The Secret of Scripture

McNulty Family

by Sebastian Barry

Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates.

Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Ireland, Book Club, Irish Literature, Historical, Literary Fiction

Paperback

First published April 2, 2008

About the author

Sebastian Barry is an Irish playwright, novelist and poet. He is noted for his dense literary writing style and is considered one of Ireland's finest writers

Barry's literary career began in poetry before he began writing plays and novels. In recent years his fiction writing has surpassed his work in the theatre in terms of success, having once been considered a playwright who wrote occasional novels.

He has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his novels A Long Long Way (2005) and The Secret Scripture (2008), the latter of which won the 2008 Costa Book of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His 2011 novel On Canaan's Side was long-listed for the Booker. He won the Costa Book of the Year again - in 2017 for Days Without End.

Reviews

[Candi · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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."

The Secret Scripture is a sublime work of fiction about memory and its effect on history and truth. It’s about love and loss, grief, religion and Ireland. It nearly broke my heart, but left me with a glimpse of joy and hope. It’s a slow unraveling of the mystery surrounding the reason why Roseanne McNulty has been institutionalized at the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital for the past sixty years of her nearly one hundred years of life. Her story is gradually revealed through her own narrative as recorded in a hidden journal as well as through inquiries made by Dr. Grene, the psychiatrist charged with her care. Roscommon is slated to shut down and Dr. Grene must determine which patients, if any, were wrongfully committed for reasons other than mental instability. The point of view alternates between Roseanne’s voice and that of Dr. Grene. What Roseanne tells us and what Dr. Grene uncovers from old documents are two different versions of “the truth”. Dr. Grene must determine which to believe and how these stories ultimately matter in his own decision regarding Roseanne’s fate in her old age. "The one thing that is fatal in the reading of impromptu history is a wrongful desire for accuracy. There is no such thing."

Roseanne’s story is a tragic one and my heart ached for this gentle soul left abandoned due to the ignorance and prejudices of other human beings. A Protestant in a country ravaged by civil war, Roseanne is a victim of the power of the Irish Catholic Church in the early 1900s. Father Gaunt is a symbol of the perversion of the influences of the church at that time over the lives and the moral judgments of those in its path. "Morality has its own civil wars, with its own victims in their own time and place."

The story is told slowly and is one to be read with quiet contemplation, allowing Sebastian Barry’s extraordinary prose to wash over and captivate you. I closed the book with a feeling of absolute contentment despite the grim journey. I will no doubt read more of this author’s work and am in fact anxious to do so. I highly recommend this five-star book.

"There are things that move at a human pace before our eyes, but other things move in arcs so great they are as good as invisible."

[Petra X · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sexuality in beautiful young women in backward societies is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it attracts young men, sometimes into marriage, and on the other it can seem to justify the accusation of being called a slut. And should the woman have a baby outside marriage, then the accusation is proved and the girl condemned and if punishment follows, it will be considered validated.

It's not much different today, is it? Call a girl a slut and people look at her askance. Not a nice person, not someone you'd want to mix with. But today the punishment is generally only social exclusion from (hypocritical) social groups. Back then, in the time of this book after the Civil War in Ireland, it could mean being locked up in mental home for the rest of their lives.

And now the girl, the woman, the old lady who is a century old is telling her tale to her doctor. He is a gentle, understanding, unfulfilled man who is doing his best for his patients who now these old institutions are being dissolved, must re-enter the world or adapt to a modern mental home.

He listens to Roseanne's story, he asks people about her, and discovers a document that tells a different story from her conversation. But there is still another story, the one she is writing of her life and hiding in the floorboards. These stories and the doctor's intertwine and they both learn far more about each other than they ever could have suspected.

It's quite an eye-opening ending, and in retrospect that is what the story is leading to all along, but I found it too pat. I thought the story of Roseanne and the Troubles with all the violence and wickedness of those timeswere good enough to stand on their own without a contrived conclusion. So 4 stars. 4.5 stars. Ok, I really enjoyed it. 5 stars!

[Dem · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superbly crafted novel told in under 300 pages. A story so cleverly written that for half of the Novel I believed I was reading a non fiction account.
image: Rosanne Mc Nulty is nearing her hundredth birthday in the mental hospital where she was committed as a young woman. Finishing up his case notes before the hospital is closed psychiatrist Dr Greene finds himself intrigued by the story of his elderly patient. While Dr Green investigates, Roseanne looks back on the tragedies and passions she has locked away in her secret journal, from her turbulent rural childhood to the marriage she believed would bring her happiness. But when Dr Green finally uncovers the circumstances of her arrival at the hospital it leads to a shocking secret.

I have read several of Barry's novels to date and this one is one of my all time favourites as this story is moving and haunting and Barry has a talent at capturing an Irishiness that is real and authentic of the time and place.

On reading this for a second time as the first time I read it was in 2009 and since the movie is out at the moment I wanted to refresh my memory and see if I would enjoy the reading experience all over again. On finishing the Novel I don't think I want to actually see the movie now as I am afraid it will spoil the vivid images created in my mind by Barry's glorious writing.

Quote from book: my mother’s wits were now in an attic of her head which had neither door nor stair, or at least none that I could find.”

This is a moving story about memory and conflicting versions of the past, beautiful and haunting and yet uplifting. A well deserved 5 stars and without doubt it earned its place on the short list for the Man Booker Prize in 2008.

[Cecily · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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...
Metal Man, Coney Island, near Sligo:
http://seafishingsligo.ie/wp-content/...
The truth will set you free (John 8:32):
http://pictures.agodman.com/wp-conten...


