So, let's see how it starts. Well, the book begins with a prologue, always an interesting place to kick off.
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He'd been dead for ten days before they found him, you know.
pg. 1
A death, before we've even picked it up?
What are you doing, Donna? Really, how can you do that? A story, before the actual story. What are you doing?
Oh my.
Now I want to know.
Who is Bunny? And what kind of a name is that? Is that an actual bunny rabbit, called Bunny, weirdly? Or is it the name of a real human person?
The next few sentences tell us — there's a huge manhunt, involving police and FBI, but snow falls after the death and covers the body where it lies at the bottom of a ravine, and there's footsteps in the mud leading down there. And then we discover the story's in the first person, and the narrator says they're partly to blame for the death – and we're not even off the first page!
Woah.
Have mercy on us, Donna Tartt. So much to take on board already.
The prologue is only two pages long, and you don't ease up on the 2nd page. What? What, Donna?
The narrator breezes through the search party, but also seems to understand that walking away is a wholly different thing. And, before leaving us, suggests that maybe it was actually a conspiracy, and that such horrors continue their haunting. So it ends, this brusque two-page prologue:
I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I well ever be able to tell.
pg. 2
Well, yes.
No surprise there. Coz it's already so chilling, so terrible, and you've made sure I'm in on the secret — and I'm totally and utterly hooked.
The story is told in two parts — Book I, and Book II — roughly the same size, and it's quickly clear that Book I has fallen back in time from the world of the prologue. Sort of. We read and we discover that the narrator is a man called Richard Papen who, at the age of twenty-eight, is telling us his story as a kind of confession.
Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that shadowy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside of 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.
pg. 5
So begins Richard's unburdening.
He takes us back to his time at Hampden College, a dusty institution in rural Vermont where Richard has landed almost by accident and via Financial Aid, and to his friends there. Bunny appears again quickly, as soon as pg. 7, amongst his other classmates — an exclusive club of wealthy friends, amongst whom Richard, feels forever an interloper.
The reader realises quickly that Book I is going to take us to his terrible death.
That makes The Secret History already two things — a murder mystery thriller, and a campus coming-of-age story. But there's one more — it's also a modern-day Greek tragedy.
Richard, Bunny, and their classmates all study classics together, particularly the Greeks, and Euripides' story of The Bacchae has a shaping hand on the plot of Donna Tartt's novel. The climax of The Bacchae has the strongest echo — King Pentheus of Thebes has rejected Dionysus, god of wine and religious ecstasy, and his whole cult, and in punishment the god lures him to the mountains, where he is torn apart by the frenzied Maenads — but there are lots of other classical themes throughout, for those sensitive to them.
That's no barrier to enjoying the story, though. Book I pulses with Bacchanalian sensibilities where 'beauty is terror' (pg.41), and the 'violence and savagery' (pg. 42) of the Bacchae feel as if they're pulling us towards the inevitable. But Tartt is so skilled an writer you can rest in the strength of her deep knowledge and just follow her in the story.
Book II takes us into the terrible aftermath of Bunny's death — the early searches and the group's attempts to maintain their camouflage, then the strains and fractures that appear, their fears, their recriminations, their dispersal, and the ultimate outcomes.
At its heart, the book is a devastating critique of the pursuit of beauty and appearance, the picturesque, at the expense of all else, how it can metastasise into a driven obsession that destroys anything and everything else.
Beside that, the novel explores the experience of the in-crowd. Donna Tartt herself was part of a clique of the gifted like the one in The Secret History — she started on the novel while she was at Bennington College, yes, in Vermont, with Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, etc.), Jill Eisenstadt (From Rockaway, etc.), and Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, etc.). Ironically, Tartt's created an in- and out-crowd with her readers, for those who are students of the classics, and those who aren't.
Tartt has brushed off suggestions the book is based on her own life, but there is such vibrancy in the sensibilities portrayed: of trying, of desperate hope to measure up, of comparing yourself with the success of others, of a desperation for acceptance, confusion at being overlooked or worse, ostracised, that the book feels as thoroughly studied in the realm of human experience as in the world of Greek tragedy.
The language in The Secret History is sublime. Not showy for its own sake, but perfectly tuned to the characters and their context.
Speaking of Richard's tutor and of his coursemates:
His students — if they were any mark of his tutelage — were imposing enough, and different as they all were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world: they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks
pg. 32
Later, as the depth of Bunny's secret knowledge and festering resentments accelerates the group's terrible plan, Richard reflects on all the moments when they could have chosen differently.
It’s funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn’t see this crucial moment then for what it was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs.
pg. 223
From the closing pages, as Richard considers being forever haunted, by what happened at Hampden College, and by the investigation:
What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?
pg. 627
Almost 35 years have passed the book was published and it has lost none of its power or brilliance.
Reading Donna Tartt's The Secret History is to read an exceptional writer of formidable talent, and I'm envious of those who never have done yet and get to experience that afresh — it's truly wondrous writing.
I commend you to read it, whether for the first time or the umpteenth. Just read it.