The Secret Scripture

I'm recycling this photograph of the cycle in the Garavogue which is the tidal river running through Sligo town because of this opening passage from Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture. When I took the photograph, I sensed a secret behind it's drowning. There are thick strands of seaweed growing out of the handlebars like the colorful plastic streamers kids used to attached to their bikes.

That place where I was born was a cold town. Even the mountains stood away. They were not sure, no more than me, of that dark spot, those same mountains.

There was a black river that flowed through the town, and if it had no grace for mortal beings, it did for swans, and many swans resorted there, and even rode the river like some kind of plunging animal, in floods.

The River also took the rubbish down to the sea, and bits of things that were once owned by people and pulled from the banks, and bodies too, if rarely, oh and poor babies, that were embarrassments, the odd time. The speed and depth of the river would have been a great friend to secrecy...

This book was short-listed for the Booker Prize for 2008. Here's a review from the back of the book...

Roseanne McNulty, perhaps nearing her one-hundredth birthday--no one is quite sure--faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist, Dr. Grene.... told through their respective journals, the story that emerges -- of Roseanne's family in 1930's Sligo--is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland. Exquisitely written, it is the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.

Last evening, we were waiting at the Cathedral for the "removal" of the step-mother of a friend of ours, from her home to the Cathedral before her funeral today. As we sat in the car, a flock of 17 swans flew above the spire of the Immaculate Conception and again, I was reminded of the words of Roseanne' McNulty ...

"I once lived among humankind, and found them in their generality to be cruel and cold, and yet could mention the names of three or four that were like angels. I suppose we measure the importance of our days by those few angels we spy among us..."

When Frank's mother died three swams flew over the crowd gathered at the cemetery as she was lowered into her grave.

Angels? these timely flocks of swans ? Perhaps?