(One character, a priest, is 'cleaner than the daylight moon' panic is 'blacker than old tea'.) The result is a richly allusive and haunting text that is nevertheless jagged enough to avoid the anaesthetic of high lyricism. He writes with a dramatist's timing and a poet's exactitude. It is an astoundingly ambitious body of work, which establishes that family trees, like national histories, sprout 'the strange fruits in the cornucopia of grief'. In addition, The Secret Scripture offers itself as a kind of thematic cousin to his Booker-nominated masterpiece A Long Long Way and his award-winning stage play The Steward of Christendom.īarry, in effect, is making one operatically extended fiction comprising discrete but interrelated novels and plays, often inspired by his real-life ancestors. This novel of crippled perspectives and ducked responsibilities comments on his 1998 book The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, a story about 'scraps of people, blown off the road of life by history's hungry breezes'. He and his late wife were 'like two peoples that have once committed grave crimes against each other, but in another generation'.īarry writes about loss, broken promises, failed hopes. A man who feels fatherly, 'even motherly', towards his patients, he is plagued by memories of an uneasy marriage. Her account forms the main part of Sebastian Barry's compelling new novel, in which Roseanne's testimony interweaves with that of her psychiatrist, Dr Grene.

The secret scripture book