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.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last month my book club read Sebastian Barry's "Days Without End", and we all loved it unconditionally. That almost never happens. So our hostess up for the April read decided to assign another of Barry's books, although she had some reservations that it might compare unfavorably to the one we thought so highly of. How can it possibly be as good, she asked?
She needn't have worried, because it was as good, but in a different way. The language was still soaring and poetic, the characters just as soulful, and the story.....! What a story!
The tale is told through two journals, one by the psychiatrist needing to assess an elderly patient before the insane asylum she has been in for 60 years is demolished, and the other by the patient herself, 100 year old Roseanne Clear (or McNulty, depending on whose story can be believed.) There is also a brief deposition by the Catholic priest responsible for her incarceration, and for many of her woes, and I sincerely hope there is a special place in Hell reserved for him.
This is a multi-layered novel, with little bits of truth and understanding poking through every once in a while. Even so, I had to read the climax four times just to believe it. I still get chills thinking about it.
Even though the setting is from 1907 - 2007, it reads like a Victorian novel, maybe because of the handwritten journals and the Irish locales.
This was a complete departure from some of my other recent reading, and I was completely swept up in the story. So much so that I continue to wish Father Gaunt consigned to that special place in Hell.

[Cheri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fare thee well sweet Anna Liffy
I can no longer stay
And watch me new glass cages
that spring up along me Ouay
My mind's too full of memories
too old to hear new chimes
l'm a part of what was Dublin
in the rare ould times.
--“Dublin in the Rare Ould Times,” Dublin City Ramblers, Songwriters: Pete St. John for the Dublin City Ramblers


”Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself

“(Patient, Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, 1957 - )”

“The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.”

“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.”

“I am an old, old woman now, I may be as much as a hundred, though I do not know, and no one knows. I am only a thing left over, a remnant woman, and I do not even look like a human being no more, but a scraggy stretch of skin and bone in a bleak skirt and blouse, and a canvas jacket, and I sit here in my niche like a songless robin—no, like a mouse that died under the hearthstone where it was warm and lies now like a mummy in the pyramids.”

Roseanne McNulty has lived at the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital more years of her adult life than not, she sits and waits – but not impatiently – for whatever end awaits. In those hours she writes the story of her life in the hopes that after she’s gone someone will believe the truth of her words, finally.

Her psychiatrist, Dr. Grene, keeps his own journal:

(”Dr. Grene’s Commonplace Book
Senior Psychiatrist, Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital”)

He contemplates the decline of the building that houses these patients, and of the need to move to a newer building, and his views on Roseanne with the new hospital not being large enough to house all of their current patients. He wants to make the best decision for her in her remaining time. Those patients who he feels were unfairly committed, can, will be “let go,” as there are fewer rooms in the new facility.

It’s through their journals that their stories emerge, a story of those years that make up Roseanne’s life, how she came to be a patient in this place, but also a story of Ireland. Of the times. Ignorance. War. Conflict. Love. Passion. Family. Loss. Grief. Religion. About memories and how our lives are built around them, and how they can come to haunt us. Perhaps sometimes they can save us, as well.

This tale unravel slowly, as tales of a lifetime are wont to do, meandering a bit here and there through time and place, through the morals of the time, and the music - ah yes, the music - the places and people. It is a poignant one, her memories of her life with her father as a child, through her teenage years, her marriage, and on through the point where the whole story of Roseanne’s life finally comes to the surface, and we know her truth.

Last fall I read Barry’s ‘Days Without End,’ and loved it, loved how beautifully written it was. Another beautiful, contemplative novel by this author, I am already looking forward to reading more of his works, but first I just want to dwell in this lovely moment and contemplate – or, as my grandfather used to say “sit a spell and ponder.”


Recommended

[Manny · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful, poetic book about love and memory. Also pain, and loss, and how you can miss the most important thing in the world, even though it's right under your nose.

Ireland too, of course.

We're all innocent Roseanne, locked up in an asylum for decades for no reason, or because she happened to be born with the wrong religion, or because the jealous people around her find her beauty too disturbing. She never really knows why, but she manages to forgive her tormentors anyway, even the cruel Fr Gaunt. At the same time, we're poor Doctor Grene, who's messed up his own life and those of three other people, because he got drunk one evening and acted without thinking of the consequences.

He creates fantastic images. The burning rat. Her mother's clock. The German planes, flying low over the sea on their way to bomb Belfast.

The hammers and the feathers. I can still see them falling.

[BlackOxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Innocent Betrayals

Secret Scripture is a story of betrayals - by those we love most, of them in turn by us; but particularly our betrayal of ourselves in memory and history. We betray ourselves through memories in which we both find and avoid guilt. We are innocent because we are hapless when it comes to memory. They are of us but neither reliable nor controllable by us. Memories rarely comfort. Good ones remind us of loss; bad ones evoke regret. Curiously, memories become dissociated from motives. So the reasons for our actions at best appear incomprehensible; at worst we end up condemning ourselves.

According to Barry's fiction we don't calculate consequences - either of betraying or of being betrayed - we creep into situations which explode. We did not intend these explosions which destroy the matrix of life. They are beyond our control. We are then trapped in the rubble - of marriage, of family for an individual; and, for a community or a nation, of the enemies we have created of one other. Roseanne Clear, a centenarian confined in a mental hospital for seventy years is one such hapless victim - a woman cheated of her life through hatefulness and the mendacity of those closest to her. 

Roseanne, and her home of Sligo, also represent all of Ireland of the last century. Her "life spans everything, she is as much as we can know of our world, the last hundred years of it... The fact is we are missing so many threads in our Irish story that the tapestry of Irish life cannot but fall apart. There is nothing to hold it together." Barry describes a drear and confused Ireland, a land of religiosity without moral principles; populated by self-righteous priests and their repressed and obedient congregations. A land of fanatical peasants and their murderous leaders who have always blamed others for their murders, particularly the English whom they murdered as much as their own.

