The Secret Scripture is a single story made of two narratives. Its title may point us to secrets from the past that will gradually be revealed, but it also describes the activity of its two narrators, who are both busy writing: the aged Roseanne McNulty, recording her memories in her private "Testimony", and her psychiatrist, Dr Grene, scribbling in his "Commonplace Book". Until near the end of the novel, they are writing in ignorance of each other's account, their texts interleaved to invite our curiosity. We have to put the story together from these two narratives.
Putting a story together is what Dr Grene is also trying to do. Reconstructing narrative is his profession. "I feel mighty desirous to reach a conclusion about Roseanne." But he has his personal as well as his professional reasons. He pursues Roseanne's story out of his own grief after the death of his wife, as if he were trying to redeem the past. He has read the deposition of Fr Gaunt, the priest who condemned Roseanne for her supposed sexual misdemeanours, and recognises him as a "stern-minded, and entirely unforgiving" narrator. Fr Gaunt's narrative is "a remarkable piece of work, clerical, thorough, and convincing", and yet it does not quite convince him.
It tells him that Roseanne, abandoned to solitude in her "iron hut" by the sea, has mysteriously borne a child. How can this be? She has been cast out by her community. She speaks to no one. The narrative structure temporarily perplexes the reader too, for Roseanne's narrative has not yet explained this. According to the priest, she has killed the child. Again, we might share Dr Grene's doubts, but we must wait to discover the truth. When Roseanne asks the doctor to give her precious copy of Thomas Browne's Religio Medici to her son, he says that he will, but knows that he will not, "considering what I knew from Fr Gaunt's blunt statement in his document". He cannot simply ask her, "Did you kill your child?" A nice paradox of the method of parallel narratives is that Roseanne is the eloquent and revealing narrator of one, but a frail, muddled old woman in the other. "She is very unforthcoming," observes Grene. He is wrong, of course.
His story is also unknown to her. Long before she died, his wife rejected him because of a foolish, drunken infidelity years before. In the novel, Roseanne's account of her own disastrous tryst with a man who is not her husband is immediately succeeded by Dr Grene's account of his liaison at a psychiatric conference. For sex is the problem in this story. Roseanne, spotted with her admirer by grim Fr Gaunt, loses her husband and is officially classified as a "nymphomaniac", a woman with, doubtless, a history of "irregular relations".
Sometimes the narratives clash with each other. In one of his entries Dr Grene piously tells us that, though that day he could have "asked her anything . . . and probably got the truth", he allowed her "her silence, her privacy". In the next extract of her "Testimony" Roseanne records him probing her about her father and her child. In Roseanne's account we know Mrs McNulty, her mother-in-law, as a poisonous influence. Bitter at her own rumoured illegitimacy and the deep secret of her adultery as a young woman, she is an agent of Roseanne's ostracisation. She ensures that her son Tom never speaks again to Roseanne, and that their marriage is dissolved. When Roseanne, heavily pregnant, comes to her for aid she turns her away. But Dr Grene learns from a nun at the old people's home to which she left her money that "she was a very great lady . . . always trying to do the good thing by everybody".
Relying on our powers of inference, the novel's narrative structure can accommodate uncertainties. "I wonder is that the difficulty, that my memories and my imaginings are lying deeply in the same place?" Roseanne asks herself. "I have to be careful with these 'memories.'" "Memory falters." Yet this is a limited kind of unreliability. We must trust Roseanne, whose story is confessional, spoken before God. "God knows the true story before I write it, so can easily catch me out in falsehood." That split-second before you give in to the temptation to make a story sound convincing, God sees what you are up to. Meanwhile, Dr Grene's account - "(but to whom am I saying it?)" - is only for himself. He speaks "in the privacy of this book", settling his curiosity without thoughts of a reader. Perhaps what he writes is banal, but "later I can tear it out".
These self-enclosed narratives must eventually come together. Finally, after Roseanne has become too weak and infirm to go on writing, Dr Grene is given her "Testimony" by the orderly who cleans her room and knows about the creaking floorboard under which she has secreted it. He can compare her memories to his speculations. We should have known this would happen. He had to become a reader just like us.
John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. He and Sebastian Barry will have a discussion on 8 April. Doors open 6.30pm, talk starts at 7pm, at the Scott Room, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 (020 3353 2881). Returns only.
