Irish poet, novelist, and playwright Sebastian Barry recently won the Costa Prize (previously the Whitbread Prize) for The Secret Scripture, which reintroduces themes and settings from his earlier novel, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998). He is also author of A Long Long Way (2005), a Booker Prize finalist.
The Story: Centenarian Roseanne McNulty has decided to record her life story, "for dearly would I love now to leave an account, some kind of brittle and honest-minded history of myself." However, having spent the last several decades at the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital in Ireland, she is forced to scribble her memoirs on scavenged scraps of paper and hide them under floorboards. When the crumbling institution is condemned, head psychiatrist Dr. William Grene, who writes a parallel narrative, must determine which patients will be transferred to another facility and which will be released. He is convinced that Roseanne is sane, but when he tries to prove it during their interviews, a sly cat-and-mouse game ensues.
Viking. 304 pages. $24.95. ISBN: 0670019403
Guardian (UK)
"He writes with a dramatist’s timing and a poet’s exactitude. … The result is a richly allusive and haunting text that is nevertheless jagged enough to avoid the anaesthetic of high lyricism." Joseph O’Connor
Philadelphia Inquirer
"The key to this book is the music of its language, which derives not from any high-toned verbiage, but from Barry’s flawless ear for words as sounds. … The Secret Scripture is a wondrous novel, a long, sad aria about how very much that fragile thing called love can not only endure, but actually triumph over." Frank Wilson
Hartford Courant
"[Roseanne’s] voice, at once elegiac, sardonic, enraged and deeply wounded, is a marvel. … This is a powerful story, and … Barry … tells it compellingly." Carole Goldberg
New York Times
"In Mr. Barry’s new novel [Irish] history is symbolized by a secret. And it is revealed to the reader as if a thread were being slowly unraveled from the cocoon of a silkworm to expose at its core a terrible truth." Dinitia Smith
NY Times Book Review
"Many angelic references and much religious imagery are to be found here (slaughtered lambs, for example), but at the root of it all is the lambent quality of experience, not religion per se. Much of the real joy of reading Barry is in the bobbing freshet of his language." Art Winslow
Telegraph (UK)
"The ending, alas, teeters on the verge of melodrama, but there is so much good writing in the preceding chapters that one readily forgives the author. In Roseanne McNulty—sly, confused, defiant, passionate—Sebastian Barry has created one of the most memorable narrators in recent fiction." David Robson
Boston Globe
"The nature of Barry’s first-person narratives, and the uncertainty he is so purposefully trying to create, sometimes left me a little confused. But, for the most part, that only gave me more in common with his characters, and, when I reached the last page, I did feel that I had shared a profound experience with each of them." Margot Livesey
Critical Summary
Again and again the critics cited Barry’s lovely, musical language as one of the greatest treasures of The Secret Scripture. He skillfully creates two distinct voices—Roseanne’s in her darkly funny memoirs and Dr. Grene’s as he records his observations in his commonplace book—in this shifting, dual narrative. As with most of his work, Barry’s characters’ lives play out against Ireland’s troubled history, "a malignant omnipresence" (Guardian), while he cleverly explores the unreliable nature of the past, filtered as it is through human perception and memory. Though one critic claimed that her unfamiliarity with Irish history caused her some initial confusion and the Telegraph pronounced the ending somewhat melodramatic, most critics loved this haunting and beautiful novel.