Sebastian Barry: The Secret Scripture

As mentioned a while back, I'm not too well at the moment, and one of the symptoms is being extraordinarily tired much of the time, so I am spending several hours a day in bed reading.

Yes, you're right. It could be a lot worse.

First up for discussion is Sebastian Barry's 'The Secret Scripture'. This is the second Sebastian Barry book I've read, the first being the heartrendingly brilliant 'A Long, Long Way', his account of a young Irish soldier in the First World War. That one was on the Booker shortlist in 2005, and lost to John Banville's 'The Sea', and I can't say whether that was fair as I have not read the latter, but I find it hard to believe it could be much better than 'A Long, Long Way' which is the best book by far I've ever read about WW1, and I have read many of the usual suspects (Pat Barker trilogy, 'Birdsong' etc.)

So I was very excited about reading 'The Secret Scripture', also Booker shortlisted, this time in 2008. This one is about a 100-year-old Irish woman, Roseanne, who has been in a lunatic asylum since the 1950s, and the doctor who is trying to determine her mental state to see if she is fit for release when said asylum is scheduled for demolition. The book moves between the diaries of both characters, that of Roseanne detailing her upbringing in early 20th century Ireland and the events that led to her incarceration, and that of the Doctor describing his attempts to uncover the truth about her, and his sadness at the recent loss of his wife.

So far so good, and it is wonderfully written and evocative, if not quite to the heights of 'A Long, Long Way'. But I had a dim memory of one of the Booker judges having broken ranks and saying that the reason that 'The Secret Scriptures' had missed out on the Booker win (to Arvind Adiga's 'The White Tiger') was that it had an incredibly bad ending. Of course I was intrigued to see if that would turn out to be the case.

Well, let me tell you. 'The Secret Scripture' has the most stupid, ridiculous, laughable, demented, throw-the-book-out-of-the-window endings I have ever come across. It is awful. It is insane. You wonder what the hell possessed Sebastian Barry, and what makes it worse is I don't think that this was a help-what-do-I-do-to-finish-this, I-know, it-was-all-a-dream ending, I think this ending was planned right from the very start. And it is also completely unnecessary. You could have had exactly the same book with a vastly different ending, barely changing anything else about it, and it would have been a fantastic book about which I would not have had a word of criticism. How did this get past his agent and his editor? How?

I don't know whether to recommend that you read it but skip the last 50 pages, read it and relish in the horror of the terrible ending, or just don't read it at all. I'm inclined to point you in the direction of 'A Long, Long Way' instead, as well as Maggie O'Farrell's similarly-themed 'The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox'.

Ironically enough, 'A Long, Long Way' has an exceptional ending, indeed one of my favourite endings of an book, that had me sobbing my little heart out.

Sebastian Barry: see me after class.

More book reviews to come.