The dark colors in a ruined tapestry

SEBASTIAN BARRY (JERRY BAUER)

Playwright, novelist, and poet Sebastian Barry returns repeatedly in his work to Ireland's turbulent decades during World War I and its aftermath and to his family's history. "The Secret Scripture" is his exquisite testament to Roseanne, an old forgotten woman in a Roscommon mental hospital who begins secretly to write her story, and of her doctor, who uncovers a very different, shocking history.

Barry spoke from his home in Wicklow, Ireland.

Q. Roseanne appears in "The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty." How did she become a central character here?

A. I tried to put her in a play, but that was put aside. I had the first chapter of this novel for a couple of years - what an odd occupation, sitting beside this dark water waiting for things to come up! Finally Roseanne became real, created by syntax in a way, so that when I first saw her name printed in a review I was happy for her. Even though it's not the real name of the great-aunt who might be behind the character.

Q. The great-aunt?

A. I first heard about her from my mother. When we were in Sligo years ago, she pointed out a tin hut and said "That's where that woman was put, your great-uncle's first wife." They later put Roseanne, as I call her, into the asylum. The implication was that she was promiscuous. Later the site that had prompted my mother to talk, that had set me thinking, was removed. So I was all the fiercer wanting to take Roseanne back. When you're told that somebody was "no good," but the rumor of her beauty remains, it's fascinating.

Q. Did you research her story?

A. No. My theory is this: You have to look inside you. These characters are a version of you, and if you're quiet they will start to speak. Later you often learn things that corroborate a guess you made. A friend from Sligo told me the other day that his parents were the laundry people in the asylum (my grandparents were the tailor and the seamstress there) and that it was nicknamed the "Leitrim Hotel." One theme of this novel is that you can tell a story before you know it, that your own story is a history you cannot anticipate until you write it down. As readers, we have a version of that history already in us, so we're reading this along with our own inner manuscript.

Q. Roseanne's early voice seems reminiscent of J.M. Synge's characters. Was he an influence?

A. My great aunt Annie - of my novel "Annie Dunne" - spoke that language that Synge heard when he traveled in Wicklow. When we stayed with Annie in the 1950s, I as a Dublin boy couldn't understand it. But that speech may have gone into me. I've never voiced that thought before, but now that you ask me it's true. It was the language of the person I loved most, and to me at that time how people spoke was a representation of them, it was like their soul.

Q. Do you identify with Synge's antinationalist themes?

A. There's that moment in Synge's wonderful essay "In Wicklow" when an old chap on the road tells him, "Of course, you're a foreigner." That side of Synge, a totally Irish person being told he's a foreigner, is terribly important because there's always somebody to tell you that in Ireland. After independence, for example, if you were rural, Catholic, Republican you had a better chance to thrive. If you were Anglo-Irish or Protestant, it was more complicated. I know how important that "foreigner" perception is for an Irish writer. Maybe I have that in common with Synge.

Q. Are you also part of the anticlerical tradition in Irish writing?

A. Like most Irish families, mine is reeking with priests and nuns. But I was thrilled to write a really good priest in "A Long Long Way," Father Buckley on the front line, ministering to everybody. In this novel, I really tried to be fair to Father Gaunt, to understand him. But then I had to follow the lead. Only 10 years or so after the First World War, here were these priests who had ministered to men dying in their arms, now trying to subvert or pervert the normal mayhem of an individual soul, to impose a constricted perfection.

Q. Are you writing the hidden history of Ireland?

A. These days, you're no longer taking these things out of the darkness, you're simply saying that they are important dark colors in our ruined tapestry. To put a woman like Roseanne - and there were thousands of them - to put her out of the book of life was a terrible crime.

Anna Mundow can be reached at ama1668@hotmail.com.