This was published in 1992, and it was Donna Tartt's first novel.

Seen by some as "the urtext of dark academia" (a category represented on The Velvet Cushion by Rebecca Kuang's Babel, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and Naomi Alderman's The Lessons), The Secret History is set in the mid-1980s, and follows the trajectories of six Classics students at Hampden College, the description of which draws on Tartt's own experience at Bennington College, Vermont.

We know right from the beginning that a student is murdered by a group of other students. (And note there are spoilers from here on in...)

Our narrator is Richard. He manoeuvres himself into the exclusive Classics class run by the flamboyant and erudite but essentially mysterious Julian Morrow. Richard is insecure. As a result, he's a bit of a fabulist; he longs to fit in with the little group of rich and glamorous Classics students, and constantly feels he's on the edge of things. You soon understand that he's wide open for manipulation...

Henry is the dark angel of the group. He's charismatic; effete and intellectual, yet preternaturally strong; and wealthy enough to never really appreciate boundaries.

Then we have Francis, who's red-haired, thin, nervous, elegant, and exotic. Also rich, he owns a Gothic pile that immediately impresses Richard: "I saw, in sharp, ink-black silhouette against the sky, turrets and pikes, a widow's walk." Characters four and five are orphaned twins, Charles and Camilla, an elegant pair whose relationship, we later learn, is somewhat too close for comfort.

The one who gets murdered is Bunny (short, somehow, for Edmund). He's a bit of a braying nitwit; Richard, whose relationship with his own father is not that great, has him down as "the sort of son every father secretly wants: big and good-natured and not awfully bright, fond of sports, gifted at backslapping and corny jokes".


Patros Archaeology Museum, 2019. The allure of Ancient Greece...

The murder is the defining event. As Richard tells us, just a few pages in: "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..."

So we know that Richard is somehow involved. And in his own estimation, the reason for his entanglement with this awful secret is "a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs". This is why he is drawn to Julian (in his study, "everywhere I looked was something beautiful"), and to the group ("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: they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks").

This pursuit of beauty is fed and watered by their classes. I'm going to quote a lengthy section, because it holds the key to the whole thing:

'Death is the mother of beauty,’ said Henry.
‘And what is beauty?’
‘Terror.’
'Well said,’ said Julian. "Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.’
I looked at Camilla, her face bright in the sun, and thought of that line from the Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining.
‘And if beauty is terror,’ said Julian, 'then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?’
'To live,' said Camilla.
'To live forever,’ said Bunny, chin cupped in palm...
[Julian continues] '... The Greeks, you know, really weren't very different from us. They were a very formal people, extraordinarily civilized, rather repressed. And yet they were frequently swept away en masse by the wildest enthusiasms -- dancing, frenzies, slaughter, visions -- which for us, I suppose, would seem clinical madness, irreversible. Yet the Greeks -- some of them, anyway -- could go in and out of it as they pleased... The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw,’ he said, 'was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws -- this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos... The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods... It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?... If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn... And that, to me, is the terrible seduction of Dionysiac ritual. Hard for us to imagine. That fire of pure being.’

It's not hard to see from this that Tartt was herself a Classics student, and really knew her stuff... And these ideas are what drive the book. It's during the attempt to replicate a Dionysiac ritual that the first murder occurs. Initially, all the original five (minus Johnny-come-lately Richard) were active in these experiments. But then Bunny was deemed to be not taking it seriously enough, and left out. And it's on that occasion, when it was just the four of them, that we have the first death. We never find out exactly what happened, because the participants were all off their skulls with the various substances the ritual demanded. But the result was a very horribly mutilated corpse... Which they don't report to the authorities, but rather leave to be discovered.



Things start unravelling when Bunny puts two and two together about the activities of the other four and the death that's been reported in the papers. When he turns to what is effectively blackmail, they decide they have to get rid of him... And Richard, though not part of the original problem, gets roped into this bit of it.

Bunny, it has to be said, doesn't elicit our sympathy. He's often angry; he's jealous of Richard's status as new insider, and winkles out every insecure button to press; he treats Francis to a nasty bit of gay-bashing. Still, he doesn't deserve to be bumped off.

Richard becomes involved inadvertently. When the rest decided to stage an "accident" that will take Bunny out, they give their innocent comrade a get-out, which he takes. But he ends up being part of it anyway. When he thinks Bunny has changed the walking plans that would lead him to his murderers, Richard sets off to warn them. And then Bunny turns up... With the result that we're told about in the Prologue.

Even though we know from the get-go that Bunny will end up dead, this first part is very suspenseful, and you're definitely tense as you turn the pages.



Part Two shows how an event like this eventually breaks everyone.

Shortly after the murder it snows, and this delays the discovery of the body. So, for a while, Bunny is just deemed to be missing, and search parties swing into action.

