The Secret History - Donna Tartt

     Donna Tartt’s talent at weaving a story is proven in her ability to craft a compelling murder-mystery of 500+ pages even though the reader knows from the beginning who is murdered and who the killers are.

     The novel is set in a small, elite Vermont college in the 1980’s, but it has a dreamlike quality that makes it seem timeless.  The narrator, Richard Papen, leaves his unhappy life with his working-class family in Plano, California to attend Hampden College.  He wants to continue his study of Classical Greek but is told that the classics professor, Julian Morrow, has accepted his five student limit.  Richard becomes obsessed with the aloof, arrogant, highbrow intellectuals who study Greek.  He observes them as they move around campus, oddly dressed (mostly in black) and in a world of their own.  Eventually, he manages to capture their attention when he helps them solve a question of Greek grammar while they are studying in the library.  With advice from them on how to impress Julian, he is admitted into the Classics program.

     The characters are wonderfully detailed and their relationships are complex.  The students are immersed in the world of the classics and out of touch with the modern world.  There is a priceless scene in which Henry, a linguistic genius and very much the leader of the group, is shocked to learn that man has walked on the moon.  The other members of the group are just as unusual:  a pair of fraternal twins, Charles and Camilla, orphans who are ethereal and charming but very secretive; Francis, whose aunt’s abandoned house in the country becomes a sanctuary for the group; and Edmund, known as Bunny, who is dyslexic, loud, older, and a bit of a misfit in this bunch of intellectuals.  Richard fabricates a history for himself including an elite private school background and a father with oil money (his real father owns a gas station) in order to blend in with the group.  Julian is an eccentric, elusive man who, perhaps, does not know how strong an influence his is on his pupils.  

       One day in class, he lectures on Bacchanalian ritual:

Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?  It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one.  Beauty is terror.  Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.  And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?  To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of or moral selves?... One is quite, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways.  But how glorious to release them in a single burst!  To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal!

As a result, the group (excluding Bunny and Richard) set out to recreate the ecstasy of a Bacchanalian ritual.  A horrible turn of events results in the murder a local farmer. 

       This secret binds them together and also divides them when Bunny, informed of the events begins to behave erratically and the others fear being betrayed.  Richard is drawn into the inner circle and made privy to its secret.  The reader, like Richard will find it hard not to like and sympathize with these characters in spite of what he knows. He becomes aware of Henry’s ‘plan’ and becomes a part of it, ultimately being present when Bunny is murdered.

       The story focuses on how this murder haunts and eventually destroys them but it is as much about friendship and the human longing to be accepted.    I loved this book.  I was captivated from the first page and found it hard to put down in spite of the fact that I’m not fan of murder mysteries.  This book is so much more!

- Frances