The Secret Scripture

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-3

Part 1, Chapters 4-6

Part 1, Chapters 7-9

Part 1, Chapters 10-11

Part 2, Chapters 12-14

Part 2, Chapters 15-17

Part 3, Chapters 18-20

Part 3, Chapters 21-22

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Part 1, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary

John Kane enters Roseanne’s room to clean, “muttering and pushing his brush” (44). Roseanne tolerates him, though “his flies [are always] open” (44). He remarks on her books, wondering how she can read without spectacles. She tells him that she can read just fine without glasses.

Many years before, John Kane led Roseanne to safety during a fire. Now, he offers her “[h]alf the shell of a bird’s egg, blue like the [veil of] veins in his face” (46). Roseanne had found it “in the gardens many years before” (47). John, meanwhile, complains about the constant dust in the room, “ancient dust” (47). Despite all the years in which they have known each other, John asks for Roseanne’s name, as though he doesn’t know it. Roseanne claims to have forgotten her name. He replies that he knows it anyway.

When John leaves the room, Roseanne ruminates on her brother-in-law, Jack, who fought in the Second World War for England. There was also a civil war fought in Sligo “and all along the western seaboard” (48). Roseanne was 14 at the time and observed a lot of hatred. Being only a teenager, however, she worried about little more than her hair, wishing to give it curls. Now, she misses the “straight yellow hair” that she had in her youth (50).

Youth sometimes preoccupied Joe Clear when he was assigned to bury boys. Roseanne recalls that he dutifully buried anyone but wept when burying boys. One evening, while in the temple with her father, Roseanne saw three young men enter, carrying a fourth. The boys had “old rifles and in their pockets bulged other weapons” (53). Joe Clear asked if they were “Free Staters or the other lot” (53). The young men were “the other lot”—Republicans, who didn’t support the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 (38). Their dead friend was a lad of 17 named Willie Lavelle; soldiers who wanted to watch him suffer shot him three times in the belly. After burying Willie, they told Joe Clear that they planned to avenge his death. The young man who told this story, John, suddenly broke down in tears and threw himself across Willie’s limp body. Willie was John’s younger brother.

Just then, “a long thin boy” demanded that Joe Clear bury Willie immediately (55). Joe Clear noted that the young men hadn’t bought a plot. As fighters for the Irish Republic, the young soldiers insisted that all of Ireland was their plot. They asked for a priest. Roseanne went to get Father Gaunt. Before she left, they made her promise not to speak to anyone on the way to Father Gaunt’s home, because of the risk of Free Staters finding the soldiers and killing everyone in the temple.

Roseanne reached Father Gaunt’s house and asked if he would come with her; he agreed. When Father Gaunt arrived, he saw the young soldiers holding guns and wondered if Joe Clear was being held prisoner. Father Gaunt then asked if the deceased boy committed murder. One of the soldiers answered that war isn’t murder. Father Gaunt told them that the bishops forbade the clergymen from absolving the soldiers, “for they [had] decided that [the Republicans’] war [was] wrong” (59). Father Gaunt agreed to absolve Willie if the soldiers confirmed that he didn’t kill anyone. The boys, all Catholic, didn’t want to lie. John said that no one ever saw Willie kill anyone. This response satisfied Father Gaunt. He absolved Willie for his sins and everyone said “Amen.”

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Dr. Grene’s Commonplace Book”

Dr. Grene feels both compassion and contempt for the patients under his care. For example, there’s the man named Meel from County Leitrim who once owned 400 acres. He was one day found in a schoolyard, dragging three dead dogs that were tied to his leg.

Dr. Grene’s personal life isn’t much more inspiring. He and his wife, Bet, have a distant relationship. She’s ill, suffering from swelling of the legs and fainting spells. They have no children, despite having tried.

The narrative reverts back to “Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself.” She’s still writing about Willie Lavelle. While tending to his body, Free State soldiers banged on the door of the temple and barged in. They shot at the soldiers inside, including John, but no one was killed. The Free Staters threatened to shoot Father Gaunt for disobeying the bishops’ orders not to perform rites on rebels. They then picked up “the two wounded [soldiers] gently enough” and took them outside; they arrested the third (52). The third soldier accused Roseanne of telling the Free Staters where they were, but she denied it. Father Gaunt asked the Free Staters what they ought to do with Willie’s body. The leader advised them to throw it “in a hole outside the walls, like a criminal, or a bastard child” (52). After they departed, Father Gaunt told Joe Clear how angry he was for having been involved in the illegal burial. Joe Clear apologized for sending Roseanne to get him and, in his defense, asserted that he believed that priests liked being involved in all matters.

