He wanted to leave something for his children that they might take in rather than the normal parental advice which would, of course, be ignored! You’ve seen your grandparents disappear over it, perhaps your parents, and the noise gets louder and louder and it’s up to you to do something. When you are past fifty years old, you can hear the waterfall toward which we all head, he said. He wanted, he said, to give her back her life in a way. Another poignant example of this was his character in The Secret Scriptures (see my review), which was a heart-wrenching story about a family member who had been sectioned and lived decades in a mental institution. He said he ‘wanted to make a box of Aunt Annie’, as it seems he does with so many other people, something to preserve their life, or re-create it in fiction. But he was charming in a way that perhaps only the Irish can be, describing growing up in County Wicklow with Aunt Annie, and the inspiration for his writing, which uses family members like her to create characters. I was so mesmerised by not just his readings but by his poetic answers and ways of telling anecdotes about his writing that it’s impossible to do them justice in this blog. It was like watching a play, with one man performing both narration and the voices of his characters, singing a few lines of song into the bargain. For each he rose from his chair and stepped to the front of the stage at the Sydney Theatre and gave what could be only described as a performance. He did two readings in this session, one from A Long Long Way, the other from his most recent, On Canaan’s Side. I’ll say this up front: if you ever get a chance to see Sebastian Barry reading from one of his books, grab it with both hands.

The secret scripture book review