Recovering Ireland’s hidden history
Sebastian Barry on being shortlisted for a second time
Congratulations on The Secret Scripture being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008. Where were you when you heard the news and how did you feel? How does it differ to being shortlisted with A Long Long Way in 2005?
Strangely enough, I was sitting at my desk... The news returned me to about age 10 -- or maybe 11, because I went out into the garden to tell my son Toby, who is eleven. He was wearing his new clothes for school, and he gave a screech, and rolled about on the lawn, the very muddy lawn. It was exactly how I felt myself.
Three years ago I couldn't believe it, and I couldn't believe it this time either.
In The Secret Scripture, Roseanne's story (of being placed in a mental institution in Ireland) is said to be loosely based on the life of one of your great aunts. How old were you when you had first heard about this great aunt and had you always wanted to weave it into a novel or play?
I first heard about her in about 1989 (I was 34). I was driving with my mother through Strandhill, a little seaside place in Sligo. We passed a ruined hut with a stone chimney, and she said 'That's where your woman was put.' I asked, which woman? My mother didn't know her name, but said that she had been the piano player in the band that used to play there in the Plaza dancehall. She had married my mother's uncle, and then been considered 'no good' in some fashion, and was eventually committed to Sligo Mental Hospital, where indeed her father-in-law was the tailor. My mother thought her real crime had been 'beauty'.
I tried to write a film for her, thinking the glamour of that would be some recompense. I tried to write a play for her. But neither worked. So seventeen years later I was relieved when I was able to write the novel.
There are two first-person narratives in The Secret Scripture - Roseanne and her long-term psychiatrist Dr Grene. Did you find it any harder to create the female narrative in the novel?
My feeling about books and plays is that the people in them are hiding in us, hiding in the strands of our DNA, and their stories survive with them, and sometimes they want their stories told, they choose a time. I did sit for about seven months with only one chapter written, feeling more foolish by the day. Then I began to see and hear her, and followed as best I could. Dr Grene was my guide really, a mirror to her story. The time spent writing it coincided with the last illness of my mother, and the book is very bound in to that. I discovered that my mother, just before she became ill, had in fact been writing secretly an account of her childhood in Sligo, a very strange coincidence. I wrote the book, and washed my mother's clothes (the medieval Irish hospital system), and was suddenly struck by the immutable nature of the mother/son relationship (almost as if noticing it for the first time...). When I read from the book at readings, I must admit I catch my mother's voice in the cadences of Roseanne.
How difficult is it to use your family's real-life experiences in fiction? Has there ever been any animosity towards your writing from family members because of this?
Yes, years and years ago my grandfather called me to his flat and cursed at me for writing a short novel that was in fact based on the stories I had been told about him when I was a child. I loved him, and we never spoke again. Otherwise, although it is true we are not a close-knit family in any shape or form, family members have been deeply supportive, sometimes much to my surprise, and gratitude.
In both A Long Long Way and The Secret Scripture you have unearthed hidden truths in Ireland's history (In A Long Long Way - the involvement of Ireland in the British Army during the First World War, In The Secret Scripture - the placing of women pregnant outside wedlock into asylums or convents). Was there an intention to expose these chapters in Irish history is it just predominantly because these are incredible sources for fiction writing?
Not to expose, as much as to try and recover. The story of Ireland is like a series of incredible tapestries, many of them stitched with a lot of red, and plentiful reels of black thread. But they're damaged pictures. Most of the damage came after independence, when a new narrative had to be established in order to assist the birth of a country. I am only going back to 'rescue' some of my family members, about whom usually I know next to nothing, to retrieve them if I can from the cold hand of history. I go to look for them, and generally find them mired or otherwise in their own times, naturally.
If you were to win the Man Booker Prize you would become the fifth Irish author to take the prize in its 40 year history - with Banville and Enright picking up the prize very recently in 2007 and 2005. Is it important to you to be defined as an Irish writer or do you feel that the classification is less significant?
Yes, it is important to me to be an Irish writer. But the sort of Irish person I am might not have been considered very Irish years ago; and my wife is a Dublin Presbyterian, whose father's generation was definitively told they weren't really Irish. I was born 'between the canals' in Dublin and my parents and grandparents come from all corners of the island. Some of them fought in the World Wars, and some of them were revolutionaries. At the same time, my first school was an LCC one in London, my friends were Chinese, Indian, Jamaican, African -- and when I go to London I do feel the pull of 'home'... If I had been born elsewhere, I hope I would have been happy to be that elsewhere writer.
You seem to adapt seamlessly from playwright to novelist and vice versa. Have you ever written for screen (have either A Long Long Way or The Secret Scripture been optioned for film?)
I did try to write that film long ago for Roseanne, but something about the form defeats whatever sort of writer I am. Recently Noel Pearson, the producer of My Left Foot, optioned A Long Long Way and asked me to have a go at the screenplay. I did, but it was wisely given on then to a real screenwriter. If anyone wanted to make a film of The Secret Scripture, I would have to let someone else write the screenplay. But either way, now I think of it, it would certainly close the circle of my attempts to find her.
What are you working on next? Is it difficult to start working on something new when an existing project is in the limelight?
I am actually in the middle of rehearsals for a new play commissioned by Canterbury Cathedral/Paines Plough. I was between interviews in the car the other day (the day of the shortlist announcement). I had pulled off the road, on some dark backroad of Wicklow, and jotted down a last line for the play that had risen up like a trout in the river. I texted it to the director, and then spoke as lucidly as I could manage to BBC Ulster about the The Secret Scripture. But I'm glad I was finishing something, not starting, right enough.
Can you recommend a book you have read recently?
Yes, I can. I thought Joseph O'Neill's Netherland was a wonder, and then some.
