The Secret Scripture
by Sebastian Barry
Nominations: Booker Finalist 2008, Dublin Longlist 2010, LA Times Finalist 2008
Date Read: January 28, 2022
What a rich and nuanced novel from Sebastian Barry, exploring madness, religion, and family. Taking place during Ireland’s upheaval with the IRA and then into World War II, The Secret Scripture follows Roseanne, a young girl that finds her life nearly over at the age of 18 yet manages to survive until a centenarian. This novel shows how the brutal application of religion without mercy can render a life nearly meaningless.
We meet Roseanne through an accounting of her own life from a mental institution that is about to be shut down. She has been there so long, the doctor in charge is unsure whether she has any family and the circumstances of her commitment are all too vague. Through her self-accounting of her own life and Dr. Grene’s research into Roseanne’s past, the reader is able to piece together a picture of the injustice that Roseanne has endured all these years.
When Roseanne Clear is still just a girl, her father commits suicide, although we are later to learn he was actually murdered. Her mother is mad and sent to an institution in quick order and Roseanne finds herself quite alone while still just a young lady. Rather than succumbing to despair, she gets a job at the Cairo Café, which she loves, and goes to the dance hall on the weekend evenings where local musicians play. She takes charge of her youth and finds fulfillment and pride in the life she creates for herself.
And then she meets Tom. A local up-and-comer with political ambition, Tom and Roseanne quickly fall in love and, without Tom’s parents approval, are married. Marriage is bliss for Roseanne, although her movements become much more limited as they are for all wives during that time. Roseanne’s undoing is going to meet a man from her past that knew her father. Just the very act of being seen unescorted by her husband in another man’s presence (fully clothed, in public), causes Tom and the local priest to turn against her and grant Tom a divorce. He is not just granted a divorce but a complete annulment from the Catholic church. Roseanne, essentially, was never married at all in the eyes of the church.
She lives for years alone in her hut by the sea and, in a short-lived affair with Tom’s brother, finds herself pregnant. Alone and with no one to help her deliver her child, she walks the 10 or so miles to Tom’s family’s house to beg for mercy and help. She is to find no helping hand or shelter. She ends up giving birth on her walk back home, alone on the beach during a storm.
Falling asleep from the exhaustion and the pain, Roseanne wakes to find her baby vanished. She had fallen asleep with her baby in her arms but awakes to emptiness. An ambulance eventually takes her to the hospital, the entire time Roseanne begs for her baby.
From the hospital, Roseanne is committed to a mental institution where lives out the remainder of her days. Her life has just ended at the age of 20. We discover other atrocities that befall Roseanne in the institution and a plot twist that I saw coming a mile away.
Yet, this book is damp with the moisture of the Irish seaside and vividly brutal in the isolation of Roseanne. Barry’s rich imagery allows us to actually live out the injustice of Roseanne’s life as if we were strangers in the room. I am in awe of his immense talent.
“But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.”
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