The Secret History - Donna Tartt

The ancient Byzantine historian Procopius wrote a book called Anecdota, more commonly known as Arcana histora (The Secret History) chronicling the scandals and court intrigues of the rule of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I, who reigned in the years 525 to 565 A.D. In it, Procopius described his hatred for the Emperor and his wife (and joint ruler) - the treacherous Empress Theodora,  the cruelty and excesses of their lifestyle, and the influence of the Byzantine Church over state affairs. He also attacked the great Roman general, Belisarius Antonina; and his wife accusing both the Emperor and his loyal General of being powerless in the hands of their wives.

Tartt's The Secret History shares not only the same title but also an identical tale of the doings and motives of a group of people, and the sufferings inflicted by them on those they lorded over. The story unfolds in a small but exclusive New England college where our narrator, Richard Papen begins his freshman year. Hailing from a lower-class background and a dysfunctional family, Papen is impressed by the sophistication of a group of students he meets on campus. He admires them from afar, secretly wishing he could be a part of their clique. They study Latin and Greek classics under the tutelage of Professor Julian Marrow whose teachings and idiosyncratic opinions the group reveres almost to the point of idolatry.

In due course, Papen charms and flatters his way into the group and later Marrow's class. At the same time, he deceives the group of his actual mediocre background - boasting instead of a supposed life of posh boarding schools and oil-money inheritance to try to fit in. As he gains their trust, he learns of a bacchanal in the nearby woods that was performed by four of the group's members - Henry Winter, the twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay, and Francis Abernathy (Papen and another member of the group, Edmund ‘Bunny’ Corcoran were not invited at that time and did not know of it).

Led by Henry, the group had been spurred by their introduction to the Bacchae (a triumph of barbarism over reason: dark, chaotic, inexplicable) by Morrow, and was driven to answer the question their teacher posed:

"We don't like to admit it but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilised people - the ancients no less than us - have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self. Are we, in this room, really very different from the Greeks or the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are to modern tastes so chilling?"

Vague allusions to drugs, sexual intercourse, and drunken madness are made in the book  to tell what occured in the woods as the four sought to invoke their primitive selves. Bakcheia. Dionysiac frenzy. Charles ends up with a bite mark on his arm with strange puncture marks not like that made by human teeth. Camilla sees a deer and everyone remembers running through the woods chasing and thereafter attacking it. Henry wakes up with blood on his hands and at his feet.  A  man lies dead - neck broken and his brains all over his face.

There had been a murder.

In time, Papen and Bunny both come to know of it. Bunny's persistent jokes and thinly veiled threats to expose the murder bring forth tension, especially between him (Bunny) and Henry whom he starts to blackmail for free meals, holidays, and expensive purchases. This eventually leads to a decision by the group, Papen included, to silence Bunny in a manner that would be permanent. And so, murder begets murder.

Through the plotting and planning of Bunny’s demise, Papen shows himself to be a passive character that is caught up in the actions of a group of students to which he belonged, and yet in many ways remained on the fringe. He is a helpless observer - a mere follower who made up and believed his own reality. He does not act to stop the cycle of violence. He does not turn his friends in. He does not question. He rationalises, and at each step turns his mind away from the reality of his situation and towards his fascination with Greek classics.

"Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer's landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? ... In a certain sense this was why I felt so close to the others in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home. It was why I admired Julian and Henry in particular. Their reason, their very eyes and ears were fixed irrevocably in the confines of those stern and ancient rhythms - the world, in fact, was not their home, at least not the world as I knew it ..."

In the end though, Papen betrays his friends and reveals the truth of what happened - to us, the reader, as Tartt tells us of Bunny's death early on in the book's Prologue and sets in place a murder mystery in reverse.

"It is difficult to believe that such an uproar took place over an act for which I was partially responsible, even more difficult to believe I could have walked through it - the cameras, the uniforms, the black frowds sprinkled over Mount Cataract like ants in a sugar bowl - without incurring a blink of suspicion.

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell."

This is a complex novel on many levels. On the superficial level, it is hard to escape noticing Tartt's ubiquitous use of French and Latin expressions, often without any translation given. While these do add a certain realism to the characters as elitist classics students, they can to an extent also be annoying, making Tartt come across as a literary exhibitionist.

On a deeper level however, most will appreciate that this is an analysis of the human psyche; the telling of a dark tale and at the same time, the illumination of the flaws that all of us, in one way or another share with Tartt's characters – the fear of loneliness, the desire to fit in and be included, and the reluctance to surrender our dreams and wishful thoughts of art and beauty to every dreamer’s bête noir – the barrenness of truth, reality,  and the now.

In the end, Papen relents and gives in:

"Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that shadowy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs."