What is the secret of Donna Tartt's modern masterpiece The Secret History? Not the ‘secret’ in the title. Not even the secrets in the plot. But the secret of its cult-like status. How does this modern classic manage to get under everyone’s skin? Why do we feel deflated once we’ve read the last page? And why do we keep returning to this modern classic, apparently addicted to the pretensions, obsessions and betrayals of a group of rather unlikable classics students in Vermont.
Such are the character flaws of these six elitist charmers that you wouldn’t want any of them as friends in real life. You certainly wouldn’t want to go on a country walk with them either. And as their murderous story is neither exciting nor puzzling – we know ‘whodunit’ pretty much on the first page – it breaks all the rules of the modern thriller. Yet somehow, Donna Tartt has woven a tale of such layered complexity, such blatant sinfulness, such outrageous entitlement and such beautifully written ambiguity, that the book can’t help but hold you in thrall. Maybe because nothing is quite what it seems in The Secret History. (Don’t read on if you’d like to discover that for yourself!)
Living in the right place at the wrong time...
Escaping their dreadful parents at last, the six protagonists in The Secret History are initially giddy at their good fortune. They get to spend their weekdays in a leafy New England college campus with few rules, and their weekends in an antique-filled manor house with no rules. Thanks to Donna Tartt’s evocative descriptions, it’s as if these six twenty-somethings have dived into a beautiful painting and we’ve dived right in there with them. They’re all totally immersed in the classic world of their charismatic professor Julian Morrow, ridiculing the ‘glitter-vinyl’ and ‘electric blue Margaritas’ of modern life, and pretentiously eschewing contemporary dress in favour of pince-nez, monogrammed cufflinks, English suits and starched shirts with French cuffs. They agonise over what tense to use in their Greek prose and are apparently astonished to learn that a man ever landed on the moon. And unfortunately, it is this contempt for the prosaic modern and this obsession with the romantic past that is their undoing. Because what better way to transcend time, to really forget you’ve got the misfortune to live in the 1990s than to lose yourself in a dark Dionysian ritual? When even cold-blooded murder was considered an epic, almost heroic, act.
How people look and how they actually are…
Deceiving others by putting on a front is as true in life as it is in a novel, although Donna Tartt makes no attempt to hide the true nature of her narrator, Richard. We know from the get-go that this 20-year-old student is lost, unhappy and self-conscious, ashamed of his working-class Californian roots, and prepared to do anything to fit in with his five glamorous trust-fund classmates from the east coast. This includes everything from copying their effete attire and lying without compunction to hiding their heinous crimes and even acting as an accessory to murder. And to a certain extent, the reader is swept along with Richard, also duped by the intelligence, charisma and confidence of his classmates. These people behave more like middle-aged sophisticates than students in their early twenties. They play piquet rather than poker, discuss Homer rather than their love lives, and drink aged whiskey rather than cheap beer. But chapter by chapter the scales fall from our eyes, and we realise that the whole group – two of them in particular – are as manipulative and narcissistic as they are ruthless and unremorseful. And it’s certainly ironic that the tutor who makes such a virtue of bloodshed and violence in his Greek lessons, can’t get away fast enough when he learns his abstract teachings have very real consequences.
The ugliness of beauty…
Richard’s self-acknowledged fatal flaw is ‘a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.’ This blinds him to reality and goes a long way to explaining his infatuation with his new life in Vermont. And not just with his bucolic surroundings. While initially falling in love with Camilla because of her ‘medieval beauty’, he continues to be in love with her despite learning how dark her dark side actually is. He’s also in thrall to the charming yet shallow professor Julian Morrow. And who wouldn’t be in thrall to a glamorous classics nut who once used to hang out with T.S. Eliot and Marilyn Monroe, and who still only allows 'beautiful people' to populate his rarified world? And, of course, Richard is also seduced by the beauty of the ancient Greek epics. He certainly buys into Julian’s claim that the bloodiest parts of Homer’s verse are the most magnificent, yet even Richard is shocked by how far his classmates will go to recreate that ‘magnificence’ – what we're talking about here is a nocturnal Dionysiac ritual that doesn't just involve absolute belief and an animalistic loss of control but also bite marks, bloodied hair and the mutilation of a body. And while this shocking event has profound implications for years to come, it's Henry’s initial reaction that is the most disturbing. ‘You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem after such an ecstasy,’ he tells an astounded Richard.
The madness of genius…
Henry is the de facto leader of the group. A brilliant classics scholar who once translated Paradise Lost into Latin, he’s the student closest to Julian Morrow and certainly the one most influenced by his teachings. As contemptuous of his fellow man as he is of modern morality, he uses his sociopathic genius to plan the perfect murder à la the Borgias. He treats his crime as an intellectual exercise at first, setting everything up well in advance and moving his players around like pieces on a chess board. Yet when he finally does decide to go ahead with his plan, one can’t help but wonder whether Henry was brain damaged after the childhood accident that kept him out of school for two years. Murder is just ‘a redistribution of matter,’ he comments casually after discovering his first victim was nothing but a local farmer. He even serves as a pallbearer at his second victim’s funeral, his uncontrollable migraine attacks the only indication that there might be a trace of humanity lurking deep within him. Yet Henry also remains rationally ruthless, happy to throw his friends under the bus – and much worse – rather than be tried in court by people he considers beneath him. Maybe it’s Richard’s belief in the afterlife that permits him to treat this life in such a cavalier manner. ‘You think nothing exists if you can’t see it,’ he once said rather contemptuously to Richard.
And it would be nice to think that The Secret History is a morality tale in some way. After all, none of the book’s unlikeable characters fulfil their potential or find happiness in the coming years. If they haven’t been murdered or committed suicide, they’re fated to being alone, addicted to substances or plagued with anxiety attacks. Yet Donna Tartt can’t resist a final twist. Would you believe she gives the contemptible if complex Henry the last word? And that he even gets the girl?
The Secret History is available from all good book stores!
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