The Secret Scripture by Sebastian BarryMy review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
In a crumbling asylum in rural Ireland an old woman called Mrs Roseanne McNulty is writing a secret account of her life, squirrelling the pages away under a loose floorboard. Her psychiatrist, Dr Green, is also keeping an account. The asylum is due for demolition and the patients are to be redistributed to modern facilities or into the care of the community, and so he must assess Mrs McNulty and determine her state of mind and the reasons for her committal over fifty years ago, from patchy records and gentle questioning of the lady herself.
The book deals principally with the dark history of Ireland in the twentieth century. Grinding poverty, a brutal civil war with enmities that were to last for decades, institutional cruelty, and the tyrannies of the priests and nuns who kept a malevolent grip on the social mores of their communities. The central question is whether Roseanne's eloquent and lucid account of her life is accurate, or whether the differing accounts and secrets unearthed by Dr Green will show history in a different light.
This is a book that left me both angry and deeply moved, and highlights once more the profound evils of self serving religion. I defy anyone to read the recent statements of Cormac Murphy O'Connor and his replacement Vincent Nicholls and tell me that the horrors of this book are in the past and that the arrogant complacency of the priesthood no longer holds sway.
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