A compassionate evisceration of a land judged wanting
Sebastian Barry's latest offering laments a society where the good are reduced to rat-catching, writes Emer O'Kelly
The Secret Scripture
Sebastian Barry
Faber and Faber, €20
There is a dreadful darkness at the heart of Sebastian Barry's new novel The Secret Scripture. And the darkness is more profound and desolate even than the book's ostensible theme, a woman locked in a mental asylum for her entire life and left there to rot unknown and effectively without identity. The real darkness lies outside Roseanne McNulty, the 100-year-old patient of Dr Grene: it is the feral tribalism of what Barry paints as a noisome society born of blood loathing and blood letting.
The book is written as the alternate accounts of Roseanne, once one of the most beautiful women in Sligo, for which she had to pay the price demanded by a misogynistic society, and that of Dr Grene, his world in ruins after the death of the beloved wife who had cast him adrift, overseeing the closing and demolition of the hospital over which he has presided for 30 years. As he tries to steady his remaining patients, particularly Roseanne, for what he describes as "the axe, the guillotine, of sanity" he must also try to unravel the old woman's history. But she sees more clearly than he does that "history 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".
It is that withering truth of Ireland, rooted in the brutality of the Civil War and the iron control of an unloving, comfortless and grim religious faith that Barry holds up as a destroying testament, bloody image following on bloody image throughout the text in a sticky, sinuous thread that threatens to engulf society as it has engulfed Roseanne.
As a little girl she had seen her respectable and apparently respected father reduced to penury as the local rat-catcher, his quiet Presbyterianism having incurred the enmity of the local Catholic priest. That enmity becomes enough to engulf his small daughter, accused of having betrayed a dead IRA man and his brother to the Free State Army when she is sent to bring the priest to the already-dead man.
Truth withers further when the rat-catcher is found hanged: Roseanne's truth is that he hanged himself in despair at misfortune and his wife's slide into madness. Popular truth has him tortured and hanged by the combatants in a war that is beyond his understanding. There is no gentleness in the truth that follows Roseanne: found talking as a young bride to the surviving IRA man, her husband and his family effectively immure her in an iron shack while the process of Catholic Ireland's rectitude is gone through behind her back: an annulment of her marriage without let or trial for her perceived "nymphomania". Sentence delivered, they are free to imprison her deeper and more effectively in the mental hospital, a living testament to the viciousness with which joy and beauty are regarded in Ireland.
Barry remains the master of language in this formidable book: his blood imagery is an art in itself, from descriptions of the gaping wounds of hate-filled guerrilla war in chests and stomachs, through the agonised seeping and gushing of childbirth, it is insistent, repetitive and accusing.
The poetic lilt never leaves it, but this is Barry as prosecutor and judge, a role he adopts for the first time in his novels. It is as though his journey through the annals of the Irish state's early years, fuelled by the stories of his own family, have been an apprenticeship to qualify him to deliver a sorrowful and hopeless adjudication on his country and what it does to her people. And the greatest crime, he further accuses, is that we collude so eagerly in destroying ourselves and our country. The good are reduced to rat-catching, living in filthy shacks, the tribes of Wandering Aengus. The shifty, sly and openly brutal thrive, grow fat and shiny, only their souls shrivelling into wormwood.
This is a hideous book, its finger pointing relentlessly at a society which we deny, but in Barry's eyes is still our "strong, living faith". Its imagery is horribly troubling, and it's easy to see why the author has allowed the novel its one major fault: it is over-written, at times seriously so.
But it is done out of passion, paradoxically a distillation of the surgical skill with which he eviscerates Ireland only to clothe her in the mercifully diaphanous draperies of compassion.
- Emer O'Kelly
