Power Of An Individual's Story

The Age

Saturday August 2, 2008

Helen Elliott

The Secret Scripture,

By Sebastian Barry

Faber & Faber, $32.95

Suffering and edurance remain a potent mix for a good novel, writes Helen Elliott.

THE EPIGRAPH, OR epigraphs with which writers preface their work, are a bit like the starter letter in those lunatic, clueless crosswords. So it is imperative to read the two epigraphs that Sebastian Barry has chosen for his fourth novel. One is from the eccentric 17th-century philosopher, Sir Thomas Browne; the other by Maria Edgeworth, the novelist sometimes known as the Irish Jane Austen.

Browne's words point to the tragedy of self-delusion, Edgeworth's to the human craving for verification of existence. "I was here!" Put those two worlds of ideas into the hands of someone who not only can tell a good story but who puts language together with a lyric sensibility and you have an accomplished novel.

Barry, playwright and poet as well as novelist, once again uses the wretched history of 20th-century Ireland not as a wash on which to sketch character and action, but as an indiscriminate and ubiquitous participant. If this were a painting it might be called, with a listless accuracy, Landscape with Figures. Bosch or Bacon-like figures would inhabit the fringes, their shadows creating the architecture of the centre.

Roseanne McNulty will celebrate her 100th birthday in the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, which was built in the 18th century to house the insane. She has lived in her little room at the top of the stairs since she was committed half a century before. She receives no visitors and appears to have no family but achieves tranquillity playing the piano when she is able, reading her books and talking to the only two people she sees, the cleaner and her psychiatrist.

Now the hospital is to be closed and the patients removed to another building, but the chief psychiatrist, Dr Grene, who has a particular fondness for Roseanne, withholds the news of the closure and looming change in her life.

The doctor also has his own sadness; his beloved wife, who has been unable to forgive him one long-ago indiscretion, has suddenly died. He is also reaching an age when he feels he should be retiring.

Roseanne becomes his focus because, although he has known her for 30 years and regards her as "an old friend" and a "touchstone ... for my own history, my own life", he has never had the time to reflect on her incarceration. How did a tranquil, intelligent and seemingly perfectly rational woman with an unusual gift for piano spend her life in an 18th-century madhouse?

Too delicate to pursue what, for his patient, is obviously traumatic conversation, Dr Grene begins to search out Roseanne's files from various parts of Ireland and England. Initially he reads, and believes, the authorities but is puzzled that these transcripts are wildly at odds with what his patient tells him.

Roseanne, however, knows that truth is fey, so she is writing her own, terrible, story, hiding her notes underneath a loose floorboard in her room. She has no expectations, but hopes someone will find the notes after her death and give them to Dr Grene.

Barry has won many awards for his writing and The Secret Scripture, which was this week longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, lines up well. The novel is primarily Roseanne's autobiography and Dr Grene's professional and personal observations, but these alternating chapters are skilfully interleafed with depositions from priests, medical files and incidental side-sketches that all, finally, shed light on both Roseanne's and Dr Grene's lives. Barry's writing will not be to everyone's taste but it resonates with truth and perception.

About those fashionable twin subjects, death and its aftermath, grief, Roseanne writes: "How I would like to say that I loved my father so much that I could not have lived without him, but such an avowal would be proved false in time ... It is as if a huge lump of lead were lain over the soul, such deaths, and where that soul was previously weightless, now is a secret and ruinous burden at the very heart of us."

If the recent history of Ireland is, in part, a history of fundamentalist Christianity tenderly nursed by poverty and ignorance into fanaticism, it has many parallels in the 21st century. Barry understands that, rather than conformity and ease, suffering and endurance characterise most lives. They still do. And it is ironic that those who read novels are those least likely to be suffering or enduring.

He has a talent for empathy with the past and for those whose chances were detonated before they began. He reminds us that once there were others with exactly the same bright yearnings and hopes. The Secret Scripture reflects that it is not the official histories that make us human but the truths conveyed in individual life stories.

Helen Elliott will chair a session on reviewing at the Melbourne Writers Festival, which is sponsored by The Age. www.mwf.com.au

© 2008 The Age

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