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The Secret Scripture: A Novel, by Sebastian Barry
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An epic story of family, love, and unavoidable tragedy from the two-time Man Booker Prize finalist
Sebastian Barry 's novels have been hugely admired by readers and critics, and in 2005 his novel A Long Long Way was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In The Secret Scripture, Barry revisits County Sligo, Ireland, the setting for his previous three books, to tell the unforgettable story of Roseanne McNulty. Once one of the most beguiling women in Sligo, she is now a resident of Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital and nearing her hundredth year. Set against an Ireland besieged by conflict, The Secret Scripture is an engrossing tale of one woman's life, and a vivid reminder of the stranglehold that the Catholic church had on individuals throughout much of the twentieth century. The Secret Scripture is soon to be a film starring Jessica Chastain and Vanessa Redgrave.
Sebastian Barry's latest novel, Days Without End, will be available from Viking in January 2017.
- Sales Rank: #115061 in Books
- Brand: Barry, Sebastian
- Published on: 2009-04-28
- Released on: 2009-04-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.75" h x .61" w x 5.05" l, .46 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
From Publishers Weekly
The latest from Barry (whose A Long Way was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker) pits two contradictory narratives against each other in an attempt to solve the mystery of a 100-year-old mental patient. That patient, Roseanne McNulty, decides to undertake an autobiography and writes of an ill-fated childhood spent with her father, Joe Clear. A cemetery superintendent, Joe is drawn into Ireland's 1922 civil war when a group of irregulars brings a slain comrade to the cemetery and are discovered by a division of Free-Staters. Meanwhile, Roseanne's psychiatrist, Dr. Grene, investigating Roseanne's original commitment in preparation for her transfer to a new hospital, discovers through the papers of the local parish priest, Fr. Gaunt, that Roseanne's father was actually a police sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary. The mysteries multiply when Roseanne reveals that Fr. Gaunt annulled her marriage after glimpsing her in the company of another man; Gaunt's official charge was nymphomania, and the cumulative fallout led to a string of tragedies. Written in captivating, lyrical prose, Barry's novel is both a sparkling literary puzzle and a stark cautionary tale of corrupted power. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* From the first page, Barry’s novel sweeps along like the Garravogue River through Sligo town, taking “the rubbish down to the seas, and bits of things that were once owned by people and pulled from the banks, and bodies, too, if rarely, oh, and poor babies, that were embarrassments, the odd time.” We are in the head and the journal of 100-year-old “mad” Roseanne McNulty, locked up for decades in an asylum in rural west Ireland. She has begun writing her life story, hiding it nightly beneath her bedroom’s creaking floorboards. Simultaneously, her putative therapist, Dr. Grene, who barely knows her, much less her history or prognosis, begins an observation journal about her. The asylum is to be downsized, and he must determine whether she is sane enough to live on her own. He attempts to reconstruct the reasons for her imprisonment, as it turns out to be, and that pitches the novel into the dark depths of Ireland’s civil war and the antiwoman proscriptions on sexuality of the national regime Joyce famously called “priestridden.” Barry weaves together Grene’s and Roseanne’s stories, which are ultimately the same story, masterfully and with intense emotionality that nevertheless refuses to become maudlin. Another notable part of Barry’s artistry is the sheer poetry of his prose, now heart-stoppingly lyrical, now heart-poundingly thrilling. An unforgettable portrait of mid-twentieth-century Ireland. --Patricia Monaghan
Review
"[Barry writes] in language of surpassing beauty. . . . It is like a song, with all the pulse of the Irish language, a song sung liltingly and plaintively from the top of Ben Bulben into the airy night."
—Dinitia Smith, The New York Times
" Barry recounts all this in prose of often startling beauty. Just as he describes people stopping in the street to look at Roseanne, so I often found myself stopping to look at the sentences he gave her, wanting to pause and copy them down."
—Margot Livesey, The Boston Globe
"Luminous and lyrical."—O, The Oprah Magazine
"A great novel about a ninety-nine-year-old woman...trying to understand the truth of her life...Along the way are some of the most beautifully formed prose passages I have ever read."
—Thomas Cahill, author of How the Irish Saved Civilization
"Written in captivating, lyrical prose, Barry's novel is both a sparkling literary puzzle and a stark cautionary tale of corrupted power."
—Publishers Weekly
"Part of Barry's artistry is the sheer poetry of his prose, now heart-stoppingly lyrical, now heart-poundingly thrilling. An unforgettable portrait of mid-twentieth-century Ireland."
—Booklist
"It is a poignant story of the horrors and hypocrisies of rural Ireland, the cruelties of civil war, and the pernicious influence of the priesthood. Roseanne is a vivid and engaging protagonist, and Barry makes rich use of the circumlocutions of his native tongue."
—The Daily Mail (London)
"Dark, awkward, and exceptionally finely written."—The Telegraph (London)
"In this book, the worlds each character builds are significantly, tantalizingly estranged from each other. The novel's delight lies in the way in which the two tales—and, eventually the two lives—begin to coalesce, to the utter surprise of both the characters and the reader."
—The Economist
Most helpful customer reviews
154 of 167 people found the following review helpful.
"Morality has its own civil wars, with its own victims in their own time and place."
By Luan Gaines
In his distinctly Irish novel, set in County Sligo and Roscommon, a mental institution, a perhaps century old woman, Roseanne Cleary McNulty, pens a diary of her long life, which she hides in her room under the floorboards. Retrieving the notebook only when it's safe, Roseanne reveals a deeply loving relationship with a father who dies far too young and a mother who withdraws over time into the solitude of a troubled mind. Presbyterians, the Cleary's are an anomaly in Catholic Sligo, Joe Cleary dominating the landscape of his daughter's formative years. Reeling from his death and her mother's complete disinterest in the world around her, Roseanne is a naïve young woman, unprepared for what awaits, falling quickly in love with Tom McNulty. Tom and his brothers, and their domineering mother are the faces of the stubborn, loyal Irish rebels who spend their years fighting for independence, closing ranks against outsiders.
