THE SECRET IS OUT (The Secret History - Donna Tartt)

Member Name: Mauri

Product:	The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Date:	30/07/03 (227 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tense and thrilling in parts, Stylish prose

Disadvantages: Flaws in the structure of the story

The secret History is Donna Tartt’s first novel. Since its publication in 1993 it has become a best seller and it has been critically acclaimed, it even made it in to the top 100 in the recent ‘A good read ‘BBC list. So is it a great book? No. Let me explain why.

THE STORY

A young Californian student Richard Papen frustrated at home gets a scholarship to study at Hampden College in an isolated part of Vermont in the North East of the US. Having already an interest in languages, especially Greek, he decides to enlist for a classics course run by the famous but rather mysterious academic Julian Morrow. This is not as easy as he at first imagines since Morrow a wealthy and independently financed tutor doesn’t accept just anyone in his class, he always has the final decision.

Rebuffed at first Richard by accident befriends the other students in the very selective group. They unlike Richard are all well off but seem to be of their own accord isolated from the rest of the students on campus. They feel superior and are regarded with suspicion by the other students. In order to emphasise their special status they wear old-fashioned clothes and are to varying degrees quite obsessive about ancient Greek culture and rituals. The self appointed ‘leader’ of the group is Henry, calculating and unemotional, he is also Julian Morrow’s favourite. Francis is the complete opposite, a spoilt rich kid who is apt to fly of the handle at any moment, ‘The Twins’ Camilla and Charles are quiet and very friendly towards Richard and seem to have a very close bond with each other. Finally making up the group is Bunny in many ways the odd one out. Academically he is inferior to the rest of the group and he's also the only one to have friends outside of their clique. Richard ashamed of his poor background tries desperately to fit in and eventually the group accepts him although he always has the feeling that th

ey have something, a secret that they are keeping from him. After a series of tragic events a terrible crime takes place and their world begins to crumble around them.

MY OPINION

I’m not actually revealing too much if I tell you that the key event in the book is the murder of Bunny by the rest of the group since this fact is revealed in the opening lines of the story! Although the author tells us of this crime we spend the first half of the book exploring the events that lead up to Bunny’s death and the rest of the book exploring the consequences of the event.

Donna Tartt embarked on a very difficult task when she wrote this novel since this story deals essentially with the nature of crime, guilt and retribution many other stories deal with these same themes but the one that comes quickest to mind is Dostoyevsky’s brilliant ‘Crime and Punishment’. Is it fair to compare the two books, does she really mean for them to be compared? I wasn’t sure until half way through the book one of the characters quotes a line from ‘Crime and Punishment’ thus we can safely assume that the similarities between the two stories are more than mere coincidence. The question is as a study of the psychology of crime and an examination of guilt and remorse how does it compare?…Well it’s not in the same league.

Donna Tartt manages initially to successfully draw you in to the story, you quickly begin to understand the characters and the interplay between them is very well observed and outlined. Although in effect we know what is going to happen we are intrigued to know why it has happened and this part of the novel is an addictive read. We then come to the murder and soon after the other characters begin to go through a myriad of emotions, fear, guilt and paranoid illusions. A lot of drugs are taken and lots of alcohol is consumed, but not much else happens and this seems to go on for about
200 pages!

I can understand that the exploration of the characters feelings and actions after the crime are essential to the story but the author goes about the task in a narrative vacuum. To go back to a comparison with ‘Crime and Punishment’, in that novel the central character spends most of the book torturing himself over the terrible crime he has committed BUT around him there are complex subplots developing, we have blackmail, a love interest, tragedy strikes other characters. The key elements of the main characters guilt are examined partly through his relationship to other characters and the events that are going on around him. This is essential to keep the story vibrant and to keep the reader enthralled by the hero’s plight. This is what Donna Tartt fails to do. She does try to introduce some external plot devices, there is an hint of a love story developing, there is a racist element to one of the characters that takes centre stage for a while there are two very cliché FBI agents who investigate the crime and that might begin to interact with Richard his friensds in a similar way that the investigator Porfiry Petrovich does with Raskalnikov in Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece. Unfortunately all these different threads fail in keeping the reader interested, like a dying fish out of water writhing this way and that, gasping for air the plot of ‘The Secret History’ equally is thrashing about from one underdeveloped subplot to another desperately trying to find some cohesiveness, trying to alleviate the boredom of so much futile introspection by the main characters.

Eventually something does happen towards the end of the book that changes the nature of the story once again and for the last third of the story we are again taken up and led speedily through to a thrilling finale. Tartt also includes a prologue that allows us to discover the fate of some of the other main characters that seem to have been jettisone
d in the course of the story.

It seems to me that authors of modern fiction these days believe that for a publisher or critic to take a novel seriously as a work of literature as opposed to just pulp fiction then the novel has to be a long, a real ‘door stop’. Consequently we have many good stories becoming bloated with unnecessary narrative. It took Dostoyevsky just over 400 pages to give us an in depth exploration of guilt and at the same time keep us entertained and totally absorbed by the story. Ms Tartt takes up over 600 pages and doesn’t come close to the insights or the narrative thrills of ‘Crime and Punishment’.

Having said all this readers of this review might find it strange that I gave these book 4/5 stars. Indeed apart from the problems with the narrative structure there are also other problems with the plot and an inability of the author to set the whole story in a concrete time frame, which for me at least found me asking question of the plot that I shouldn’t really be asking and ultimately became a distraction from the main story.

On a positive side and there are plenty good things to say about ‘The Secret History’. The novel is written in a very pleasing prose style. The descriptive passages, especially those describing the seasonal changes nature of the Vermont countryside are excellent. Donna Tartt is also very good at setting a scene by highlighting minutiae, an old shoe laying on the ground an empty bottle, which really create the appropriate atmosphere in the story. She also manages to inject a certain amount of dry black humour in to an essentially tragic story.

In the end we are left with a ‘Curate’s Egg’ type of novel, lots to admire but also plenty to criticise.

Donna Tartt tried to do many things with her first novel, she tried to produce a hybrid part thriller, part psychological drama, even an element of Greek tragedy. She touch
ed aspects (more eloquently described by many before her) of man as ‘superman’, the idea that some people due to their superior intellect are not bound by the morality and laws of other men and in the extreme have even the innate right to kill if suits their purpose. Ultimately she fails to do what she sets out but it is nonetheless a valiant attempt and ‘The Secret History’ is certainly worth reading.


‘The Secret History’ by Donna Tartt is available in paperback by Penguin book; ISBN: 0140167773 (640 pages) you can buy it from Amazon.co.uk for £3.99 (+ P&P)

Thank you for reading and rating this opinion.

© Mauri 2003

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