Julian, meanwhile, that strangely cold figure, reacts in a characteristic fashion: "The business had upset him, that I knew, but I also knew that there was something about the operatic sweep of the search which could not fail to appeal to him and that he was pleased, however obscurely, with the aesthetics of the thing. Henry saw it, too. ‘Like something from Tolstoy, isn't it?' he remarked. Julian looked over his shoulder, and I was startled to see that there was real delight on his face. 'Yes,' he said. 'Isn't it, though?'"

The students have to circumnavigate this hiatus, plus the associated investigation. Luckily for them (if that's the word), there's a tangential drug angle that distracts everyone's attention. But already the strain is starting to show. Charles is drinking more. And Henry begins to sound stranger and stranger. We learn of the piglet-killing ritual that followed the original murder; and the strange monologues he embarks on ("reeling off a pedantic and astonishingly accurate torrent of knowledge with the slow, transfixed calm of a subject under hypnosis"). It's all more than a little off.

Then the body is found, and the falling apart continues, individually and at group level. Some readers complain about the second half. Nothing happens, they say. I disagree. I think Tartt keeps up the tension very nicely, as every character and every relationship is affected by what the group corporately did.

Richard: "At one time I had liked the idea, that the act, at least, had bound us together; we were not ordinary friends, but friends till-death-do-us-part. This thought had been my only comfort in the aftermath of Bunny's death. Now it made me sick, knowing there was no way out. I was stuck with them, with all of them, for good."

Richard also begins to understand that he has been manipulated, and potentially set up: "I was still trying to force back the blackest thought of all; the merest suggestion of it sent the rat's feet of panic skittering up my spine. Had Henry intended to make me the patsy if his plan had fallen through? ... And -- though the immediate danger was apparently gone -- there was no guarantee that it wouldn't surface again a year, twenty years, fifty years from now."

Yet, for all its horror, there's a luminescence to the murder that they can't deny: "As ghastly as it had been, there was no denying that Bunny's murder had thrown all subsequent events into a kind of glaring Technicolor. And, though this new lucidity of vision was frequently nerve-wracking, there was no denying that it was not an altogether unpleasant sensation."



The denouement comes when Julian receives a letter from Bunny... It denounces Henry. Julian dismisses it as a sick joke, but the others are convinced it's a genuine letter that has been bizarrely delayed. Eventually, Julian stumbles upon the truth. He gives the letter to Henry, indicating that he will not use it against him. But after that, Julian precipitously leaves the college.

Richard paints in some more detail about this enigmatic but pivotal character: "It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent... Now, of course, it would be easy for me to veer to the opposite extreme. I could say that the secret of Julian's charm was that he latched on to young people who wanted to feel better than everybody else; that he had a strange gift for twisting feelings of inferiority into superiority and arrogance. I could also say that he did this not through altruistic motives but selfish ones, in order to fulfill some egotistic impulse of his own... More than anything I wish I could say that Julian's face crumbled when he heard what we had done. I wish I could say that he put his head on the table and wept, wept for Bunny, wept for us, wept for the wrong turns and the life wasted: wept for himself, for being so blind, for having over and over again refused to see." There is a coldness about Julian that is quite shocking.

Henry is angry with Julian for what he sees as cowardice: "In our circumstance, he would have done exactly what we did. He's just too much of a hypocrite to admit it... He wouldn't care if we'd killed half a dozen people. All that matters to him is keeping his own name out of it... I loved him more than my own father,’ he said, 'I loved him more than anyone in the world.'"

There's a final bit of melodrama (perhaps the least successful part of the book), and Henry ends up shooting himself.

The Epilogue tells us that Richard is the only one who ends up graduating. He has become very uncommunicative, however, and shuns relationships. Francis attempts suicide; Charles sobers up, but no longer communicates with his sister; Camilla lives an isolated life. All of them are haunted by Henry.



***

The Secret History was a phenomenal publishing success, with millions of copies sold, and translations made into many different languages...

Thirty years on, notes Begona Gomez Urzaiz in 2022, it was still reeling fans in.

Which is puzzling on the face of it. Tartt gives us not only an erudite, exclusive, often off-putting academic background, but also a tiny, troubled, absolutely not-Joe-ordinary clique of people within it. It's full of quotations from Greek ancients (often written in Greek). It should be niche stuff. And yet she sucks you in... "Tartt’s greatest gift," says Anna Silman, "is how she brings us wholly into the psychological and intellectual world of our characters, so we never scoff at the idea that a group of young scholars might be compelled to commit murder because they got too into their Classics homework."

John Mullan has a good rundown on the reasons for the book's appeal. I think the last one is the most revealing: "[It's a book that] lets you in on secrets. Tartt's title is a cracker, not least because it is true to the appeal of the book. We, like Richard, are being given membership of a select group. One secret is given away at the book's opening, only because we can be assured that others lie in store. Every one of the millions who have read The Secret History has the delicious illusion of being admitted to the most dangerous of confidences. It is as if her every reader is the first and only one to read it."

In all, for atmosphere, suspense, creepiness, and a delicious feeling of claustrophobia, this is hard to beat.