See? This is what happens when you agree to do things at the pub. Reading all the Booker Prize nominees? Sounds like a great idea! I can guest post on your blog and everything! Which all sounds well and good at the time, untill you look at them all, and realise that you’re meant to read them all by mid-November, and then you start getting flash backs to cram weeks at university when you had to read a semesters worth of reading in one week.

But anyway, I’ve started on my quest, and have finished the first of my Booker prize nominees, following in Scott’s steps and starting with The Secret Scripture.

I can easily see why The Secret Scripture was nominated - it’s a moving and deftly written piece of prose, carefully exploring themes of memory, loss, grief and time, wound through a plot starting during the partitioning of Ireland in the 1920s, and moving through to contemporary Ireland. It is an interesting and personal account of this difficult period, but the focus of the text is not on the history of the period, but is rather a more personal tale of the histories of the central characters, Roseanne and Dr Grene.

Barry’s portrayal of the cruelly maltreated Roseanne is very finely formed. Near the end of the days, her account of the troubles of her own life, and how she came to spend the majority of her life needlessly held in mental institutions, is poignant and softened by time. You get a sense not that she has forgiven her tormenters, but that through living with her memories as her primary companion for so long she has worn some of the edges off. Or that she doesn’t now have the strength to be as angry as she once might have been. She grieves for her lost life, but is less bitter than you might expect.

In contrast, Dr Grene is portrayed with a more raw and troubled sense of loss. Having spent many years quietly mourning his marriage, and listening to the sounds of his estranged wife sleeping in the attic room above him, he now mourns the complete loss of her in death, and his sense of bewilderment - the complete lostness and strangeness of mourning - is palpable on the page. Where Roseanne is trying to resolve her demons and memories of the past, Grene is haunted by them, unable to cope in the freshness of his grief.

This is a soft and sombre tale, with the themes gently played out through the stories of the characters, and slowly resolved as their stories grow closer together throughout the book. What might have come across as clunky or heavy-handed by another author, is beautifully realised in The Secret Scripture. A great book, and a fab start to the somewhat daunting task of reading through all the nominees!