A group of college students conspire to murder one of their classmates in Donna Tartt's 1992 novel The Secret History. I never heard it mentioned in the '90s myself, though I was in high school and busy reading Anne Rice, Stephen King, JRR Tolkien, and Dungeons and Dragons books at the time. Nowadays people are talking about it as a forerunner of the Dark Academia genre that has cropped up in just the last four years or so. The Secret History lacks the gothic aesthetic which Wikipedia says is essential to the genre but I suspect people would rather not mention now that the Dark Academia genre really seems to have evolved from Harry Potter fandom. It reminds me of how Agnes Varda is suddenly being talked about as the high goddess of the French New Wave. I think people have been looking back to find women whose contributions weren't recognised due to suppression by the patriarchy. The only trouble is that hindsight is not really 20/20, especially when it's politically biased.
So The Secret History is overrated, as many people have said. I'd call it a decent pot-boiler, a Columbo episode without Columbo. The narrator, Richard, is the only one among the group of wealthy students who comes from a middle class background, which he tries to hide at first. He's a remarkably passive guy, which I think was deliberate on Tartt's part (at the end he describes himself as "so essentially" a "bystander"). He's in love with the only girl in the group, Camilla, but when he's wading with her at a lake and she cuts her foot, he does nothing to help her, just watching blood cloud the water distractedly. The leader of the group, Henry, rushes in to save the day.
I'm amused by how the term "dark" is used lately. I was watching The Butcher Boy again last night, the story of a young boy in an abusive household who has elaborate delusions, whose mother commits suicide listening to the folk song "The Butcher Boy", after which the lad lives up to that name in ways you might imagine. That, to me, is dark. But now people call Matt Reeves' Batman "dark" which, visually, yes, I guess so. But people seem to forget that Tim Burton's Joker committed mass murder by sabotaging the chemicals in common grooming products. Hardly anyone even dies in Reeves' movie.
And how is The Secret History supposed to be dark? The idea is that, by the end of the book, you're supposed to love Henry, the murderer. This book was written long after Interview with the Vampire or the episode of Columbo where Columbo sympathises with Johnny Cash playing a killer. Not to mention The Picture of Dorian Gray. Or Edgar Allan Poe. But okay.
In an interview at The Guardian, author Sadie Jones said she found The Secret History, "trite and derivative and I couldn’t work out what all the fuss was about. It felt very schematic to me." Schematic is a good word. Tartt's designs to manipulate the reader are so transparent, you can sense the outline she wrote before starting the novel. When Richard ends up nearly dying after staying the winter at a ridiculously ramshackle loft, he's rescued suddenly by Henry who takes him to the hospital and nurses him back to health. Okay, our sympathies are with Henry now. The murder victim, Bunny, is relentlessly painted as such a thoroughly obnoxious caricature of humanity that it's unintentionally hilarious when Richard adds, after some absurd anecdote, something like "but I did love Bunny."
Much of the novel feels like gossip, like the broadly telegraphed revelation that the twins, Camilla and Charles, were sleeping together. I started to wonder, since evidently many of the characters were based on Tartt's actual classmates and professors, if Bunny was based on an ex-boyfriend with whom Tartt had an intensely acrimonious breakup, after which she said, "I'm going to create a narrative where that bastard gets murdered and no-one reading the book even feels sorry about it!" There are two ways Bunny--his name is a nickname for Edmund--is portrayed in the book; obnoxious and pettily pathetic. Just the nickname Bunny in itself--and a scene later where Bunny is offended that Henry calls him "Rabbit" in Greek--feels like a cheap shot.
Bunny makes misogynist remarks to Camilla; he's vociferously homophobic, especially around the book's gay character; he demands people pay for his dinners, his clothes, and his hotel rooms. Tartt goes on to describe his whole family as crass and obnoxious. Sometimes it is kind of funny in a The Trouble with Harry kind of way but mostly, every time Tartt delivered another punchline at Bunny's expense, I started less and less to think, "What a jerk!" and more and more, "What's stuck in Tartt's craw exactly?"
Anyway. That's done.
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