But this description is also recognised as questionable by Barry. It is a judgement based on history. History is merely recorded memories and cannot be trusted. As the doctor in charge of Roseanne’s care comes to recognise, "I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history... most truth and fact offered by syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable." The unreliability is not so much down to lies as incompleteness, axes to be ground, loyalties to be safeguarded. Penetrating this morass seems impossible, but it sometimes can be done. Reality is then found "like a lost shilling on a floor of mud, glistening in some despair."

This is a highly emotional book. It conjures sympathy, disgust, and ultimately hope in about equal measure. It is honest rather than clever; it is spare without being sparse. It is very Irish; and it is very good.

[Debra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rose McNultry is almost 100 years old. For most of her life she has been a patient in Roscommon Mental hospital in rural west Ireland. This "mad" woman has lived here most of her adult life. The hospital is going to be shut down and she is facing a scary future of being moved from where she has lived most of her life. She has frequent talks with her therapist/psychiatrist in the weeks leading up to the hospital's closure. Her therapists job is to determine what to do with the patients left behind. He needs to determine who is of sound mind but institutionalized against their will and who is mentally ill. This also asks the question, if you are sane when you are institutionalized, will this prolonged treatment render you insane?

Rose has been keeping a journal of her life which she keeps hidden under the floorboards of her room. She only takes her journals out when it is safe. It is through her journal entries that we learn about her past. Her relationship with her parents - she had a loving father and a mother who distances herself from her daughter.

Rose falls in love with a young Man who has a domineering Mother who does not approve of her Catholic son being with a Presbyterian young woman. Father Gaunt makes sure that Rose does not marry the young man she is in love with. The priest’s misogyny, mistrust and dislike for women is Rose’s downfall. Ireland's history comes into play as does the Catholic church who "puts away" those are different, who are sexual or deemed "loose". A priest’s word is law back then and troublemakers are removed from society. As a result, tragedy, cruel treatment and prejudice ensues.

I enjoyed how the story went back and forth telling Rose's story then and her story now. For some reason, the jumping back and forth between decades made Rose's story more sad - more poignant. I could feel her loneliness and pain. I, unlike Rose, would have been mad as hell at having been locked up all those years. I would have raged and fought. She chose the path of forgiveness. She is a survivor. There is something quite beautiful in her ability to sit with her loss and loneliness and forgive those who have wronged her.

This book is beautifully written. It's a big book with a lot of heart. It has a very poetic and Gothic feel to it. For some reason, while reading this book, I thought of other Gothic books such as Jane Eyre. These books are not the same and do not have similar story lines, but they do both have a lot of atmosphere and have the same type of dreary feel to them.

See more of my reviews at www.openbookpost.com

[Annet · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gem of a book, beautiful story, beautifully written. I recommend this one to my friends!

[Paula K · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was first introduced to Sebastian Barry with Days Without End published in 2016 and winner of the Costa Book Award and a Booker nominee. Days Without End hit me like a ton of bricks...so fabulously written and such a tale. Did I ever imagine that another of his books could become so beloved? Well the Secret Scripture has. But it also made me REAL ANGRY.

Set after the Irish Civil War, Roseanne Clear McNulty is about to turn 100 years old and wants to tell her story. Roseanne has spent most of her adult life confined to a psychiatric hospital in Ireland under tragic circumstances. She is the victim of Father Gaunt, the Irish Catholic priest of her village. Condemned for only talking to another man other than her new husband, the priest has made her out to be an adulteress and she looses everything.

Father Gaunt represents everything I hate about the Catholic Church. The power priests in Ireland had over women, the abuse, the repression of sexuality and its people. As a non-practicing Irish Catholic I get so angry and disturbed by these fanatics. I hate shelf-righteous religious people, always black or white, always their way as there is no other. Their opinion is the only one that exists. I understand this so well as I was brought up in a born-again Catholic family.

Sebastian Barry tells this heart-wrenching story so well. The Secret Scripture, which also won the 2008 Costa Award and Booker Prize nomination, is beautifully written and so poetic. The ending was quite unexpected! I listened to the audio as the narrator’s brogue is so delightful.

Barry, an Irish playwright, novelist, and poet has become one of my favorite authors. Recently he took over the title of Irish Poet Laureate from Anne Enwright another of Ireland’s fabulous authors.

If you are interested in the troubled history of Ireland, the Catholic Church’s repression of their society, or just reading a novel by one of the finest authors living, don’t miss.

Highly recommend.
5 out of 5 stars

[Canadian Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Secret Scriptures is a remarkable holy grail of writing.
Barry masterfully writes a poetic psychological mystery where he magically weaves a story of 2 voices: One of Roseanne McNulty, who now sits in a mental institution and has for the past 40 odd years of her 100 year life; and the other of her psychiatrist, Dr Grene, who has known her for the duration of her stay. Roseanne sits in her room as she nears the end of her life, reflecting back through the daily journal she writes and hides in the floorboards of her room. Grene has been told he needs to release patients as the hospital is closing down. He now has the task of evaluating those who are mentally sound and for reasons unbeknownst to him, were incarcerated for reasons other than mental illness. As such was the life of Roseanne - when the Irish Catholic church had a vice like grip on what morality was and for many women who didn’t fit the mold were demoralized and removed from society by being institutionalized often under horrific conditions.
Themes of good vs evil rebound; infidelity; aging; religion and loyalty. An eloquent read. 5 ★

[Paromjit · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written, haunting and profoundly moving novel from Sebastian Barry, an eye opening unofficial history of Ireland, the political turbulence, its misogyny, the injustice, ignorance, and a damning indictment of the Catholic Church, its abuse of power and judgementalism. The powerful and heartbreaking narrative, whilst somehow retaining hope, moves back and forth in time, focusing on the nature of memory, that asks the question, what is truth? 100 year old Roseanne McNulty has been incarcerated in Roscommon psychiatric hospital for most of her life, but it is facing closure, and it has fallen to Dr Grene to evaluate whether she really should have been committed in the first place. The understated and captivating story shifts from the secret hidden journal written by Roseanne to that of Dr Grene's journal, the two providing two very different perspectives as Roseanne's tragic truth is slowly unveiled, revealing how she came to end up at the asylum.

