usually avoid her, but she was perfect for Roseanne McNulty, just perfect. She was totally wrong for Dr. Grene . They needed a male voice for that part.

There’s wonderful, wonderful, writing in this book; powerful images, vibrant characters, lyrical prose. Roseanne was a marginally educated, Protestant, Irish woman during the 20th century. She is relating her childhood, her traumatic losses, her young adulthood. She doesn’t always have access to accurate information. Children are not told the real reasons for the bad things that happen. Trauma and time distorts memory. Without dates given or exposition on the historical events of the time, Sebastian Barry relates the effects of political and social upheavals from the first person perspective of a powerless individual. It works; Roseanne McNulty is a character that lives beyond the author’s pen. Powerless she may have been, but what a survivor! show less