Donna Tartt - The Secret History
In recent years, largely due to the inescapable influence of BookTok, I've become interested in campus novels and "dark academia". As part of the generation who grew up on Harry Potter and made it a huge part of my personality until Rowling gave us all a rude awakening and forced us to find new personalities, and as part of the generation whose fondest memories were formed at university right before graduating into decades of economic crisis and stagnation, it's perhaps inevitable that I'd be drawn to stories in academic settings.
For some reason, despite knowing that novels such as M.L. Rio's If We Were Villains and Katy Hays' The Cloisters - both of which I loved - owe a huge amount to The Secret History, I've never got around to reading it. This week I decided to fix that.
This is a strange book. I know that I enjoyed it, and that I was having to fight the urge to put aside work I actually have to do in order to read it. It's beautifully written, and as I read the final pages I was fairly certain that this was getting added to me "favourite books of the year" list. And yet beneath all that is a slight sense that I've been conned, that the book has only fooled me into believing it's brilliant.
The Secret History has all the trappings of an inverted murder mystery, in the same way as If We Were Villains - not so much a whodunnit as a howdunnit, in which we're aware from page one that a murder has taken place, and the mystery that unfolds lies in the telling of how and why it came about. And for the first 300 pages that's exactly what we get, following Richard as he falls in with a group of wealthy, mysterious Classics students who will eventually murder one of their own.
Tied up in all this is the sense, established very early on, that our narrator isn't exactly reliable. We see him lie again and again, about his family and his upbringing and where he came from and what brought him to be studying in this specific school. And I felt very smart as I was reading it, picking up on hints that all was not as it seemed, trying to piece things together to work out what was going on ahead of the reveal that I knew was coming.
At almost exactly the halfway mark of the book the murder takes place, and our first mystery - how and why did this happen? - is solved. That leaves us with the second half, another almost 300 pages of novel, and the question of what isn't Richard telling us and his friends? I was hooked, and desperate for answers.
What follows is very well written and, at times, very beautiful, but ultimately it's all a little empty. There's no further mystery, and Richard hasn't been lying to us or to anyone else. Instead we're treated to a very slow wrapping-up as the dust settles around Bunny's death and everyone goes on with their lives. The first half of the book shows us characters who are possessed of an air of jaded disillusionment with everyone and everything around them; the second half turns that sneer on the reader, as if to say "did you really think there was more to this?" At one point Richard complains that he and Francis are unable to communicate in secret around Julian because he is just as fluent in Greek as they are. Upon reaching the end of the novel this passage sprung into my head again, now re-contextualised as a complaint that there are no more secrets to keep from the reader and, thus, no more fun to be had.
I think this is still among my favourite books of the year, and I'm very glad that I'll now have this context when I read more modern "dark academia" works that are in conversation with it, but while I often enjoy an unsatisfying ending to a novel this one feels like a joke told at my expense, and I'm not sure how to feel about that.
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