The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

In The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry tells a story set in Ireland. As is often the case, this story set in Ireland is very much a story of Ireland, as much describing a nation and a setting as a personal history. But it seems that at least one aspect of the country’s painful relationship with its competing churches has changed in Sacred Scriptures. Gone is the assumption of grace applied unthinkingly by Catholics to their side of the divide. And reason for its removal is the church’s attitude towards women, marriage and motherhood.

In Secret Scriptures these axes of divide intersect to create a story that is effectively a modern virgin birth. It thus creates and presents a Madonna who, in her own way, must be kept above and apart from other women, other people. Late in the book Dr Grene, whose journal forms a large part of the narrative, asks this question: “Is not most history written in a sort of wayward sincerity?” Recollection thus remains sincere, but its waywardness perhaps lies in its selectivity, its particularity. History, after all, is an interpretation of events, not merely a listing, and interpretation always has a point of view. When, however, one’s knowledge of the past is at best patchy and at worst inaccurate, it becomes a new world to be discovered, revealed perhaps by chance, perhaps by design. Dr Grene also writes, “The one thing that is fatal in the reading of an impromptu history is wrongful desire for accuracy.” In the end, it is Dr Grene’s pursuit of such an impromptu history that reveals a stunning truth, a truth that can only be uncovered precisely because of the accuracy, the diligence that others invested in one person’s history. The impromptu history that Dr Grene reads is that of Secret Scripture’s central character, Roseanne McNulty, née Clear.

She is a hundred years old and has, for most of her adult life, been confined within the walls of a mental hospital. Her place of repose is to close and be demolished. Dr Grene is to oversee its demise. Roseanne has decided to write her life story. If Te Secret Scripture has a weakness, then it has a double weakness. Overall, the plot might come too close to the sentimental for some readers. For others, it will be the book’s saving grace. Secondly, Roseanne Clear, frail at a hundred years of age, might be an unlikely figure to write such a succinct, coherent and vivid account of events that happened almost eighty years before. Again we must suspend some belief here, but that is easily done because her recollections are both engaging and credible. They would have been more so if, as impromptu history, they were less concerned with improbable detail. It’s not the events that might be questionable, merely the accuracy of their recollection. But after all, that detail might just be illusory. There was a history in the family, we are told, a history of illness and instability and, perhaps, a history of another, less mentionable, affliction of women.

But in the end none of these are rare. It’s their public acknowledgement or admission that’s unusual. Life and its institutions treat Roseanne Clear badly, but no differently from others identified as afflicted with her condition. She is effectively branded insane by a socially-constructed righteousness that now seems to have lost all of its previously unquestioned authority. She seems to have few regrets, however, except, of course, for a life that may not have been lived. The life in question did, in fact, live, and it became something that reinterpreted Roseanne’s entire existence. Sacred Scripture is a beautiful book. It has its flaws, but the immediacy of its subject and the poignancy of its dénouement make it both enthralling and surprising.

View the book on amazon The Secret Scripture

Ways Of Escape by Graham Greene

Ways Of Escape is one of the most rewarding and, surprisingly, surprising reads one might encounter. On the face of it, the book is Graham Greene’s artistic, literary autobiography. A second half and companion volume for A Sort Of Life, Ways Of Escape deals chronologically with Graham Greene’s works, his inspiration and his development as an author. All of this, we may believe as we start this book, is well known, well document, even public knowledge. 

Ways Of Escape reveals, however, that much of Greene’s inspiration was quite personal, often very private, and it is through this that surprise emerges. The book catalogues brilliantly the sometimes direct, sometimes loose relationship between experience and inspiration. Graham Greene is apparently candid about the nature of his invention. Whether it is achieved via amalgamation, imitation or juxtaposition, for the author it appears to be eventually rooted in experienced reality. 

What Ways Of Escape communicates above all is how much Graham Greene was occupied with his writing alongside a life that seemed already utterly packed with travel, journalism, various employment and risk, so packed that people encountered along the way could never have suspected that they were being analysed for their potential as future fictional characters. 

 Graham Greene is self-deprecating throughout, appearing to belittle his own work, thus showing little respect for the critical acclaim of others which, by the end of the period in question, was considerable. Many of the scenes from his work that he values seem to relate strongly to, perhaps clarify his own experience. And, for Graham Greene, experience was usually vivid and sought out to be so. He samples local prostitutes freely, drinks whatever is to hand and chemically alters the reality to which he otherwise seems to remain encountered as a participant rather than as an observer. 

 There are indicators to Greene’s ambivalence towards religion. He expresses respect for a simple, unquestioning faith. But he despises a middle class, “suburban” Catholicism that seems to assume an ownership of God. Greene, of course, belonged to that latter group by virtue of class, education and marriage, but one feels he yearned for a simple, stated and genuflecting responsibility to an omnipotent God. One also feels that this might be Romanticism, a desire to become an ideal to which he feels he may only aspire as a result of the mired filth of the life he perceives he lives. He relates some of his contact with the press, as well as with film. 

There are brushes with the law in the form of libel actions. Throughout, one feels his respect for his fellow professionals is at best limited. He even describes the word “media” as applicable to bad journalism, clearly placing himself above the label. But above all it is experienced reality that provides the gems. His description of bombardment in Sinai rings both true and vivid. “I remembered the blitz, but the blitz had one great advantage – the pubs remained open.” Such attention to detail alongside direct experience is what brings Graham Greene’s prose to life, and it is this rooting in the reality of experience that prods the reader into reaction. 

This is a masterwork by a master technician. But it is the book’s epilogue that, for me, provided a supremely apt and yet provocative coda. Here is a man who has imagined others, given them life in print and film, a man who seems to have little confidence in his own ability or thought for his consequence. And, we learn, he is a man who might even be someone else, someone who claims to be him, an Other. The juxtaposition of this idea with a life lived is both thought-provoking and disturbing – a masterstroke by a master of his craft, even his art. 

 View this book on amazon Ways of Escape (Vintage Classics)