This is an extraordinary, thoughtful and engaging book that reflects Ireland's troubled history, it is of its time, of family, religion, women, love, loss and grief. If you have not yet got round to reading this, I strongly urge you to do so. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Faber and Faber.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

“History as far as I can see, it’s not the arrangement of what happens, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of the withering truth”.

A deeply emotional heartbreaking story....
My heart was aching!
Painfully sad!

Love, loss, loneliness, victimized injustice, betrayal, prejudice, Catholic Church repression.....
tragedy....upon tragedy!!

This story with it’s surprising ending won’t be easy to shake. I couldn’t be the only reader who felt anger - mixed with grief.....
......quite an affecting novel —(one of the best written books I’ve ever read within a mental institution)....
....with two forever- memorable protagonists!

Spectacular beautiful prose.

Note: there are many top notch reviews that have been written: But, in my opinion, this is a great book to go into blind—
THEN....
.....enjoy the great many reviews and the discussions you involve yourself with.

Many thanks to the Goodreads community for steering me in the direction of this novel!

Many thanks for the fantastic reviews from Candi, Dem, Diane, Cecily, Sara’, Violet, Blair, Cheri, Annet, Debra, Paula, Manny, and others....

I’m glad I finally took a turn!!!

[Violet wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

"History, as far as I can see, is not the arrangement of what happens, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth."

People often speculate on how history might be told had the voices of women not been silenced. Barry here gives us the written testament of a Presbyterian working class woman who has reached her hundredth year and has been incarcerated in an asylum for decades. The Irish troubles are never overtly centre stage but the fateful shockwaves they cause in the form of concussions and cleavages are a pivotal and malignant part of her history. Roseanne's testament to her life is juxtaposed with the musings of the consulting doctor of the asylum who takes an interest in Roseanne after his wife dies.

Roseanne's story as told by herself is perhaps no more or no less trustworthy than any account an individual might provide of his or her own life. She is continually correcting herself, stopping up short, changing the subject, picking up the thread of a narrative and then dropping it. Her memories trouble her and will not be easily hammered into simple storylines. Barry ingeniously and progressively allows us to read between her lyrical and elusive lines. The truth she is seeking to tell about her life is not so much factual truth as emotional truth. To some extent she is mythologizing her life. She does this in a voice that possesses a beautiful lyrical strangeness that conjures up poignantly the poetic realm of experience - the secret scripture. The reader meanwhile is asking two pivotal and compelling questions - who is she writing this testament for and how did she spend most of her life in an asylum? Dr Grene's musings, called in the novel "Dr Grene's Commonplace Book", will eventually help provide answers to both questions, though he too, for guilty reasons of his own, initially seeks to hide as much as to reveal. When we finally learn the truth we are left musing on the culpability of masculinity, sometimes reinforced by female slavishness to convention, including of a religious nature, in not only simplifying history but perverting it.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Catholic Church was all powerful, a time in Ireland when religious and political factions cause almost unceasing distress and death. A young beautiful woman, a protestant woman, dares to fall in love with a Catholic but will end up spending a great part of her one-hundred years inside a psychiatric institution. Why and how did this happen?

A story written down by a very old woman, an account of the priest uncovered by Doctor Grene who is charged with discovering which of the residents, patients would be allowed to go free when this old institution is destroyed. Yet, the accounts vary greater, so which one to believe?

And so slowly unravels the story of a life, a time when a priest's word was unquestionable. Irish mothers and their sons, I married one, the son, well possibly the mother too. A very dense and wordy book, a book one must read slowly, a very sad and poignant tale. A very good and touching tale, that brings that whole period back to life and shows us the true story of what actually happened to Roseanne, and what Doctor Grene will decide to do in the face of the truth.

[Kalliope · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this novel I have felt as if I were peeling two onions: one yellow, one purple. First one, then the other, and back to the first and so on. My illusion was that after peeling its outer tunic and I proceeded to remove, slowly and gradually each scale leaf, I was lifting a veil and approaching the inner bud, a hidden core. The truth.

The yellow onion has less thinner and finer leaves. In their frailty and subtler delicacy of colour, they are as the veiled and vulnerable memories of an old woman. Evocative and reminiscent. The purple one has thicker, heftier, almost corpulent scale leaves. They are also brighter in their colour contrast, as if written in black and white. In their matter-of-factness they seem manlier and have more purpose. As scientific men often do.

And then as I peel them both, they gradually begin to lose their distinctiveness, and become more alike. The white translucent tone predominates, and begins to feel as if they were the same onion after all.

This illusion or tale of two onions is deceptive. There is no such thing really. I am not peeling any onions. I have just read a novel. But I have imagined it but as I develop it the image seems to have acquired a greater consistency and reality than the book I have read. It seem to be getting all confused. Once I started with the onions simile my review has taken a flight of its own and I feel I am moving away from the book I have just read and am trying to review.

