The Secret History is a complex, layered, gripping novel that brims with a mix of ideas, psychological insight and as much as anything, plot. It would be ridiculous to try to summarise or offer anything but a thin interpretation of this remarkable novel. But what I will say is how wonderfully it captures the appeal of anti-modern, anti-materialist, agonistic view of the world.
The Secret History centres on Richard, a student heading to an elite New England college after a fairly loveless pbringing in California. On arrival he hears of a small group of students studying with an eccentric classics professor and he becomes set on joining the group.
Julian, the professor, accepts him after Richard fabricates a luxurious Californian upbringing, and soon he is in a tight friendship group with five well-off oddballs: the prodigiously intelligent Henry, the super-rich Francis, the twins Charles and Camilla, and the irritating and ultimately doomed Bunny.
The group, with Julian’s encouragement, are unashamed elitists. Their classes are intellectualy demanding and intense; they set themselves apart from the rest of the students and staff, and they spend their time studying classical life and eschew not just the whole of the college but all modern ideas, revelling in Roman and Greek philosophy and beliefs.
It’s this that leads Henry, Francis, Charles and Camilla – unknown to Richard at the time – to perform a Dionysian ritual, and strung out on natural hallucinogens they accidentally kill a man. There’s an immediate panic, but one that subsides, until things escalate after Bunny discovers what happened. Annoyed about being excluded from the ritual in the first place, and unable to contain his desire to needle them, they set on a plan to murder Bunny in order to silence him, this time with Richard’s involvement.
We know from the opening pages that Bunny is killed by his friends, and the first third of the novel focuses on the build-up to his murder. It then shifts to the aftermath, when the search is on for the missing Bunny, and then the days after his body is discovered, as the college is mourning, the police are circling and Richard, Henry, Francis, Charles and Camilla are forced to stay with Bunny’s family and attend the funeral, maintaining the appearance of grieving friends. It’s so agonisingly taut, it’s almost amusing!
The final third of the book revolves around the aftermath for the five of them; their attempts to maintain their friendships, to continue their lives despite the debilitating guilt, the drugs and alcohol that become their daily comforts. And in a glorious twist, during this part of the story, a letter Bunny wrote to Julian from before his death arrives from Italy, and suddenly Julian suspects – no, knows – what happened, and they are thrown into fits of terror again.
It’s a brilliantly written suspense novel that over 600 pages keeps you guessing all the way, despite the central crime being confessed on the first page. And there’s so much more to it as well. With just a handful of characters, Tartt is able to explore each of them in detail: their upbringings, their quirks, their relationships with one another. Bunny’s character in particular is so well drawn you can picture him, his obnoxious charisma, his desperation after finding out he was excluded from something he wished he had been part of. With so much told from the perspective of Richard over such a long period, Tartt allows us to sympathise with their decision to murder him.
It’s also a remarkable coming of age novel in many ways; exaggerated, yes, but the friendship cliques, the excitement of intellectual ideas, the alcohol and drugs, the parties, the intellectual snobbery, the desire to be an outsider, to be different … all of the elements of an idealised university life are offered here in spades.
But more than anything, for me The Secret History captures the allure of a different way of viewing the world: a pre-modern, non-rational view. Encouraged by the enigmatic Julian, the main characters accept that the rational, materialist view of the world is mistaken, and that in fact there’s a spirit world that can be conjured up with the right rituals and practices, just as the ancients would have done. It’s similar to the ideas you find the likes of Arthur Machen or more recently Susanna Clarke, that there’s another realm beyond the immediate world in which we live day to day, but in this case it’s the spirit world of the ancients, not that of occult.
Describing the Dionysian ecstasy that the ancients practiced Julian says…
“The revelers were apparently hurled back into a non-rational, pre-intellectual state, where the personality was replaced by something completely different – and by ‘different’ I mean something to all appearances not mortal. Inhuman.”
And to explain why this is necessary Julian adds…
“It’s a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists, such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake…
“It is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channelling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free.”
This is a view of the ancients reflected in Nietzsche’s essay ‘Homer’s Contest’ where he argues that the reason the Greeks celebrated athletic contest was to provide citizens with a release for the underlying passions and desires that drive them.
As Julian says again…
“The Greeks… had a passion for order and symmetry… but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism.”
Whether the friends in The Secret History did in fact see Dionysus on the night of their ritual we don’t know (they might have just been out of it), but the assumption that there’s more to the world than our limited imagination allows is a powerful one, and lies beneath this remarkable novel.
Giles book reviews 