Father Gaunt later visited the Clear family on Sunday morning at ten o’clock. Joe Clear offered him tea. The priest lit a cigarette and nervously began to tell Joe Clear that he would have to leave his position as superintendent of the graveyard. The priest drew hard from the cigarette several times and realized that he had quite a bit of ash to flick off, though there was no ashtray in sight. Joe Clear offered his hand, “which perhaps flinched tinily for a moment when the heat hit it” (58).

As a consolation, Father Gaunt mentioned that the mayor’s secretary, Mr. Dolan, told Father Gaunt about an opening for a rat-catcher. He tells Joe Clear that there’s been a “veritable plague of rats […] bedeviling the warehouses on the riverside” near Finisglen, an otherwise “salubrious district” (58).

Roseanne showed Father Gaunt out. Outside the door, he asked her to tell her father that, if he were to take the position, there would be a dog to assist him in catching the rats. Roseanne went back in and asked her father if he knew anything about rat-catching. He said that he dealt with rats at the cemetery. Still, he insisted on “[studying] the matter” and wondered if the library had a manual on rats (60).

Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary

Roseanne remembered the day that her father was “let go from the cemetery” very clearly (61). Joe Clear took great pride in his work as superintendent and loved his country. He loved being Presbyterian but disliked how Protestants sometimes bullied Irish Catholics. Roseanne knew these things about her father because, every evening before she slept, he entered her room and confessed “all the intimations, suspicions, and histories of his heart” (61). Working in the graveyard, tending to the bodies of so many Catholics, helped him learn to live in and love Ireland. So, when he lost the job, he lost a significant part of himself.

Worse, Joe’s new job as a rat-catcher made it harder for Roseanne to spend time with him. It was “a dirty, tricky, and perilous occupation” (62). Joe Clear did, however, find a book on rat-catching: A Perfect Account of Rat-Catching by Rattus Rattus. The tale is about a rat-catcher working in the vermin-infested factories of Manchester. As promised Joe Clear got a dog to assist him in the hunt—a Jack Russell named Bob.

Meanwhile, Roseanne was by then 15 and realized that the things that delighted her in childhood “pleased no longer” (63). Joe Clear, however, tried to maintain some sense of normalcy, despite the discomforts of his job. He read the newspaper, the Sligo Champion, regularly. One day, he saw a story about the young soldiers whom he assisted at the graveyard. Except for John, the story detailed how they had all recently been shot to death. John, who was from Inishkea Islands, escaped. Joe Clear figured that he made it back to his people there.

Roseanne recalls how, around this time, her mother, Cissy, retreated into silence and became a faded version of her former self. On Christmas, Joe Clear gave both his wife and daughter presents. He gave Roseanne “a silver-coloured [sic] pin” (67). He then handed Cissy a packet “wrapped in gold shop paper” (68). She opened it. Inside was a “speckled scarf” (68). Cissy asked her husband to explain his gift. He told her that he hoped that she would like it, but Cissy responded only with “Oh,” a response that neither Joe Clear nor Roseanne could decipher for meaning.

Part 1, Chapters 4-6 Analysis

Roseanne characterizes the Ireland of her youth as a place so riven with internal tensions that it remained neutral—that is, nonaggressive—during World War II. Five thousand Irish soldiers joined the Allies’ war effort against fascism, fighting with Great Britain. However, the soldiers who returned—Eneas was among them, which is addressed later in the novel—were ostracized when they returned home. Most of the population resented England for its past abuses against the Irish. There were also many, like the Lavelle brothers, who opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established the self-governance of Ireland, as long as it remained a part of the British dominion. Moreover, they expected Germany to win, given its advanced technological warfare.

Understanding this tension between Ireland and Great Britain, rooted not only in centuries of colonialism but also religious strife, Joe Clear was eager to prove his devotion to his homeland. His gesture of turning his hand into Father Gaunt’s ash tray is an extraordinarily meek gesture, which indicates both his fear of the clergyman’s power and Joe’s willingness to humble himself before it so as not to be perceived as a threat, though to no avail. Joe’s work at the cemetery, which he lost, aided in his sense of belonging. Catholics trusted Joe Clear with their dead, indicating that the differences in their faiths did not make him less human or untrustworthy, and no less capable of understanding the sacredness of these rituals, which bond everyone.