For example, the tale of the onions does not have any reference to the murky and violent politics as those suffered in the Ireland of the 1920s when the country endured the worst kind of wars--a civil one. It is certainly far away from any meditation of the thorny aspects of sexuality when there may be abuse or self-delusion involved. It ignores completely the issues of stale religions and conventions when they exclude individuals out of a fossilized set of social arrangements. For it does not include any consideration of the themes of betrayal and trust and how they combine with love, and what happens to broken dreams and candid idealisms under the pressure of torturing creeds. My invented analogy overlooks the peculiar mixture of crystal clear writing with elusive and elegant passages of lyricism with no sugar of Barry’s pen. And it omits to consider that one of the characters could be understood in its symbolic dimension and does not see that it is as big as an entire land.

But then the onions do present a story too, and we all need stories, for stories are the stuff of life and of our self-knowledge. So, yes, after all, Barry’s novel does have for me some aspects, even if somewhat reduced and simplified, of the story of my imagined peeling of the two onions, since the image did occur to me intricately connected to my reading of the novel. There must be something there, or at least in my mind, which after all is all that matters. At least to me.

And now as the imagined peeled onions get more and more entangled with my memory of Barry’s novel, I realize that someone who has not read the novel would have a difficult time ascertaining what the Secret Scripture is all about, since my own telling is just misconstruing and is disfigured by other ideas that populate my mind. And for those who have read it, my bringing in this stupid account of the onions, and my peeling of them, will appear as a mangled distortion.

At least let me say that I do not intend to trivialize Barry’s novel. Forget the onions. I should have concentrated on the actual process of unveiling: the continuous progress when moving from the distinct to the sameness, or from appearances to the essences. What may seem different may turn out to be of the same nature.

And yet, do not belittle banality. The games that the mind plays sometimes act as a defence against sorrow and despair.

Leaves of the onion, leaves of the book. Both could make you feel vulnerable and cry.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

I expected to love this book because I loved Days Without End. This is a radical change of pace. Mostly it made me angry. Not that there's anything wrong with the writing. It's a bit like exploring a forgotten or secret garden full of shy beauty if take the time to look.

Based on news stories of the time and place, this is oddly a happy ending version of so many women's stories.

*********************************************
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/wo...
ttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03...

[Andy Marr · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really wish Goodreads offered the chance to award half-stars. This was my second Sebastian Barry novel, after Days Without End, which I read back in 2018. While TSS wasn't quite poor enough to gain three stars, DWE wasn't good enough to gain five, and so, despite enjoying one far less than the other, both get four stars. It hardly seems fair, really.

Incidentally, this would have earned the full four stars if I hadn't guessed the 'surprise twist' at precisely the 31% mark (this despite the fact I'm notoriously stupid when it comes to plot twists). The prose was also slightly overdone in places, though all in all I'm rather in love with Barry's writing.

[PattyMacDotComma · Rating 5 out of 5]

5★
“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.” from Roseanne’s ‘Testimony of Herself’

What a mighty book! Roseanne McNulty is one hundred years old, sent years ago from the Sligo Lunatic Asylum to the Roscommon Regional Medical Hospital, which is now destined for demolition. Dr Grene is the psychiatrist charged with reducing patient numbers, deciding who can be safely released into the community.

He met Roseanne Clear, his oldest patient, when he arrived thirty years ago, but he hasn’t been able to find out when or why she was sent there. As he questions her and tries to locate information, he writes in his Commonplace Book, some of which makes up his chapters, along with his own memories and musings.

Meanwhile, Roseanne is writing her own story, her testimony of herself, and hiding the pages under a loose floorboard in her room. Her chapters are what she remembers as her truth, but even she is unsure how accurately she interpreted her childhood.

One character is a constant presence in her life: “the parish priest, a little perky darting man called Father Gaunt who loomed so large later in my own story, if a small man can be said to loom large.”

In her chapters, she writes lovingly of her father, a grave-digger, and tells how he was unjustly demoted to rat-catcher, making the family even poorer. As a child, she says she went everywhere with him, proudly helping him catch rats. She writes about the dangers from soldiers, police, and shootings.

“It is difficult to describe the noise that guns make in a small enclosed space, but it would make the bones drop out of your flesh.”

Later, when she’s a bit older, she describes her mother’s condition.

“ …because my mother’s wits were now in an attic of her head which had neither door nor stair, or at least none that I could find. If we were to eat, I must find work of any kind.”

As a young woman in Sligo, in the northwest of Ireland, she was a popular partner at dances on weekends at the Plaza, fell in love with Tom McNulty, and married him. So why is she in this hospital and when did she arrive? Where are her people? In fact, who are her people?

Dr Grene feels compelled to find out before he can assess her, but he’s wary of her answers. Roseanne writes that he has asked what she remembers about how she came to be here.

“ ‘I do remember terrible dark things, and loss, and noise, but it is like one of those terrible dark pictures that hang in churches, God knows why, because you cannot see a thing in them.’

‘Mrs McNulty, that is a beautiful description of traumatic memory.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes, it is.’ ”

He doesn’t doubt her there, but he still has reservations about the facts, as she relates them.

“Like some psychotics she was very certain about, and consistent in, what she seemed to know. Yet she also confessed openly to ignorance on many matters, which suggested to me she was not psychotic, but that her memory too perhaps had suffered the silverfish of age. A psychotic person often supplies answers to everything, whatever their truth. They intensely dislike not knowing, because it brings on the pain and storm of confusion.”

The silverfish of age - pesky little creatures.

Meanwhile, he’s grieving the recent death of his wife, Bet. His description of her parents’ opinion of him at the time of the wedding shows how fractured religious affiliations were (are?) in Ireland.

