Fragments Shored Against My Ruin

We have enough problems with linear narrative and true memory–from Dr. Grene’s Commonplace Book

It is grimly apropos that I finally got around to reading Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture while the nation bobbed about in toxic wake left by the publication of Ryan/Laffoy Report. The Ryan Commission provided the most comprehensive factual account so far of how the institutions of Church and State worked hand-in-glove to facilitate the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of the Irish state’s “untermenschen.” And Barry’s novel undertakes the imaginative project of illustrating how forces of oppression could be applied in a particular setting, to particular people.

For much of her 100-year tenure on the planet, Roseanne McNulty née Clear, has been the object of these forces. Attempting at last to become the subject of her story, the ancient patient of the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital begins writing “Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself,” in which she undertakes to clarify the course of events that led to her committal. Superficially belonging to that populous fictional cohort of “unreliable narrators,” Roseanne is not so much a duplicitous chronicler as one who is reluctant to face the enormity of the injustice that has been inflicted upon her. Passages in Barry’s novel unexpectedly recall Kazuo Ishiguro’s wonderful 2005 work, Never Let Me Go. The narrator in Ishiguro’s book adopts a cunctatory approach to her tale—by dallying fetishistically over humdrum details of boarding-school life, she allows her ultimate revelation to loom larger and larger in the background. Similarly, there is a sense that Roseanne’s reminiscences of her time working in the local cafe, her cinema trips to see Fred Astaire, and, most touchingly of all, the scattered childhood moments spent with her father, are all vain efforts to damn the floodtide of misfortune that have swept her old life away. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, as Eliot would have it.

Interleaved among Roseanne’s account is the Commonplace Book kept by her medical supervisor, the institution’s senior psychiatrist, Dr William Grene. Grene is also using his journal as a refuge and as a tool—to come to terms with his failures as a carer and a husband.

It could be argued that it requires a willed credulousness to accept that both documents, putatively intended for the writers’ eyes only, are crafted with a shared level of novelistic precision. But the acceptance of implausibly articulate storytellers is typically part of the reader’s side of the contract with the writer. The compensation for accepting that deal is a remarkable prose style, which employs a conversational, storyteller’s tone to smuggle a heightened language into the reader’s consciousness. The following passage, from Dr Grene’s journal, illustrates for me how this rich text narrowly avoids becoming clotted by the density of allusions it contains (note how often the word “like” modestly slips in yet another simile into the cascade of comparisons).

[Grene has entered his dead wife's bedroom, and has begun reading from her extensive library on rose cultivation.] I lay down on my own bed and continued reading, long into the night. It was as if I were reading a letter from her, or was privileged to enter a subject that probably lined her mind like wallpaper. Rosa Gallica, a plain little rose like the one you see carved on medieval buildings as Rosa Mundi, was the first. The late roses are the huge tea roses that look in gardens like dancers’ bottoms in frilly knickers. What a creature we are, bring a simple bloom to that over the centuries, and turning those mangy scavenging animals at the edge of our ancient camp fires into Borzois and poodles. The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone, we must be elaborating, improving, poeticising.