The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

I should point out immediately that any comments I make about this book are due to my disappointment in its ending. That’s the awful thing about books – a mediocre one can be saved by a perfect ending and a good one utterly ruined by a terrible one. This is one of the latter.

Winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award 2008 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, I had high hopes for this novel. After all, only this year I’d read and loved recent award-winner Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, which was also nominated for several awards and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. After such a run, I was not to be put on my guard by glowing reviews and a clutch of awards.

I was bound to be disappointed. The narrative is split between two narrators. First we have Roseanne McNulty, a 100-year-old inmate of an Irish psychiatric hospital, who is writing a “Testimony of Herself.” The second narrator is Dr Grene, who is writing about his struggle to sort the patients before they are moved and the present hospital destroyed. Set in the present day, Dr Grene has to sort out the truly mentally ill from those who were shut away for convenience, of which Roseanne is possibly one. His mission is to find out what led to her commitment and therein lies the story.

At the heart of the book is the love between Roseanne and her father, the relationship which opens the book and comes to such a devastating end. But the most important love story is that between Roseanne and her husband Tom McNulty. But this relationship, the great joy in Roseanne’s life and which leads to her downfall, is not given the strength it deserves. I did not feel the romance of their story, did not believe the love was strong enough to utterly devastate Roseanne when it was taken from her. In fact it didn’t immediately register with me that this was the great love story. So halfway through the book I was baffled!

But it was the ending that I couldn’t bear. A twist I saw coming a mile off and read with a mounting sense of horror and a chant of “Please don’t. Oh please don’t!” is what will stay with me. I would rather have just found out the truth about why she was committed. Why had Father Gaunt taken against her to the extent that he twisted the truth time and again to take away everything she loved, the last of which was her freedom? Knowing the answer to that question would have been enough for me. Instead I was left with an insipid twist and a heavy heart.

As an Irish novel this is excellent. I cannot fault Barry’s writing and ability to convey atmosphere. So good was his writing about this place that I feel that I could now go away and write about Sligo on the strength of what I’ve learnt from this book. But that ending…!

As this is a wonderfully written book, with some interesting characters, I would recommend it. But I think you know by now what I would caution against.

Faber and Faber, 2009. ISBN-10: 0571215297. 312 pp.

[Nikki sometimes muses over the endings (and beginnings. And middles, for that matter) of her own stories on her blog The Possibility Engine]

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