The Secret History - Donna Tartt (Classic)

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.

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.”