The Secret History was Donna Tartt’s debut novel. It opens ominously with the announcement of a murder, with this gripping first line:
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.“
Much of the rest of the novel is dedicated to describing the circumstances leading up to the killing, and to answer the question: how did five educated, cultured and relatively genial young people come to kill someone they once considered their friend?
The novel’s narrator is Richard Papen, a student from California who escapes an unhappy childhood home to go to university the other side of the country in Vermont. Richard becomes part of a close-knit group of classics students, taught almost exclusively by a charismatic professor, Julian Morrow. (Morrow is perhaps a nod to Dr Moreau, another creator of monsters, and suggests Julian may share the burden of responsibility for what happens in the novel). As a character Richard has strong echoes of Nick Carraway, the narrator of the Great Gatsby, witness to another tragic east Coast story of rich people and how their money spoils them. The novel is told several years after the event, and Richard’s testimony makes it clear that the group were never convicted for their involvement in the killing of their friend Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran.
Richard is in no hurry to rush to the details of the murder. This is a confessional, and he believes it is important we understand the full background to what happened, their ‘secret history’. We are introduced to Julian’s small group of students: twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay, Francis Abernathy, Henry Winter, and Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran. Francis and Henry are both independently wealthy, but while Bunny’s family has money he is always borrowing from his friends. The others are cultured intellectuals but Bunny is an outlier, crude and unsophisticated, who takes advantage of his friends and tells unfunny jokes at their expense.
For Bunny’s murder to be portrayed as something the group were forced to do, but for the reader at the same time to feel some sympathy for the victim and understand why he was initially their friend, Tartt has to have Bunny undergo something of a personality change over the course of the novel. Bunny’s faults, at first either not mentioned or tolerated as eccentricities, slowly become magnified to the point of being unbearable. Instead of just sponging off his friends for an occasional meal, he eventually forces them to spend thousands of dollars on him every week, to the extent that their families all think they have drugs problems. None of this would have mattered if Bunny did not know that the group – excluding Richard – had a dark secret which if exposed would ruin their lives. It is the knowledge that sooner or later he will deliberately or otherwise expose them which causes them to act.
Bunny’s murder – they push him into a ravine, breaking his neck – is described at the climax of the first half of the novel, and once the deed is done the pace of the narrative almost inevitably begins to flag. There is no suspense as to whether they are investigated or arrested – Richard’s narration has already made it clear that they get away with the murder. Because it appears Bunny has accidentally fallen to his death, and because the body is not discovered for ten days, the inquest finds that he died accidentally, and there is no murder investigation. Things don’t go entirely smoothly – the extended search leads to suspicions that Bunny has been kidnapped (at one point ‘arabs’ are implicated) or was involved in drugs. The FBI is called in, but any threat to the group quickly evaporates once his body is found.
Despite the lack of legal consequences, the impact of their involvement in the murder of their friend is felt by the group nonetheless.
But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.”
Charles begins to drink heavily (as to some extent do all the others), and he eventually becomes unstable and abusive towards his sister. Henry arranges for Camilla to move into a hotel to get away from Charles. It emerges that Camilla and Charles have had an on-off incestuous relationship, and jealousy of Henry causes Charles to threaten him. At the same time Julian discovers the group’s responsibility for Bunny’s murder when he receives an incriminating letter from Bunny that had gone missing in the university’s arcane internal post system. Instead of reporting the crime, Julian walks out of the college and leaves the students to their fate.
The classics – Ancient Greek and the authors of the period – play an important part in the atmosphere of the novel. The students consider themselves an elite because of the subject they study, and hold themselves accountable to a different set of standards from the rest of the student body. Mainly this comes across as pretentiousness:
“Mais, vrai, J’ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I’d always hoped that someday I’d be able to use it.”
Richard remains something of an outsider because he has friends outside the group, “somehow despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the the subtleties of the particular shade.” But while Richard can at least approximate the behaviour of his waspish friends, Bunny’s involvement in the group is a complete anomaly. Most of the time he behaves like a typical undergraduate, drinking, taking drugs, and generally being boorish, completely out of place amongst his cultivated ‘friends’.
The Secret History is an ambitious novel. It introduces the reader to a close and complex group of friends and I think we are supposed to find them fascinating – Henry the savant, the enigmatic twins, and so on. I struggled to identify with them – they are all dependent on prosperous parents, and the extent to which they rely on the bank of mum and dad is exposed when Francis, openly gay when with his friends, feels forced to agree to an arranged marriage to a woman he despises just so he can ensure his allowance and inheritance. The novel is slightly less than the sum of its parts – the discussions of Ancient Greek literature and philosophy feel more important and profound at the time than when recalled at the end of the novel – are they just pretentious, spoiled students showing off and attempting to justify their homicidal tendencies?
Tartt is clearly an accomplished writer. She publishes approximately one novel per decade which shows how complex and immaculately crafted her novels are. Why The Secret History has never been adapted for the cinema of television is one of those mysteries that will never make sense, because it is incredibly filmic (I can imagine Bunny and Henry’s Christmas break in Rome would translate particularly well to the screen) , but hopefully one day one of the streaming services will pick it up.