‘Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.’
This is a book that starts with an acknowledgement of a murder and nods at the impact this has had on the narrator’s life: ‘This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.’
There is plenty to intrigue in Tartt’s short prologue, but the next half of the book climbs laboriously, ponderously towards this pinnacle event. What did Bunny do to deserve death? Perhaps more compelling, given his demise is established on the opening page, is the question of how his friends got away with killing him. However, Tartt’s true concern lies elsewhere: what has killing Bunny done to the culprits?
What’s it about?
A group of six students attending a New Hampshire college who study under a classics professor with a distinctive approach to educating his students. Apparently worldly wise, Julian invites his students to: ‘leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime’. His teachings encourage five of these students to set aside conventional restrictions and attempt to recreate ancient traditions, with chilling results.
Once Bunny is finally dispatched, half-way through this sturdy book, the reader is left to witness the disintegration of the remaining coven. Murder, Tartt insists, doesn’t just harm the victim.
What’s it like?
Literary. Slow. A coming of age story in which the narrator attempts self-knowledge but can’t escape himself, grasping as he does, even in the final pages, for ideals and people that can only be bad for him.
In a manner entirely befitting a novel focused on a group of pretentious literary students, ‘The Secret History’ is littered with classic Greek and Latin quotations and idioms, only some of which are translated. Richard seems at moments to be clear-sighted, recognising that his role was always, essentially, to be a useful bystander, a potential patsy, and at others to still yearn for a life experienced as a Greek tragedy, declaring his ‘fatal flaw’ is ‘a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs’.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the novel is not that Richard’s friends have avoided a murder charge, but that they haven’t been thrown out of college. A significant proportion of the story revolves around the group relentlessly drinking, taking drugs and failing to turn up to class, without many consequences besides a bad head. I found this unconvincing, but then I think I had quite a tame university experience compared to some people!
Final thoughts
Richard is an unreliable narrator not because he chooses to be, but because he is so dreadfully unobservant: recounting Bunny’s barbs without realising their significance, Richard exists in a delusion that he is a cherished member of an impressive, close-knit group of students; very, very gradually, he learns that not only is he on the absolute periphery of their group, but that the group itself is far weaker than he imagined.
This was an interesting read, though the characters are all so deeply unpleasant that it was something of a relief when the consequences of the group’s decisions began to be felt; most novels which open with a murder end with the apprehension or identification of the culprit but ‘The Secret History’ ends with the consequences of the killers’ moral decay, which is arguably more powerful.
