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.
Not long ago, you may have noticed that I was completely blown away by Donna Tartt's extraordinary and wonderful novel, The Goldfinch. Like several other people I know, I was left feeling there couldn't be anything else in the published world that I could bear to read afterwards. So I took what seemed the only way out, and returned to her first novel, The Secret History. This was published in 1992, so almost exactly twenty years ago, and I think I read it soon afterwards. I remembered loving it at the time -- how would I feel after all this time, and now having The Goldfinch to compare it with?
I needn't have worried. Donna Tartt is a remarkable writer and the novel certainly helped me over that yawning chasm of unknowing. It was also interesting, having read the two books end to end, to see how certain themes and ideas were shared between them.
I've seen this novel described as a psychological thriller, and I suppose that is fair enough. But it is so much more than that. It's certainly not a whodunnit as we guess from that first sentence that a crime has been committed, and by the second paragraph we know for sure: We hadn't intended to hide the body where it couldn't be found. A whydunnit, then, and that's what, slowly, the novel starts to reveal. Richard Papen, who narrates the story, is a clever young man, a scholarship student at a small, select Vermont college. Ashamed of his humble roots in California, he invents a wealthy, classy background, so that he can mix with the other students in his classics class. All of them privately educated, with rich families and trust funds, all admire and love their charismatic classics tutor Julian Morrow. They were, Richard says, imposing enough, and different as they all were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world. As he gets to know them and to be accepted by them, Richard experiences a mixture of love and awe, which allows him to get swept into what turns out to be an extraordinary world view in which Dionysian rites can lead to terrifying visions and terrible violence, and in which, ultimately, murder can be coolly carried out.
The murder of the infuriating, greedy, cruelly tactless and insensitive Bunny takes place relatively early in the novel, and the the rest of the plot deals with what happens to the group in the aftermath. What struck me most about these brilliant, spoiled kids was exactly that -- they were, essentially, still kids, the oldest of the group, the terrifyingly manipulative Henry, only 21. Obsessed with Julian's talk of an unseen world of emotion, darkness, barbarism, they allow themselves to believe that in some way they are above the ordinary laws by which most of the world lives, and of course the results are predictably disastrous. The other thing that was striking to me was the fact that everybody passed their lives in a haze of alcohol and drugs, one thing that linked this novel to The Goldfinch, of course.
Naturally enough, events move inevitably towards tragedy, and the lives of these promising people are all ruined in various ways, by death, alcoholism, loneliness. Richard, perhaps, survives better, on the surface at least, having a successful academic career, though emotionally less so, as he will always be haunted by the events he was drawn to taking part in. The quintessential outsider, he looks back at that fateful year and his friendship with the others and wonders what had held them together.
I do not now nor did I ever have anything in common with any of them, nothing except a knowledge of Greek and the year I spent in their company. And if love is a thing held in common, I suppose we had that in common too, though I realize that might sound odd in the light of the story I am about to tell.
Certainly, then, this was well worth re-reading. Next up? I think I shall have to get onto The Little Friend, Donna Tartt's second novel, of which I have only a hazy memory. It's said not to quite measure up to the other two, but I can't believe it will be a disappointment. So watch this space.
