The Secret Scripture
by Sebastian Barry
>Faber & Faber, 320pp, £7.99

In Sebastian Barry's Costa Prize winning novel Roseanne, a very old inmate of a psychiatric hospital, tells the story of her life. Alongside her deeply moving and poetic account of youth in Sligo before the war there runs a parallel story in the form of the diaries of Dr Grene, the hospital psychiatrist, who takes a belated interest in her now that the hospital is about to close. Her childhood with a kindly Presbyterian father and a mother who eventually goes mad, her marriage to a jazz singer, a baby, disgrace and incarceration, are all played out against the background of the bitter politics of Ireland in the 1920s and '30s. Dramatic incidents are relived and reimagined through the prism of childhood and old age - the book is as much about the unreliability of memory as anything. The contrast between these two first-person narratives, which both try to describe and make sense of the past, is one of the main flaws of the book: the doctor is a dullard by comparison with Roseanne and the story of his failed marriage remains curiously uninteresting. Indeed his main role seems to be to supply an unnecessarily melodramatic ending to the story (commented on by the Costa judges), the culmination of several irritatingly implausible plot twists.
Emily Read