Author: Sebastian Barry
ISBN: 978 0 14 311569 4
Publisher: Penguin, 2008
Roseanne Clear is a hundred years old, and has lived at Roscommon Mental Hospital for the last sixty years. The old hospital is to be demolished, the process of which has initiated a ‘review’ of the patients to see if any are suitable for transfer to the outside world, by the supervising Dr Grene. The narrative of the book alternates between sections of ‘Roseanne’s testimony of herself’ and ‘Dr Grene’s commonplace book’. As Roseanne describes her life from early childhood up till her committal to Sligo Mental Hospital, Dr Grene writes of his own attempts to find out more about her past, his emotions regarding the hospital, his marriage, and his ongoing fascination with Roseanne, the nature of which he can’t quite understand. Both narrators write in secret, though Roseanne’s text is half-addressed to Dr Grene – she hopes perhaps it will be discovered after her death. In the process of his investigations Dr Grene discovers different records and documents that offer a dramatic contrast to the version of Roseanne’s testimony of herself.
The clues to the nature of the relationship between the doctor and the patient are embedded in the very cadences they each narrate their stories in. At the outset, I found it rather unimpressive and was concluding that here was an author who was really not very good at differentiating between narrative voices. This develops as the work continues into a curiosity, then a doubt, a realisation of their interdependency, and finally an awe at the method by which the two characters have been sustaining each other with the most delicate, most intangible lines: a tracery of thought-threads and shared perceptions that logic and reason cannot account for. The trail of the squirrels of thought that leap from one branch to another and leave no tracks but have connected the trees nevertheless.
The emotional impact of the narrative is almost unbearable in the unmitigated forgiveness in the face of immeasurable cruelty and abuse. A forgiveness that is put forward so simply that it cannot but be believed, and it therefore all the more stunning.
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