Donna Tartt - The Secret History (1992)
“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.”
So it began. One of the most brilliant novels of the last decade. There started The Secret History, and there started the career of the mysterious, enigmatic Donna Tartt. Thanks Heaven for her. After first having read this, if I could have kissed the ground she walked on I just might have done so.
The book concerns an elite group of classics students at a New England university, and is told from the point of view of Richard Pappen, a new addition to their number who gradually assimilates into the tightly-knit, insular band. Over time, Richard comes to learn their secrets, eventually coming to the point where he, too, must now share responsibility in a new, monstrous act of murder.
So much has been written about this novel, but rarely has anything quite adequately illustrated the joy and breathless wonder which reading this novel engenders. And much of that has to do with what a sublime writer Tartt is. Where most modern literature now shines its light of praise on dearth, sparse and water-clear prose, Tartt invites us into something different, treating us with rich, sumptuous sentences, so satisfying and beautiful that they inspire no small sense of elation at witnessing how the English language can be used as such a medium for intricacy and erudition.
Not once is the prose bloated, though. It’s like partaking of an especially fine meal, cooked by the French, with its delicate tints of herbs and spices, but served with the hospitality of the Greeks. The detail in the writing sparkles and glints like sapphires in an ocean, pieces of quartz embedded in a road which winds up to lush, green mountains bathed in dusky winter sunlight. The cumulative effect of the prose is powerful and mesmeric, like staring at the beautiful tempered pattern on the back of a cobra.
The plot, which is ever-so-slightly perverse, is entirely gripping, its pace almost perfect, its characters mysterious and charismatic. The experience of it is rather like reading something of Dickensian detail, with the tone and register of something by Bret Easton Ellis, yet which has its roots and themes in Greek literature. There is something distinctly Homeric about it all, and there are more than enough classical references smattered throughout – never gratuitously though, may I make clear! – to have lovers of the period convulsed in delight.
The book itself is split into two parts; the first is a brilliant build-up to a murder, suspenseful and slightly dangerous, while the second is a wonderful study in the effects and power of guilt. The isolation of it, though you may share it with others, and the deep echoing pain of it, its potentially ruinous nature. And all the while it manages as well to be a serious – if perhaps skewed in its perhaps limited focus – examination of the morality of contemporary society.
The Secret History is a brilliant marriage of the cerebral, the thoughtful, and the refined, gripping thriller. It is that rare thing, a novel of literature that more than holds its own, commercially and through time, against pop-fiction, and certainly surpasses much of it in quality. The secret of The Secret History is definitely not one to keep to yourself! An absolutely perfect performance.
Posted by Fiona Walker in Book Reviews | Permalink
