There is always danger when you read a book that has
achieved a huge amount of praise.
Depending on the individual there can be the instinct to either: 1) Give
it undue praise because other respected people have done so and to not
reciprocate would make you sound like an ill-educated oaf, or 2) Try to stand
out from the crowd and establish credentials as being ‘alternative’ by
deliberately not liking it. Even if one
avoids these traps, it is not always easy to remain totally impartial when
reading a new book, especially if it is acclaimed. This, of course, is
the central task of any reviewer, and though true impartiality is almost
impossible to achieve, it is important to at least be aware of one’s possible
frailties and limitations when reviewing something.
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Donna Tartt is a very successful author with her latest book
The Goldfinch being nominated for and
won numerous awards including the prestigious New York Times ‘Top Ten’.
Her career, however, started in 1992 with The Secret History. Now
normally I only review new(ish) books, but this book came highly recommended by
many people whose judgement I trust, and so I thought it would be appropriate
to give it the full treatment.
The Secret History
in many ways defies categorisation but the best that I have found calls it a
‘Whydunnit’. The story begins by telling
us about a murder, who the victim was, and who the perpetrators were. The narrator appears to have ‘got away’ with
the deed but feelings of guilt obviously linger. This kind of approach where the ending is
given away is not unique to Tartt of course – this was famously utilised by
Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet – but
her application of it is particularly effective. The murder itself occurs neatly in the middle
of the story giving us half of a story explaining why the murder occurred, and
the other describing the aftermath.
The story focusses around a young man called Richard who
comes from a working-class background to study at an elite university in the
North-East of the United States. There
he discovers the most elite and selective course: Ancient Greek, which only
taught to 5 students at that time. These
5 were somewhat cut off from the rest of the university as their education was
incredibly immersive and so naturally they were all close. Ancient Greek culture and literature is one
of the story's major themes, cropping up in the obvious context of their
studies, but also in the make-up of many of the major characters. I am in no way a student of Ancient Greek theatre, but one of the stories major characters, Henry, has been described in
numerous sources as the classic Greek tragic hero, and it is easy to see how
such a man would fit into the famous myths that even I am familiar with.
Almost all of the story takes place on the university campus,
a place largely cut off from the ‘real world’ and so these characters,
ostensibly cut-off from the rest of their contemporaries, find themselves in a
world cut-off from a place already cut-off. The first major development of the story is
that Richard’s classmates, minus the eventual murder victim Bunny, accidentally
perpetrate a terrible crime. Both Bunny
and Richard are made aware of this and react in divergent ways. For Richard his loyalty lies to the people
that gave him a sense of belonging and home, while Bunny – feeling cut off by
the group who never truly accept him – finds it harder to ignore the
crime. This ultimately leads to his
death, the major event in the story.
Donna Tartt is an exquisite writer, and this is much in evidence
in this book. This is described by many
as a ‘literary’ book, and yet it is incredibly readable. I have absolutely no time for writers who
believe that to be taken seriously they must render their prose as clear as
mud. Tartt proves that you can write
with skill, poise and character, whilst also making her meaning accessible to us mere
mortals without literature degrees. Her
story has a natural beauty that is impossible to explain – which of course is
the essence of true beauty. The
characters are rich and vivid without being caricatures and I can honestly say
that the business of reading the story was an absolute pleasure.
Any avid reader of my blog (if they exist) will know that
the aspect that I generally pull out from a story is the relationships between
the characters, especially familial ones.
This book is no different as it is really a story of ‘found
family’. All of the characters seem
incredibly detached from their parents and, in the case of the twins, even on
occasion from their siblings. The idea
of the ‘found family’ is very strong here and the shifting dynamic between the
friends as the situation in which they find themselves grows increasingly
desperate is, for me, the central part of the story around which everything
else revolves. It is this that is the
central frame of the story and allows Tartt to hang all of her beautiful
description and embellishment.
Having said all of that, this is not the perfect book. The stem of this novel’s limitations are that
it suffers from a classic case of ‘First Novel-itis’. I see time-and-time again that authors in
their first published work go a little overboard in the breadth of coverage,
including details and sections that do not really advance the story but are
instead included to satisfy the author’s artistic temperament. This is understandable, most authors have
dreamt of being published for years and so the temptation to include the
maximum level of detail must be great. The Secret History is not immune to this
problem, though it is largely located in the first half of the story. This section still has the richness and
beauty that permeates the rest, but it just takes forever to get going. The pacing is just wrong and this is brought
into sharp focus by the rest of the story which moves at a wonderful speed.
This issue, however, does not stop this from being a
terrific book and one that I would recommend to anyone. It is one of those books that anyone with an interest in literature must make a bee-line for and I look forward to reading some of Tartt's more recent titles.
8/10
Favourite Quotes“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
“Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all.It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.”
“Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.”
