LGBT Book & Video Blog

The Secret Scripture

Vladimir Nabokov once complained that English translations of his favorite Russian writer were so flat and colorless that "None but an Irishman should ever try tackling Gogol." I'd nominate Sebastian Barry, the most exhilarating prose stylist in Irish fiction -- which just about makes him, by definition, the best prose writer in the English language.

Barry has shown a dazzling facility with poetry, drama and fiction -- his works form a mosaic-like whole, though each stands on its own. He never uses a fancy word when a simple one will do; his characters speak a plain vocabulary, but in cadences tempered and honed into poetry. Roseanne McNulty, his heroine in his new novel, The Secret Scripture tells us: "I am completely alone. There is no one in the world that knows me now outside of this place, all my own people, the few farthings of them that once were, my little wren of a mother ... they are all gone now." Roseanne, who has been hiding her memoirs under a floorboard at the Rosscommon Regional Mental Hospital for more than half a century, regards herself as "a thing left over ... a scraggy stretch of skin and bone in a bleak skirt and blouse, and a canvas jacket, and I sit here in my niche like a songless robin -- no, like a mouse that died under the hearth stone where it was warm, and lies now like a mummy in the pyramids ... No one even knows I have a story."

The characters in Barry's works are connected by blood or marriage, including Roseanne, who is an outsider, one of the forgotten people whose life was assigned by fate to a lost corner of history. The central figure in their world is Thomas Dunne, from the play "The Steward of Christendom," a former senior officer in the Dublin police who faithfully served the British Crown for years, ending his days in the alien world of post-revolutionary Ireland. In the novel "A Long Long Way," Dunne's son Willie goes off to fight in World War I holding England and Ireland equally in his heart, only to find himself a man without a country. In the novel "Annie Dunne," Willie's sister, isolated on a small farm, laments, "The world of my youth is wiped away, as if it were only a stain on a more permanent fabric."

  More of this review of A new novel from the best stylist in Irish fiction

By Allen Barra