Oh what a wonderful story! And such a tragic one! And so beautifully composed!
Power! What the
possession of it by some can have a horrendous effect on the lives of others. A
priest is a man of God, the closest we can get to Him. So can he ever err, go
wayward with his judgement? Oh no, never!
What is truth? Is
what we see always the truth, what we hear always the truth, what we feel, what
we believe – no, yes, perhaps? And what if one harnesses their impositions
based on this ‘perhaps’? A possible destruction – maybe, surely? Isn’t there
something between these hard drawn lines of truths and lies, rights and wrongs
– isn’t that what we live as a life, don’t we?
Roseanne Clear was
a beautiful lass, well she was, still is as can possibly be at the age of an
approaching hundred. This is her story, her own rendition of a life of which
the most part was spent in a lunatic asylum. Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital
run by Dr. William Grene, is where she is at present and from where she pens
down her life. And this hospital is to be brought down and it is put down to
the doctor now to decide who stays in the new place and who is to be set free. Set
free, ha!
The journey begins
from Roseanne’s childhood, during the war, her happy days spent with her
parents, her closeness to her father. And then one remorseful event after other
strikes the family, her father being ushered spinelessly yet tactfully by the
priest to lose his dignity till the day he is found hanging from the ceiling of
a neighboring house.
As Dr. Grene is on
this personal mission to dig out the aging Roseanne’s true story, he figures
out the prominence of the priest, Father Gaunt’s intrusion in her life and the
dear ones surrounding her. So which one is true, the account that Roseanne pens
down in her sheets of paper or the asylum records where Father Gaunt has
glorified his belief of the truth. What then finally caused Roseanne to land in
the asylum or was it a planned plot to teach her the lesson for being bad. Bad?
Married for years only to be told later by the man of God that there has been
no marriage – oh! The Church has passed some law for which he had fought tooth
and nail. Being seen with a person other than her husband, well, isn’t she
rightly termed a nymphomaniac by the priest? Marooned, exiled, broken, oh what
has each one of the McNulty’s done to her. She stays in a tin hut watering her
roses. Some people are doomed in whatever they do or they don’t, Dr. Grene
finds out. As he digs deep and the
people he meets put the last bits of the jigsaw puzzle in place, the truth, yes
this time the truth, the real one shatters him; a tragic reality confirming
what a small world this is!
The beauty of
Sebastian Barry’s prose is in the fact that it is not his, it is Roseanne’s,
and the words are hers, and the feelings are hers, and the sanity in the
madness are hers as she talks to you, the helpless reader. Her beauty, her simplicity, her love are in those lines, her
presence presides all over those pages of ‘The Secret Scripture’.
And at the
end, her's and everyone else's, when it is to come to an end, would it really matter to any of us, what
was right and what was wrong, what was true and what wasn’t, when we or she has
already lived the pain, borne those ugly rashes on the soul, had those non-healing deceiving strikes and cuts on the heart? It wouldn’t, I say, with an unforgiving smile
coz I ain’t a priest!
My Rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 8/10
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| Sebastian Barry |
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