The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Innocent Betrayals

Secret Scripture is a story of betrayals - by those we love most, of them in turn by us; but particularly our betrayal of ourselves in memory and history. We betray ourselves through memories in which we both find and avoid guilt. We are innocent because we are hapless when it comes to memory. They are of us but neither reliable nor controllable by us. Memories rarely comfort. Good ones remind us of loss; bad ones evoke regret. Curiously, memories become dissociated from motives. So the reasons for our actions at best appear incomprehensible; at worst we end up condemning ourselves.

According to Barry's fiction we don't calculate consequences - either of betraying or of being betrayed - we creep into situations which explode. We did not intend these explosions which destroy the matrix of life. They are beyond our control. We are then trapped in the rubble - of marriage, of family for an individual; and, for a community or a nation, of the enemies we have created of one other. Roseanne Clear, a centenarian confined in a mental hospital for seventy years is one such hapless victim - a woman cheated of her life through hatefulness and the mendacity of those closest to her.

Roseanne, and her home of Sligo, also represent all of Ireland of the last century. Her "life spans everything, she is as much as we can know of our world, the last hundred years of it... The fact is we are missing so many threads in our Irish story that the tapestry of Irish life cannot but fall apart. There is nothing to hold it together." Barry describes a drear and confused Ireland, a land of religiosity without moral principles; populated by self-righteous priests and their repressed and obedient congregations. A land of fanatical peasants and their murderous leaders who have always blamed others for their murders, particularly the English whom they murdered as much as their own.

But this description is also recognised as questionable by Barry. It is a judgement based on history. History is merely recorded memories and cannot be trusted. As the doctor in charge of Roseanne’s care comes to recognise, "I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history... most truth and fact offered by syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable." The unreliability is not so much down to lies as incompleteness, axes to be ground, loyalties to be safeguarded. Penetrating this morass seems impossible, but it sometimes can be done. Reality is then found "like a lost shilling on a floor of mud, glistening in some despair."

This is a highly emotional book. It conjures sympathy, disgust, and ultimately hope in about equal measure. It is honest rather than clever; it is spare without being sparse. It is very Irish; and it is very good.

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