Book Club Day! The Secret Scripture

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

Review by Shannon Buck
for Rolling Around in My Head
Next Book: Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens

-              All notes refer to the Penguin 2009 paperback edition (ISBN 978-0-14-311569-4)

Note from Shannon: 

SPOILER ALERT: if you haven't read the book but think you might want to, don't read the review. I give away pretty much everything in the plot!

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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. 

These seem not my thoughts at all, but maybe are borrowed out of old readings…But they feel as if they are mine.

-Roseanne McNulty, From Sebastian Barry’s “The Secret Scripture”

Where can I begin to describe this book? Should I talk about the magnificence and humility of the narrator? Should I tell you about the threads of plot, closely coiled on the woolen blanket of this story? Should I describe how the human experience flows through this book, a heavy and seductive stream of deceptive memory and loss?

The Secret Scripture is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. Its power is in its subtlety – in the questions that remain after you have read the final page. The narration is in two parts: one is written, in secret, by an old woman living out the last of her days in a decayed institution as archaic as she. Roseanne has been there so long that she is not sure when she arrived. Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital has been her home, her sanctuary, and her prison for so many years that she has become one with it, and cannot leave although the Hospital is shortly to be closed, and the more able of its residents released into the ‘community’.

The man responsible for evaluating the residents, one by one, as to their fitness for life ‘outside’, is Dr. Grene who, as the alternate narrator, reveals his own tragedies to the reader as Roseanne reveals hers.

Roseanne’s story, written on a collection of unwanted scrap paper with a ball-point pen given to her by Dr. Grene, is written as a way to leave something of herself alive; a final task to complete before she can go to her rest with joy. It unfolds slowly, beginning with her father, Joe. In fact, Roseanne’s entire story is compassed about by this man, who we learn to see in a certain way based on what she tells us.

If this story has a hero, Joe Clear is that hero. He is a fountain of joy, we learn, a hale and honest man with a rich singing voice and a generosity of spirit that seems to envelop and exalt Roseanne, his only child. He is the kind of man that you want to know – you want to talk to him and learn from him, listen to his tall tales and sit at his feet, smiling up at him.

And if the story has a villain, Father Gaunt is it.

A small, precise, preternaturally clean Catholic priest, the aptly named Father Gaunt is the symbol of all that is unfeeling, chilly, clinical, methodical, and sinister. He is, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, the author of all the misfortunes that befall both Joe Clear and Roseanne herself (though Roseanne repeatedly denies this, especially early in the book). He is, in fact, the man responsible for her long internment – or one could say interment – at Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, by way of the “Sligo Lunatic Asylum”.

Through all of Roseanne’s reminiscences about her past, Father Gaunt consistently recurs as a malevolent presence. He manipulates her father into poverty and her mother into prostitution, manipulates Roseanne herself into divorce and disgrace, and then, eventually, tidies her away into the institution and, one gathers, metaphorically dusts his hands off and walks away.

The real tragedy of the story, though, lies in the fact of Roseanne’s bond with the hospital. She is so deeply ingrained in the place that she is, by her own testament and according to the assessment of the doctor, unable to leave. Not able to disconnect from it.

One of the many themes of the book is that of immuring, or walling away. The author repeatedly uses images that conjure towers, tombs, mausoleums…smooth stone edifices built to restrain.

“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.”

“In the pyramids”? In the tombs of great kings? There’s a burial here, but there is also an exaltation – a transformation. 

But if that is how Roseanne describes herself, there is also, later, a story of a man, locked into a basement by his wife and starved to death.

There is a story of girls, many young girls, kept unloved in an orphanage and then, pitied too late, dying in flames.

There is a story of babies, “surplus” babies as Roseanne calls them, laid on beds and left to die in a room with holes in the walls, the icy rain coming through holes in the ceiling.

There are nuns, who Roseanne describes as “savagery and modesty mixed”, in a convent.

Tidying people away.

But as easy as it would be to portray the hospital as a terrible, sinister place, the author does not always do so. Dr Grene, the administrator, is a sympathetic character – a man with true compassion and, it seems, a true vocation. He sees himself as a caretaker. (I won’t use the newer word, ‘caregiver’, because it feels wrong here.) In his own words: “I have a really stupid habit of feeling fatherly towards my patients, even motherly.” Then he lectures himself, “I must…resist compassion at every turn, because compassion is my weakness.”

So the doctor seems to be a good man. But he has cheated on his wife, has colluded in the imprisonment of “well” humans, and has spent his entire career working within a system he knows to be diseased and self-serving. Then, is the doctor a bad man?

