Book Review: The Secret History

Yet another in the seemingly endless series of novels chosen by the book club which are heralded, hyped, and lauded and yet for me don't quite live up to expectations. This is the book that took years to write, was written while the author spent time with a hugely intellectual and erudite company, and whose pecuniary success has meant that Donna Tartt has been able to spend the rest of her life (to date) languidly contemplating her literary navel, and polishing her subsequent manuscripts until they meet her own exacting standards of shininess, which results in her dropping them off at the rate of approximately one per decade.

"Haunting, compelling and brilliant," gushes the Times critic on the front cover. I'd give him (or her) one out of three at best. Brilliant it may be, but I found it neither haunting nor compelling.

It's a good enough read, don't get me wrong. In parts it fairly zips along, verging in places almost on the gripping. But then it begins to meander, losing its way in the minutiae of student life and recording the passage of time with infinite care and detail when a simple paragraph starting "The following Spring..." would suffice. One of the club members, with classical Greek learning in her background, suggested that Tartt was attempting to mirror a Greek tragedy (throughout the book and not only in the part where the group attempt to recreate a bacchanal). If true then it's a clever idea, as an intellectual challenge, but slightly pointless in the knowledge that it will bypass 99.9% of your audience. Still, don't let me be accused of supporting dumbing down.

Much of the writing is excellent but in places it loses any pretensions to grandeur and becomes almost clunky. I was left with the impression that Tartt had dashed off a draft in her own style and then spent several years going over the text, overlaying it with clever and artful prose in an effort to - well - polish it as I mentioned above, and that she'd simply missed a bit here and there.

The real downfall of the piece though, is the assembly of unbelievable characters. Dark and moody Henry, stoically battling his demons (or alternatively just being a boring snob); coquettish Camilla who can't quite manage on her own (not very 20th century that is it? But very classical Greek, apparently); charming and well-connected Julian who despite having travelled the world and met just about every famous person you ever heard of, is now content to hide away in an academic backwater teaching a handful of drugged-up ne'er-do-wells and getting up the nose of the college board.

So in the end my impression is that it's a load of old tosh. Readable, well-written (for the most part) tosh, but tosh all the same.