I was ranting on about Sebastian Barry a few weeks ago, before I had even read this novel, when its inclusion on the Booker longlist was first announced. It's another two days until the shortlist appears, and whether the book will be on it or not is anybody's guess. As I have not read any of the other contenders I can't, obviously, offer any opinion on this. All I can say, having stayed late in bed this morning finishing it, is that it is a most wonderful, and most terrible, read. Wonderful not only because Barry writes the most beautiful, heart-rending prose, but also because it manages to be a story both intensely personal and sharply political -- in fact the two are inextricably intertwined. And it is terrible for the same reasons -- that is to say, the story that it tells is one of such individual pain, such injustice, so much suffering, and all these in the name of religion. If this makes it sound too dark and too depressing a read -- well, believe me, it is not. Darkness is there, sorrow is there, but through it all there is an extraordinary vision of the persistence of the human spirit, and I think you will end this book feeling stirred, disturbed, but finally uplifted.
The novel tells the story of Roseanne McNulty, once "the most beautiful woman in Sligo", now a woman of somewhere in the region of a hundred years old, who has spent more than half her life incarcerated in a mental institution. Her story is narrated both in her own words -- she is secretly writing what she hopes is a true account of her life -- and through the 'Commonplace Book' entries of the institution's psychiatrist, Dr William Grene.The institution is about to be closed, and Grene has the task of deciding the fate of its inmates, some of whom, including Roseanne, he suspects were placed there for "social" rather than mental health reasons. Grene is a troubled, fallible man, whose unhappy marriage ends part way through the novel with the sudden death of his partially estranged wife. He starts his investigation of Roseanne's life simply with the desire to do her justice, but he gets increasingly involved as the facts he uncovers become more and more disturbing, and conflict with the little she is prepared to disclose to him herself. Meanwhile the reader is discovering the truth, or as much of it as Roseanne is able to confront herself, through her own writings. It is, indeed, a tragic story, one in which religious conflicts, political unrest, and repressive morality conspire to ruin the life of this lovely, and once happy, young woman.The most frightening figure in the novel is the priest, Fr Gaunt, who reappears at intervals throughout Roseanne's life and who quite deliberately falsifies her story, finally arranging for her to be sectioned on the trumped up grounds of nymphomania.
As we know, this kind of thing was, alas, only too common in Ireland until far too recently, and as Sebastian Barry says in this interview, the novel originated in a story he heard about the first wife of one of his own great-uncles. Like Roseanne, she was forcibly separated from her husband and sent to live in a tin hut on the edge of the village, her marriage was annulled, and she was finally incarcerated in an asylum. As anyone familiar with Barry's writing will know, he frequently uses his own family history as the basis for his work, and in fact some of his earlier characters reappear here: Eneas McNulty (from The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty), Lizzie Finn from the play The Only True History of Lizzie Finn, and possibly others I didn't spot. Of course you don't need to know this to appreciate the writing, but it does add yet another layer to what is already a multi-layered work. I know some readers have found the ending a bit contrived, but I think it has dramatic truth and I'm certainly not about to carp about it.
Here's an little extract, just to give you a taste:
We blew out, a crowd of young girls from the town, to Tom McNulty's dancehall by the sea, like a torrent of roses along the bleak roads, sometimes spilling in tremendous gaiety and simplicity out onto the strand itself, where the road came down from the village of upper Sandhill, and the bollards one after the other on the very sand itself showed the lowtide way to Coney. Maybe you would rather rather call us gulls, elegant white birds dipping and calling, we were always inland as it were -- as if there was always a storm at sea. Oh, it is girls of seventeen and eighteen know how to live life, and love the living of it, if we are let.