Much at work in Roseanne's life is a priest, Father Gaunt, a man invested in his own arrogance and misogyny, who visits his hatred and mistrust of women on the innocent Roseanne. It is through Gaunt's efforts that Roseanne's marriage to Tom is ruined, no one of consequence to protect the girl, left staggering at the blows fate has dealt. Having been institutionalized for over half her life at the time she writes her memoirs, the remarkable thing about this character, as so beautifully rendered by Barry, is her inherent generosity of spirit and disinclination to harsh judgment of those who have wronged her. And while Roseanne is writing of her father and her marriage, Dr. Grene is charged with determining the future placement of his patient, Roscommon soon to be vacated and completely demolished. Unwilling to interrogate a woman whose face still carries the remnants of her exceptional beauty, Grene becomes fascinated by the small details he uncovers, hints that the truth may differ from Roseanne's recollection of her past.
Alternating these two stories (Dr. Grene beset by a terrible personal loss while investigating Roseanne's life), the author reveals an Ireland in turmoil, a beautiful woman caught up in a family enacting their part of that troubled history, cast out by the venality of a priest. It is Roseanne's great tragedy that her striking beauty is wielded as a sword to annihilate her world, her fond recollections of father and husband- at least for a time- the only buffer against the cruelty of the world. Roseanne's story is important because it is her voice, among many, that speaks to the plight of women ill-used by a hypocritically moral society and a Catholic church that has the power to ruin a life with one harsh judgment. Barry delivers an extraordinarily dear character in Roseanne and an empathetic doctor in Grene, setting the stage for a denouement that weaves these two lives intimately together, each in need of solace: "There is something greater than judgment. I think it is called mercy." Luan Gaines/ 2008.
42 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
A splendid, powerfully moving novel, not to be missed.
By Skye Hye
Before she died, my 98 year old grandmother, sinking into the bog of dementia, said to me: Everyone sees this ancient skin, wrinkled, my fingers bent and swollen, my hair falling to nothing, but I am a girl inside this skin. I feel exactly the same in my mind and my heart as I did at twenty.
I never forgot it, and now that my time is coming and my own skin thinning, I understand exactly what she meant.
This novel about the enduring power of the human spirit in the face of unrelenting tragedy and betrayal, struck me to the heart. I found it incredibly moving and was riveted to the page.
There is something about being a survivor that wounds you, takes away whole pieces of you, but despite the pain and horror, makes each small aspect of life a triumph. For Rosanne, it was the daffoldils and the roses, and the sunlight on her window pane, for others, a sunset, the pleasure of an ice cream cone in summer, the smell of just cut grass. I saw a fox in the dark night when I was driving through the village last week; it had another small animal in its mouth, trotting merrily past the pavement in front of me. I had never seen a fox before. I felt so lucky, so deliriously happy, to have seen it, as Rosanne felt with the new opening daffoldils from her window in the assylum.
To see this beauty and feel this intense pleasure in ordinary things is a triumph over the brutality and ugliness that living in society can bring, as is the ability to retain one's humanity - kindness, compassion, understanding, empathy. To see the world in a grain of sand....
Barry's writing is like wild strawberries bursting in your mouth, each sentence is to be savoured, and the poetry and cadence of the Irish way of speaking, whether it is the Gaelic or in English is so beautifully, so powerfully, so accurately given to us to see and hear and take away to keep. I remember listening to the Irish aunts and uncles I knew as a child, thinking that their conversation was like poetry. And it was.
I saw a few negative reviews as well as the many positive ones, and it may be that in the age of television and high speed internet, that something like this that takes its time to unfold and reveal its mysteries, like Rosanne's daffolils, can seem to some as frustratingly slow. I found the pace perfect for the unravelling of Rosanne's life story, that grew more gripping each time I turned the page.
I feel grateful to the author for having written it, and for the enriching experience of having read it.
63 of 69 people found the following review helpful.
Redemption
By E.B.
There are tragedies flung at us by the gods such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Then there are those tragedies visited upon us by ourselves. This is a tale of the latter.
In dark and gorgeous language Barry tells the story of an old woman, Roseanne McNulty. From childhood Roseanne was set on a path that inexorably led her to stray outside the strict conventions of 1940s Ireland. Unwittingly, she becomes the victim of a merciless society bent on rigid conformity and determined to exact its revenge on those who flout its dictates. For those whose picture of Ireland in the "old days" is one of rose-covered thatched cottages, the revelation that so much pain resided behind the walls of many of those dwellings may come as an unpleasant surprise. But those of us who have lived in Ireland and particularly have witnessed its relatively recent confrontation with so many of the dark secrets of its past, Roseanne's tale has the gut-wrenching but undeniable claim of authenticity.
Barry summons the voice of Roseanne perfectly. As the narrative gradually shifts from Roseanne to the psychiatrist, Dr. Grene, who has tasked himself with the mission to discover the elusive truth about Roseanne's past, Barry also captures Grene and his mid-life turbulences beautifully. This is not a plot-driven novel which is just as well: my only complaint is that I found the plot, such as it is, to require some hard work by the reader in suspending disbelief. But it is a minor matter in a book that concerns itself with issues such as history, mercy and the very nature of truth. In the end, Barry's characters eloquently present the argument that redemption is indeed possible.
I stongly recommend this book.
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