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The Secret Scripture OF the four books short-listed for the Man Booker Award 2008, The Secret Scripture emerged the first runners-up. As "leaked" by more than one member of the Booker jury, the book appeared to be the most favoured up to the very last moment, yet Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger won in a digital photo finish, as it were.
In the instant case, I believe The Secret Scripture will endure far better in the long run with the discerning fiction readership. The book is a gripping narrative of two lives, though linked to each other by the ties of parentage but unbeknown to both characters and the reader till the last few pages! The tale is woven around the self, life-sketch by the protagonist, discovered after her death. Roseanne Clear grew up in the Ireland of the 1920-30s when the Church ruthlessly enforced its doctrine "for the banishment of women behind the front doors of their homes and the elevation of manhood into a condition of sublime chastity and sporting prowess". In less than a year’s blissful marriage, a chance meeting and an innocent, fun-filled, brief conversation with a childhood friend was construed by the village priest as an amoral assignation. So, the marriage was annulled by the church forthwith and Roseanne banished to a one-room cottage some 15 km away. Her policeman father had been eliminated by the IRA’s rogue elements and mother interned in a mental asylum. To cope with anger, injustice and loneliness, Roseanne tries to revive a long neglected rose creeper recalling how her mother had found happiness through "the strange moments of floral enchantment — something new arising from the known rose. A leap in beauty". For better part of each day, she wandered over the cliffs and the beach dunes below her cottage. One day she chanced upon a distraught mother whose child had wandered off while she took a catnap. Roseanne launched into the rescue and its narration is a classic in descriptive prose-craft: "On complete instinct I rushed towards a cave that I knew, the sort of deep cave that any child would love — and was well rewarded — there was a little crouched figure there, digging in the dry sand, her bottom wet as a puddle, the rest of her happy as a Larry ... I scooped her up and even that did not frighten her, she may be thinking me a creature part of her own fantasy. ... How I wished suddenly for my own mother to seek for me, to rescue me — to bring me again to her breast." In time, heavy with child, Roseanne walked the 15 km to Tom’s family for confinement and succor but was ruthlessly shut out from the house. The labour spasms began in earnest some 10 km short of her cottage: "My stomach was like a bread oven, gathering in heat ... the time of human clocks flew away, the coming and going of the pain was the new marker of time. Now there was suddenness, arrival, blood ... in that second of madness then was the crown of a little head, another second a shoulder, all smeared in skin and blood ... . I took up the little creature, bit the cord and my child gathered his first diamond of air, and howled out in miniature, called out tinily, to the world, to me, to me `85 ." That is when Roseanne fainted through exhaustion and when she awoke there was no trace of her child. Unbeknown to her, a retainer from Tom’s family had shadowed her and spirited the child away. Less then 25, Roseanne became an emotional wreck and entered the village mental hospital never to leave till her death nearing her hundredth birthday. In moments of clarity of the mind, she had registered that her infant son had been sent to Nazareth. Dr William Grene had assumed charge of the hospital when Roseanne was close to 70. He was a lean, handsome and a most affable psychiatrist who found Roseanne a charming and lively wit to converse with. Shortly, William was convinced that she was wrongfully committed to the hospital. If only he could trace out her son, he would unite her with her kin. Through a meeting with a local nun, William learnt that Nazareth used to be an orphanage before it became the old age home. The old records, however, had been shifted to England. Roseanne had come into a life threatening high fever, but the moment she stabilised, William took the first flight to London and among the old documents found a birth certificate of William Clear, a son born to Roseanne Clear. Being an orphan at the Nazareth House, the infant was offered to and accepted for adoption by Mr and Mrs Grene of Cornwall, in 1945. And the affixed photograph that William was looking at were indeed his own parents (adoptive but not genetic)! He stood transfixed as though swept over by a tsunami. Back in the hospital, as he entered Roseanne’s room, "she stood up and came the few inches towards me like a scrap of parchment, embraced me and thanked me. Even her bones have lost weight. I was so moved I almost told her. But I still did not. I was terrified of shocking her in the wrong way, medically, psychically". Dr William Grene was left clutching the copy of Religio Medici, Roseanne’s sole personal possession in life which during a conversation long ago she had handed to the good doctor with a charming smile and the injunction "won’t you give this book to my son, if you locate him".
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This
is not the first occasion that the Booker jury was unable to make a
clinical choice of the winner. In a similar conflict in 1992, the jury
simply had to settle for two winners: The Sacred Hunger and The
English Patient. Judging by the print re-runs of both titles and
huge success of one as a Hollywood movie, the jury’s wisdom was fully
vindicated.