Is the hospital a good place for Roseanne, or a bad place?

This question is at the core of the story, and at the core of its tragedy. Throughout the novel there are scenes of institutions, hospitals, prisons – and scenes of escape from those prisons; mostly escape by death. The marginalized and unwanted people of society, the ones with no net of loving family to catch them, have been put neatly into their little boxes where they won’t be a bother to anyone.

And yet, Roseanne is happy here.

And yet, Roseanne dreads freedom.

What is the greater cruelty: to take an old woman from her fifty years’ home, to force her into a ‘community’ where she will be, just as she was all those years ago, uncared for, unloved, and unwanted? At best, an object of pity? Or to leave her there in the place – the prison – where she is happy but which she knows is not home, to count out the last of her days behind walls that keep her in, where she considers herself to be safe?

Dr Grene speaks to Roseanne about leaving.

“God knows…no one could be happy here.”

“I am happy,” I said.

“…You might consider this place your home.”

“No.”

“Well. You as well as any other person have the right to be free if you are suitable for, for freedom. I suppose even at one hundred years of age you might wish to – to walk about the place and paddle in the sea in the summer, and smell the roses – “

“No!”

I did not intent to cry out, but as you will see 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.

Does Roseanne want to leave the hospital? She says, herself, that she wants it but dreads it.

But can the reader trust what Roseanne says? Can we trust what she remembers, and can we trust her stories, that, to quote Roseanne herself, she tells with “perfect force mainly because she believes every word of them”?

The Secret Scripture will echo in my head and in my heart for a long, long time. Each word of this book had an exquisite delicacy that compelled me forward through every drop of beauty and slice of tragedy in the story…the language is both simple and rich, the characters full-throated and living. It’s one of the loveliest works I’ve ever read.

The Secret Scripture Study Guide for extra credit! (Spoiler alert.)

1.            Water is a constant presence throughout the book. What do you think water represents?

2.            One of the main themes is forgetting – both deliberate and otherwise. Roseanne alters the truth of her past, yet the title of the book is “Scripture”. If you had to write a new title for this book, what would it be?

3.            Many people in the book are trapped by walls: some escape. How can we understand Roseanne’s father’s “Indian Angel” story in the context of Joe Clear himself? In the context of Roseanne? (p. 10)

4.            There is a lot of loss in this book – it is a major, recurrent theme. Roseanne tells us that her mother is lost, “as a shilling on the floor”, because she never told her stories (pp 8, 11). Do you agree with Roseanne that, if no one knows your story, you are therefore Lost? What does this mean for people who cannot communicate? What does it mean for the past “patients” of institutions, who have perished immured behind their walls? Are they lost? Does a person’s experience, lived but untold, count? What if we don’t want to tell our stories?

5.            What do you think Roseanne would have thought of Doctor Grene if she had known he was her lost son?

6.            Dr. Grene likens the inmates of Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital to the building itself, but he likens the staff to the “bats and rats” (p 15). Why?

7.            What did Roseanne’s mother mean when she said “All things may fall at the same rate,…but it’s the rare thing rises”? (p 19)

8.            Why is Roseanne so determined not to vilify Father Gaunt, when he IS the author of her tragedy?

9.            What do you think of the author’s use of a Catholic priest as a villain? Do you think this is fair? Is it historically accurate? Is it probable? Is it a copout?

10.          Dr. Grene writes that he and his estranged wife Bet make love on the downstairs carpet, on her silent instigation, the night before her death (p 90). Do you think this really happened? The very next time Roseanne sees him, he has shaved (p 97). What is the significance of this, coming where it does in the story?

11.          What is the significance of Bet’s haunting of Dr. Grene? (i.e., p 113-114, 150, 166) Do you think he is imagining it?

12.          What do you think about the treatment of John Kane in the novel? How does Roseanne regard him? How does the author regard him? Is he unfairly depicted?

13.          Sexual violence runs as an undercurrent through the novel. It is rarely mentioned explicitly, but it is hinted at in significant places of the book. And Roseanne adapts her memories, possibly, and her narrative, certainly, to avoid the subject entirely. She was attacked in the hospital where she was first committed, by Brady. Considering both her stories of her childhood, and her adaptable memory, do you think this was the first time? (See pp 37, 50, 105, 152, 279)

14.          What is the significance of the scene where the German Luftwaffe, returning from the bombing of Belfast, flies directly over Roseanne? (p 253)

15.          And, lastly……at the end of the book Dr. Grene is trying to pick his moment to tell Roseanne that he is her lost child. Do you think that he ever does?