“My parents were Catholic, which might have stood in their favour, except that they were English Catholics, a people in the eyes of my inlaws more Protestant than the Protestants themselves, and at the very least, deeply deeply mysterious, like creatures from some other time, when Henry VIII was wanting to marry. They must have thought Bet was marrying a phantom.”

He thinks about how he happened to end up in Sligo, at this institution, at this time, and how on earth he will turn people out of care. How did the patients/inmates arrive here? He hesitates over the word ‘inmate’.

“But as the place was constructed in the late eighteenth century as a charitable institution for the ‘healthful asylum and superior correction of wounded seats of thought’ the word inmate does always spring to mind.”

Wounded seats of thought - an old, interesting description of mental illness. About the old men, he says:

“They are certainly not mentally ill the most of them, they are just the ‘detritus’ of the system, as I once heard them referred to. One of them that I know well fought in the Congo with the Irish army. A good few of them in fact are ex-army men. I suppose we lack a place like Chelsea barracks, or Les Invalides in Paris. Who would be an old soldier in Ireland?”

Who indeed? And who would be the doctor trying to decide their futures?

I love Barry’s writing and his characters, and although I haven’t yet read the early McNulty Family book, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, I’m sure it isn’t necessary to appreciate what a terrific work this is, well worth its many prizes and its nomination for the 2008 Booker Prize.

Thanks to NetGalley and Faber and Faber for a copy for review. Although published in 2015, it has been promoted to publicise the recent release of Old God's Time, which I also read and reviewed.

My review of Old God’s Time

The Guardian has a wonderful interview with Barry, "Family stories mean a whole different thing when you are 60."

Link to Guardian article, 7 March 2020

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author slowly weaves together two heart-wrenching and tragic versions of the life of Roseanne McNulty, a 100-year old woman residing (for much of her adult life) in a psychiatric asylum. The first version is Roseanne’s own elusive and often unreliable past recollection, recorded in her secret journal, hidden in the floorboards of her room. Another version is slowly revealed by her psychiatrist; Dr. Grene, as he investigates her sketchy past records and evaluates her suitability for release into the community.

Both accounts of Roseanne’s shattering life history gradually reveal more than the mystery of her long-term confinement in a mental hospital. Roseanne also recalls the turmoil following the Irish Civil War as well as the abusive power of a parish priest. It is a beautifully rendered Irish tale that will haunt me for some time to come.

I listened to an audio version of this story and I was mesmerized by the narrator’s captivating Irish brogue. The narrator, along with this author’s lyrical prose, gives a voice to all of those women unjustly institutionalized in early 20th century Ireland.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book, all of it, the prose, the content, the Irish-ness of it. The words are chosen so well that they flow smoothly in telling the story. Memory is a center of the tale as is Ireland and fate as in all Irish stories. There is love and hate, war but no real peace. There is always misunderstanding, but there are occasional attempts to move beyond this.

The ending was foreshadowed to some degree but I didn't mind that at all. Once again it fits with the fateful-ness and Irish nature of it all.

This was my first book by Barry but most definitely not the last.

[❀Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m going with 5 stars since three days after finishing, I’m still thinking about how good this book was. It had me completely captivated from start to finish. The story was subtle but chilling, with many layers of tragedy and dark elements (a cemetery, rats, and a disturbing priest to name a few…not to mention the suspicion of the sanity of the main character). But the writing was beautiful and not a single word was wasted. I loved the gothic-like atmosphere that was created and how it tied in with the dark themes and symbolism throughout. There were two narrators with distinct voices, both of which I was equally eager to read as they alternated in the story. They gave such intimate accounts of their lives and the horrific and sad times they had experienced, that it felt more like reading the memoirs of real people. This was a slower read for me—which I didn’t mind—because the pace was steady with just enough suspense to keep it intriguing...until towards the end when the intensity grew to where I could not put it down. I loved how it all came together in the end.

[Laysee · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is hard to resist a secret and harder yet when it is as masterfully unraveled as this one. Sebastian Barry tells an absorbing story about a 100-year-old woman and the secrets that installed her for many wretched decades in a mental hospital. The “terror and hurt” in Roseanne McNulty’s story has a monstrosity that seems inevitable in the historical landscape of Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s. Roseanne is powerless against harsh political realities and the unforgiving religious and social temper of those times. She seems to me a woman more sinned against than sinning.

When the story begins, Roseanne is on the threshold of being evicted from the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, as it will soon be demolished. The plan is to return its inmates to the community except those assessed to be unfit for independent living. The prospect of freedom is frightening to Roseanne. "..these small actions, associated in most people's minds with the ease and happiness of life, are to me still knives in my heart to think of." Dr. William Grene, the 65-year-old psychiatrist visits Roseanne to establish reasons for her initial commitment and her eligibility for continued residence at the new Roscommon. Barry captures the respectful doctor-patient relationship that over time comes close to friendship.

The Secret Scripture takes the form of two diaries that are alternately presented. The first is Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself scribbled onto clean sheets in blue ink and hidden beneath the floorboards of her room; the second is Dr. Grene’s Commonplace Book that records his interviews with Roseanne, notes from historical documents that shed light on Roseanne’s past, and snippets of his own life and personal tragedy. These diary entries are jigsaw pieces to the sordid secrets of Roseanne’s beleaguered life. It is intriguing that not all the pieces fit, and fit they must for me. Thus, Barry kept me digging deeper into Roseanne’s past.

There are parallels between Roseanne’s life and Dr. Grene's. Both have spouses they love and who love them, and yet they tragically lose them through one isolated act of indiscretion. Both carry so much sadness that dissolve into tears at unsuspecting moments - tears that defy attempts to itemise their causes. Both have a quickened sensitivity to the pain of others, having been honed in the crucible of their own suffering.

