Book brief: Memories — all alone at life's end
Like an ancient Rapunzel sequestered in a tower, Roseanne Clear McNulty is slowly measuring out her remaining days. At 100 years old, maybe more, she is a ruined beauty locked away in a moldering mental hospital in Northern Ireland, her only visitors a kindly psychiatrist 35 years her junior, a gruff orderly and the occasional mouse.
And her memories.
In The Secret Scripture (Viking, 330 pp.), Irish novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry has created a wondrous character in Roseanne, who is secretly writing (and burying under the floorboards) not so much a memoir but an accounting of her life and the events — a few joyful, but far too many others devastating — that brought her to this place.
Her voice, at once elegiac, sardonic, enraged and deeply wounded, is a marvel.
