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[personal profile] mtvessel
03 Nov 2004
The Secret History - Donna Tartt - Penguin 1993
* * * *
Donna Tartt's story is set in a New England college and her protagonists are a snobby clique studying ancient Greek under an eccentric professor. This setting is bound to appeal to anyone who has had an Oxbridge/Ivy League education, which would include, I would guess, the majority of literary critics writing for the national newspapers and magazines in the US and Britain. So it is not surprising that this book received rave reviews when it first came out (clever woman...). This may explain why the blurb on the back describes it as "truly deserving of the accolade Modern Classic". Yes, well, very good it certainly is, but a classic it is not.

The joy of this book is its characterisation, which is the best I have encountered for a very long time. The six main characters - Richard the extremely untrustworthy narrator, Henry the standoffish genius, Bunny the insensitive extrovert, Francis the flamboyant rich kid and the twins Charles and Camilla (yes really - presumably a coincidence rather than a joke on the Royal Family) - are all grotesque and memorable, but also completely plausible. Certainly I recall meeting similar people at university. The emotional tensions, both spoken and unspoken, are brilliantly done and the group dynamics evolve in a very satisfying fashion.

However. The plotting, I think, has a few problems. For a start, Tartt reveals in the prologue the main event of the book, which happens over halfway through. To be honest, I would have preferred it to come as a surprise - as it was I spent three hundred pages waiting for it to happen. Secondly, the themes are very much those of Crime and Punishment (which I haven't in fact read), so in a sense this is a modern-day retelling rather than an original novel. Third, given that the protagonists are classicists, it would have been nice to see more direct reference to the myths of ancient Greece. Apart from one intriguing event (which inevitably but regrettably is told in flashback, so we do not learn all the details we would like to know) the classical background is ignored.

The final thing which stops this book from being a classic is that as far as I could tell, it does not have anything very original or profound to say. I know it's old fashioned to insist that a book has a moral, but the fact remains that most true classics have them. The only moral I could detect in this one was too much study of ancient Greek can be bad for you. Nonetheless, I'll certainly read anything else Tartt writes that comes my way - she has the potential to write a classic, even if this one isn't quite it.

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