One of the strengths that stood out for me is Barry’s astuteness in laying bare the nuances of human interactions that are relatable. In his conversations with Roseanne, Dr. Grene becomes keenly aware of "That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer." The reason we are sometimes tongue-tied. While reflecting on his failure to communicate with his wife, Dr. Grene confesses: "We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach." Thus, silence that is voluble, awkward conversations that stall in mid flow, facial expressions and gestures that signify shifts in mental states are delicately conveyed.

Roseanne’s predicament points to the intractability of human existence. What is the nature of history? Dr. Grene wonders outloud, "Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable..." Of even greater import, of what use is truth if it does not radiate health for the individual concerned? For people working in mental health care, a relevant question is: How far should a mental health professional go to uncover a patient’s private life? How Dr. Grene justifies a choice he made moved me: "Today was the day she might have told me everything, and today was the day I opted myself for her silence, her privacy. Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy." I cannot agree more. Reading Roseanne’s pitiful plight also makes me wonder how possible it is for a person to be the author of his or her own life. Dr. Grene observes: “Roseanne has endured, even though her life is all farthings." Roseanne is an ordinary woman but her endurance is extraordinary. In the cocoon of her silence, she writes her pain into the floorboards. Stories are important.

The Secret Scripture is a sad story but it could well be the story of any other woman who had lived during the years of the civil war in Ireland and the intolerance of its religious communities. I wish I knew more about the history of Ireland and imagine that this book will mean more to a reader who is better informed. The revelation at the close of the novel is shocking but marvelous. This is my first novel by Sebastian Barry. I know I will read more of his work. Barry’s prose alone is a joy to read.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was sent to me by my mother, who is Irish, and it was sent to her by a childhood friend, also Irish, Joan's name on the front page; so, I felt obliged to read it, knowing full well it was not a book I would choose for myself.

I read the first 80? - 90 pages to be precise and realized as I was going along, that I have in fact read it before. And then more or less exactly from page 90 to about 199 I had no recollection of it at all - Blank. I must have put it down, and not returned - disinterested, bored perhaps.

And then on page 199 when Roseanne meets John Lavelle up Knocknarea, I realized - oh Wow I remember this - it is the most beautiful declaration of love - ever. I most definitely remembered all of that - and pretty much all the rest of the book.

Except I was ASTONISHED to find that I had not remembered the ending - and the Ending I think is quite possibly the whole purpose of the book. I had no recall, and so I was genuinely surprised and most sincerely moved by Dr Grene's discovery about himself.

I can only conclude that I did in fact read the whole book the first time around, but that there must be some reason or reasons why I could remember only specific parts.

The first 90 pages - easy to explain - they are quite sensationalist - and I use this word in it's derogatory connotation - there is too much in this opening third - too much Drama! The book runs to 312 pages.

I shuddered for the second time, when I read how Roseanne's mother stabbed the little metal hands, from her clock into the eyes of her husband, Roseanne's beloved father Joe Clear lying in his coffin. 10 pages letter I put the book down - with genuine disgust and loathing when I read how Father Gaunt wanted to convert Roseanne to his Catholic faith by marrying her off to the 50 plus, fat, Joe Brady - who had taken her father's job as the town's gravedigger.

Yeuch - Father Gaunt is the slime to beat all slimy Catholic priests - and Roseanne shows incredible strength in resisting him. Her mother - has clearly withdrawn in mental derangement and Roseanne, 16, needs to find work to support herself and her mother. She tells the priest where to go.

And then - the next 100 pages - forgotten. I can conclude quite reasonably - out of sheer boredom. On the second run through I made myself continue. This is where the author fills us in on Roseanne's middle years - the job in the cafe, her marriage to Tom McNulty and at the same time we hear about the current story which I found really hard to date - I did eventually pin it down to 2007 or thereabouts, through our main narrator Dr Grene, who is responsible for the Roscommon Mental Institute where Roseanne McNulty has been a patient for most of her life.

I think there is something of a structural problem here, the two stories are told via written documentation from our two main characters. Roseanne, writes her life story on loose pages which she hides under the floorboards in her room. Her great age of 100 compels her to make some account of her life, and she feels some compulsion to help Dr Grene with his enquiries. The second document is - 'Dr Grene's Commonplace Notebook', a diary of sorts about the hospital, the patients under his care, and his personal life, notably his relationship with his estranged wife, Bet: the problem being that both narrators, wander, halt, backtrack, segue off into different stories. Roseanne I could easily forgive, - she 's almost 100, and her voice is so humble and sad; and she is taking great care to try and remember her life as accurately as possible.

Dr Grene, on the other hand - my God - exasperation - of the highest order - quite possibly - the reason for my 100 page memory lapse.

And then we have the stunning chapter 16 - 'Roseanne's Testimony of Herself' which culminates with the despicable Father Gaunt once more, who has contrived over a number of years to annul her marriage to Tom NcNulty and demands Roseanne stay - a sort of house prisoner, in her hut by the sea near to Strandhill.

Here is Roseanne commenting on the nature of memory:

I must admit there are 'memories' in my head that are curious even to me. I would not like to have to say this to Dr Grene. 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 that don't belong there. I certainly suspect - well, I don't know what I certainly suspect. It makes me a little dizzy to contemplate the possibility that everything I remember may not be - may not be real, I suppose. There was so much turmoil at that time that - that what? I took refuge in other impossible histories, in dreams, in fantasies. I don't know.

I don't actually agree with everything above - for example I don't think memory "is neglected", but yes trauma, it is now well understood that people deliberately blank awful memories as a way to protect themselves. But you can also see the hesitant style - Two narrators with this kind of hesitancy can get - tedious.

