Modern Classic (The Secret History - Donna Tartt)

Member Name: mcader

Product:	The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Date:	06/02/09 (18 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Thrilling, educational, a source of inspiration

Disadvantages: Studenty

This novel is many things. Most simply, it is a character-driven murder, mystery and suspense story. It has a spell like a university-set Great Gatsby, making it hard to define a lot of the substance that makes it such a rich and haunting apparition. Its characters drift in the subconscious of inspired yet searching students. You cannot be too practical about the book - it works from an essentially romantic premise: that of our strange and tragic, often unfulfilled condition. It is a profound account of friendship dramatically tested. It is told from an intelligent, involved yet almost neutral observational perspective that sustains an undercurrent of resonant sorrow, longing or struggling for something unattainable.

Beneath the familiarity and traits of the characters and the lighter illustrations of university life the account not so much explores but expresses an awareness that there are forces and inter-relationships at work within the principle figures. For it is a contemporary Greek tragedy felt from the inside where an innocent intention - itself a relevant and powerful device - leads to destructive and damaging, perhaps unavoidable results. This device is a complete enactment of a genuine Greek bacchanal that briefly realizes some ideal to find a purity, a total release from thought and modern confinement and re-connect with the ancient energies and history of the past.

Like all works, some relate to it and others do not. Published in 1992 it must principally be, I think, one of the ultimate student novels; the tale of dangerous minds; it is certainly a modern classic. With this in mind, perhaps it is like the distinction between students who are real university material, and those who are not, if there is in fact such a distinction. For it contains serious intellectual elements - the affect, value and influence of knowledge if you like - as well as a reflective, idealistic and occasionally humorous account of university or college life, `a comedy of campus manners'. For those interested in studying the classics it is especially recommended. The narrator is pretty much an everyman character, who by interest becomes involved with characters that might not be considered typical outside higher universities. It celebrates through a specific story the stage of life of arrogant youth and its fresh yet hesitant freedoms for a sophisticated, well-off group of close friends. It had a profound influence on me, perhaps because I was awakening to this stage; beginning to think about choosing a university. Its appeal to me might have been the idealistic lifestyle of what it means to be a student: free and at ease with oneself, meditative and inspired by new influence, happy in a perfect environment for exploring one's ideas and interests around subjects and people who share these interests and the exchange and expression of real knowledge. Not only this but a campus lifestyle of sudden visitations and various sporadic events, experimentation with crazy ideas amid a real intimacy and familiarity with those of one's own kind.

This novel will remain I am sure a source of inspiration to students. Its power is subtle and rooted in a space between two periods of time or history. An awareness of both reveals the reasons why history is studied; the effect of a whole perspective applied to the modern day. It subsequently hints at many qualities through its observations as well as to fundamental, unchanging human ones in both. A principle of this is perhaps the strength of a restlessness and struggle for purer happiness from such immediate knowledge and kinship. Arguably this is the reach for an unattainable, as such a balance must be endured as our very condition. Alternatively it highlights an extreme need to purge all inessentials and intellectual detritus through an experience of life that is lost in the past or is uncontrollable.

Whatever the case, such power leads them to a means in the bacchanal that allows the sensation of it only briefly and it has a price and leads to tragedy. For the rest of us this will leave the distance and salvage and the glorious stories in the `long, gleaming hall' of history.

Summary: Greek Tragedy