Greek tragedy (in Vermont)

When I started Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, I was afraid I’d caught the over-analysing bug. This was clearly the kind of book you should lose yourself into, yet instead of simply accepting the emotions triggered by reading it, I kept marvelling at how skilfully Tartt manipulates the readers to react in a certain way. The opening of the book makes clear what will happen at the climax: a student will be killed, and his closest group of friends, the narrator among them, will be responsible. “Right”, I thought before I had come far, “I can see where this is leading. Poor boy, desperate to hang with the cool kids, plays along when they gang up on the runt of the litter, who is less fascinating, less old-world-charming (a mere banker’s boy) and less academic  than the rest of  his set. And that’s reason enough to kill him, I suppose. Huh.” I’m afraid school has left me suspicious of hangers-on who want to belong at any price, and the book’s hero (or anti-hero) Richard Papen falls neatly into this category.

It turns out, thankfully, not to be as simple as I thought, but still my inner book-reviewer noted with admiration how Tartt led me down a path I had initially been very reluctant to go. Whenever Richard is not with his charmed circle of friends, his life is suitably dismal: his childhood and early youth are dull and grisly, and a freezing winter spent in Vermont without friends or a bean is memorably appalling. In contrast, when Richard is accepted into the select group of students studying Greek at the university of Hampden in Vermont, the reader feels almost as relieved as he is. Idyllic autumn days lie ahead, complete with a ramshackle, atmospheric country house where the Greek set repair to at weekends. Richard is saved from his winter ordeal by the group’s ring-leader, who interestingly enough is neither the dandy nor the frat boy (the future victim) but a serious-minded swot, which gives his actions – which he persuades his friends to join in – a false air of sanity and reasonableness. Add to this the eminent murderability of the frat boy, Bunny, whose reaction when his pals get into a fix is to become increasingly unpredictable and annoying in an almost Raffles-like manner. And yet Richard insists that Bunny’s friends kept a lingering affection for  him until the end, and we’re not allowed to hate him completely. Yes, my inner reviewer conceded, very cleverly done.

By the end, though, I finally abandoned the over-analysing in favour of a stricken “Gosh, this is just so sad”, and the final scene, which didn’t even concern my own favourite mis-behaving Greek student, almost made me cry. In a way, I regretted that I hadn’t been able to lose myself in the idyllic pre-murder scenes more, but if I had I would probably have been even more shaken by the end, and a few days of working and light-hearted Regency Romance-reading wouldn’t have been enough to restore my spirits.              

What did I expect? What book ever contains the message “we killed this guy and then we lived happily ever after”? Even the most hard-bitten author – Zola, say – will generally not let anyone get away with murder. If the cops don’t get you, the Furies certainly will (and Richard & Co. are studying Greek, after all). Things might have turned out even worse for the young killers, I suppose – but still, it’s really, really sad.

One prerequisite for understanding Richard and caring about what happens in The Secret History has to be that you find at least one of his friends as fascinating as he does. Though I can certainly see the point of the swot, Henry, and to a lesser degree of the aloof twins, my favourite was surprisingly enough the dandified Francis. Then again, maybe that’s not very surprising. I may not care for dandies usually, but otherwise Francis ticks a great number of my boxes – he’s pale, thin, red-headed, enjoyably waspish and unashamedly self-centred. Gay, though, so presumably not sensitive to female admiration. After making his acquaintance soonish after the smooth poisoner in Dark Angels, I begin to understand the single girl’s lament: “It’s always the cute ones”.