The Secret Scripture
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.
4.1 out of 5 based on 11 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
320 |
| RRP |
£16.99 |
| Date of Publication |
May 2008 |
| ISBN |
978-0571215287 |
| Publisher |
Faber & Faber |
| |
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.
Read an extract from the book on The Independent's website
Reviews
The Financial Times
Matthew Sweeney
"The fact that Sebastian Barry began as a poet is apparent throughout in phrases and images... As with the wonderful description of the mustard gas incident in A Long Long Way, there are spectacular dramatic sections here as well... The Secret Scripture is not at all like its illustrious predecessor but is equally powerful and memorable. It confirms that Sebastian Barry is at the forefront of contemporary Irish fiction."
10/05/2008
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The Guardian
Joseph O'Connor
"...a richly allusive and haunting text that is nevertheless jagged enough to avoid the anaesthetic of high lyricism... Barry's destabilising of inherited images gives the book a punkish energy... Roseanne and Dr Grene... are incarnated with such commitment and narrative astuteness... You are reading them, not reading about them... [Barry] makes enthrallingly beautiful prose out of the wreckage of these lives by allowing them to have the complication of actual history in all its messy elusiveness... His achievement in this magnificent and heart-rending novel is a kind of restitution."
24/05/2008
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The Independent on Sunday
Murrough O'Brien
"...sweet, pellucid prose."
22/02/2009
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The New York Times
Dinitia Smith
"Barry has said in interviews that many of his characters are based on his relatives... These lives are reimagined in language of surpassing beauty... Barry has said that his novels and plays often begin as poems (he is a published poet), but his language never clots the flow of his story; it never gives off a whiff of labor and strain. 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."
23/06/2008
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The Daily Telegraph
Ruth Scurr
"The Secret Scripture assembles a disquieting portrait of a woman destroyed by politics and misogyny... The only person [Roseanne] has ever harmed is herself: "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." Her psychiatrist comments that this is a beautiful description of traumatic memory. The same can be said of Barry's novel, which is dark, awkward and exceptionally finely written."
02/05/2008
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The Daily Telegraph
David Robson
"Nine times out of 10, novels featuring psychiatrists are stodgy and unconvincing, but The Secret Scripture is the exception that proves the rule. 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... his novel is a cornucopia of fine phrase-making and mellow characterisation."
02/05/2008
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The Times
Tom Gatti
"The plot might strain, but the prose holds fast. Roseanne's history is full of gleaming images - a soldier laughs “a horrible laugh like a lash of rain into your face”, the sand of Strandhill beach seems to have “drawn up its enormous knees” - and bright, “belling thoughts”. It's a story to treasure, and Roseanne is a teller to remember. "
01/05/2008
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The Literary Review
Chris Paling
"Powerful... Both of his protagonists sing poetically and it’s a mark of Barry’s talent that the reader accepts this without flinching... If there’s a weakness in The Secret Scripture it’s that it contains no loose ends; there are few meanings left ... for us to chase. Sebastian Barry’s writing has always found beauty and poetry in the ordinary dramas of life. Readers will have to decide for themselves if the revelations of the last few pages of this novel come at too great a cost to what has gone before."
01/05/2008
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The Daily Mail
Michael Arditti
"Roseanne, who made a brief and somewhat bolder appearance in Barry's earlier The Whereabouts Of Eneas McNulty, is a vivid and engaging protagonist, and Barry makes rich use of the circumlocutions of his native tongue. He sets up a series of subtle correspondences between past and present, only to destroy them all in the final pages with a coincidence so improbable and sentimental that all vestige of credibility is lost."
01/06/2008
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The Sunday Times
Hugo Barnacle
"A few chapters in, it becomes clear that we are in bestseller territory, as lurid melodrama is piled on lurid melodrama, improbable coincidence on improbable coincidence, while important plot shifts are obscured by passages of excited purple prose. We start encountering daft potboiler slip-ups.... The big twist at the end is effective and powerful, but corny, which does rather go for the book as a whole. It is rewarding, but you feel it could have been cooler and subtler."
11/05/2008
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The New Statesman
Robert Hanks
"Barry writes "heightened prose"... When this works ... the effect is bewitching; but it can become irritating... the difficulty of the style is compounded by Barry's failure to give his two narrators sufficiently distinct voices... The book is also marred by a self-consciously literary quality ... and the predictable unreliability of the narrators... For all its mysteries, hesitations and poetry, The Secret Scripture is, finally, a little too pat."
22/05/2008
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