The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2008, which is why I was reading it. I had no idea what it was about and I must admit that I was a wee bit disappointed when I realised that the setting is Ireland and features a female inmate of a mental hospital. It sounded like a depressing read to me, it’s not actually depressing but is very sad in parts and given the way women have been treated over the years there, that was inevitable, but the writing is very good.

Roseanne is thought to be almost 100 years old and has lived for most of her life in a mental hospital, but the hospital is due for demolition, that’s a bit of a worry for her as she has been writing her lifetime’s experiences down and has it all hidden under a loose floorboard in her room. How can she save it when the time comes for her to move?

Dr Grene is the psychiatrist who heads the hospital and he visits Roseanne just about every afternoon to chat to her, and has done for years. He’s intrigued by her case and fears that she might be one of those women incarcerated because she had upset her family or society in some way. He wonders if she should be moved to some sort of care in the community rather than into another mental hospital. He’s on a mission to find out what happened in her past, but her medical notes are unreadable because of the attentions of damp and mice.

Inevitably a priest was at the back of it all. The experiences of women in Ireland weren’t very different from those in parts of the Middle East now. I’m convinced that all religions were originally concocted to keep all women down.

Both strands of the book are told through their journals. Dr Grene’s wife has died recently, they had been estranged, and he’s to blame for that, so his conscience is bothering him. He writes about the early years of his marriage when they were so in love.

I’m sure that this observation from Dr Grene’s commonplace book is so true:

“There has never been a person in an old people’s home that hasn’t looked around dubiously at the other inhabitants. They are the old ones, they are the club that no one wants to join. But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of the day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.”

Dr Grene is an agnostic, but he still writes of the soul.

I would definitely read more books by this author, I believe this one is part of a McNulty Family series. Have any of you read them?