There are still more than three weeks to go till the end of the year, but nothing that can happen in my reading life will prevent Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture being one of the best novels I read in 2009. Quite by chance, while I was reading it Adèle alerted me to a post on Marie Phillips's blog that gives a different view. Though she thought the book 'wonderfully written' - which it is - Marie was put off by what for her was a blemish: this being 'the most stupid, ridiculous, laughable, demented, throw-the-book-out-of-the-window [ending] I have ever come across'. I avoided reading Marie's post till I'd finished The Secret Scripture, but now that I have, I don't agree. I'm not going to put in any spoilers (as Marie also doesn't), because I'd like to encourage others to read the book. I'll just say two or three things about it. The story it tells of Roseanne Clear, a woman of 100 who has spent several decades in an asylum and is remembering her past by secretly committing its main outlines to paper, is at once riveting and of a luminous intelligence. Barry's writing never falters. If there's a reservation I have, it's only that he has to sustain two first-person voices through the book, Roseanne's and that of her doctor, William Grene, who is keeping his own diary; and different as Barry makes the two voices, there is sometimes a similarity of accent and construction, as I suppose it must have been difficult to avoid. Nonetheless, Roseanne's painful but at the same time inwardly rich and humanizing story and Grene's late attempt to track it make up a powerful literary combination.
And that ending? Well, I find I'm not the only reader to have been untroubled by it. With Harriet Devine I think, on the contrary, that it has 'dramatic truth', sealing a kind of redemption of the suffering of which we've been made aware in the preceding pages - though like other redemptions it can't undo the terrible wrongs that have been done. Moreover, there are enough signals from him along the way to why Barry might have felt perfectly entitled to the ending he contrived. Here's one of them, from amongst Roseanne's written reflections:
History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man's dominion of the earth.
More than once Barry puts in the mouths of his protagonists thoughts about memory and the past compatible with a view that literary truth and mundane truth stand in a complex relation and the first can take liberties with what one would expect from the second, would think probable, predictable, within its domain. Why, in any case, should Barry not be permitted the sort of thing we have come to take for granted in Shakespeare and Dickens - or in Alfred Hitchcock, for that matter - if it enables him to resolve the tensions of this fiction into a startling coda of human compassion?