Secondly and this becomes clear as I write this - I don't like that it's the man with the status of doctor and psychiatrist, who 'absolves' Roseanne's faulty memory; who finally decides that Roseanne's "Testimony" is also valid although she refuses to remember certain facts concerning her father. The psychiatrist decides eventually, at long last that perhaps there are omissions of a sort in Father Gaunt's testimony - the reasons for Roseanne's sectioning in a psychiatric hospital.

I have to say I dislike Dr Grene - he's supposed to be a good guy - but he always looks at the formal, the status, the material aspects of the world. Father Gaunt is a priest therefore his testimony is 'sacrosanct'. I suppose that is the point of Dr Grene's character to show how men of the world behave, and after all Dr Grene is suitably softened, and humiliated slightly with the death of his wife, his own advancing years and yes his backstory about his adoption and the death of his sibling - killed in a road accident because of him. He learns via life experiences to be a little bit more like Roseanne - to hesitate, to offer silence, to not pass judgement, to forgive.

Still didn't like him.

Does it not strike anyone - that there is just too much in this story, stories?

I loved John Lavelle's avowal of love for Roseanne - but Roseanne herself silent, dismisses it, preferring the gay, satisfying life with her husband Tom, the musician, the politician, and not with the outcast Lavelle - but Lavelle is in fact her true reflection. She doesn't want to recognize this.

What about Lavelle's backstory - his wife shot through the head, whilst holding her infant sons, one is killed instantly with her, the other is dropped and damaged in the head by his fall. The shots are fired, randomly by soldiers in a boat, looking for a desserter, or rival faction in the Civil War: I forget.

It is a strange book - with decided highs and lows of narrative skill and incident. Too much incident in some places, not enough in others.

I still can't get past completely forgetting the Big Reveal at the end - I clearly didn't think too much of Dr Grene first time round; I think I have softened somewhat on the second reading.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, if you're going to read this, please don't read the goodreads description.

This book didn't change my world, but it was good. It's made up mostly of recollections by its very elderly narrator, but the way it uses (perhaps unreliable) memory isn't like, say, Ishiguro, who uses gradual revelations to turn a story on its head. There are surprises (or not, if you are the sort of person who guesses everything before you're told), but the surprises aren't supposed to make you think you've been had.

It's wonderfully written, if a tad on the dreamy side in occasional spots, and the story is fairly absorbing. I think I would have gotten a lot more out of it if I knew more about Irish history, but nonetheless I was hooked the whole way through, and enjoyed it a bunch.

I read A Long Long Way (also by Sebastian Barry) a couple of years ago, and really enjoyed that book as well. I didn't need a reminder that he's a good writer, but reading The Secret Scripture told me that he's not a one-trick pony. Maybe that's the wrong word, because A Long, Long Way, with its very linear plot and straightforward, honest descriptions, doesn't really have any tricks. The Secret Scripture has tricks, but they don't overwhelm the piece - Barry is not a gimmickist. I guess the worst you could say of him is that he sometimes strays into the whimsical. He is also a poet, and you can tell.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sligo made me and Sligo undid me, but then I should have given up much sooner than I did being made or undone by human towns, and looked to myself alone. The terror and hurt in my story happened because when I was young I thought others were the author 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.

~~~~~

My father's happiness not only redeemed him, but drove him to stories, and keeps him even now alive in me, like a second and more pleasing soul within my poor soul.

~~~~~

There are things that move in arcs so great that they are as good as invisible. The baby sees a star winking in the dark night window, and puts out his hand to hold it. So my father struggled to grasp things that were in truth far beyond his reach, and indeed when they showed their lights were already old and done.

~~~~~

In these simple quotes, in Barry's own words, I have summed up the novel, and my feelings for it. To add much more to this narrative would be superfluous.

These are the stories that are imprinted in my DNA, I think. I gravitate towards them and find myself like a thirsty soul whose thirst is only quenched by these stories of Ireland: the duality of hope and despair, in one breath.

It should go without saying ... 5 stars, only because I don't have more to give.

[Cathrine ☯️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

4★

"Roseanne had always lived on the edges of our known world...'This is a decent place, if not home. If this were home I would go mad!'"

How gracious she is to say that when a mental institution is a kinder place than home. What exactly happened to her and who's version of the retelling can you trust? A psychological mystery weaving back and forth in time over a period of almost 90 years, I had different sensations reading this atmospheric tale. Not a long book but the pacing got a bit monotonous midway through. Old women take their time telling their stories. Exquisite prose (sigh). "It was a silence like a hole with a sucking wind in it."

It was so bleak. It was so sad. The book blurb says "a vivid reminder of the stranglehold that the Catholic Church had on individual lives for much of the twentieth century." True, but if you want my version, I would say a vivid reminder of how men have had a stranglehold on women in particular for much of history; not surprisingly the human sexual response taking the starring role. Tragically this is not an isolated tale but one repeated over and over all over the globe into 2015 depending on where you had the luck or misfortune to be born.

Finishing up I felt like I had just walked through a haunted house. A real haunted house.

[Joy D · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 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.

[Britany · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really wanted to like this one-- the summary sounded like something I would fall right into-- but alas, I trudged, slugged, and finally finished this book. Disappointed that I never connected to the characters or the story at all, surprised to find myself at this end of the spectrum when so many others enjoyed this one.

Roseanne Clear has been living in Roscommon- a mental facility for the past 80 some odd years. Roscommon is being demolished and Dr. Grene is tasked with figuring out which patients need to stay and move to another facility and which patients were mistakenly diagnosed and can move on to the rest of the world. As he delicately attempts to figure out Roseanne, she tells her story too. Grim and heartbreaking as it was-- hard to find this emotion when the connection was lacking.