Book Review: ‘The Secret History’ by Donna Tartt - revisited
This was my fifth read of ‘The Secret History’ and not only is it still my favourite book, I think it’s even better than the last time I read it two and a half years ago.
For the eight season of our podcast, The Dark Academicals, we’ve been exploring texts that are foundational to dark academia and to ‘The Secret History’ specifically, so we felt it time to revisit the novel. I loved every second of it once again.
Under the influence of their charismatic Classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality, their lives are changed profoundly and for ever as they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.
It’s a synopsis that feels like it gives so much away, but it really tells you nothing about the stunning novel that follows.
This novel is one that you can delve into further and further on each reread and even pick something new to focus on. This time I ended up focusing on Richard, our narrator.
I unexpectedly analysed him this time around, and I came to the conclusion that he’s a surprisingly unreliable narrator. With Richard as our narrator, we sit outside of all of the major events of the novel, even though he is telling us the story. We are entirely dependent on what Richard sees, hears and is told, and how he decides to issue us with the information. I know that this is the case with any first person narration, but there’s something about the stakes in ‘The Secret History’ that make the potential for an unreliable narrator shakes the whole foundation of the story, especially when we take into account how much Richard either didn’t know, or didn’t tell us after Bunny’s death.
I could go on and on about Richard, and I did in this episode of the podcast which you can listen to in full right here:
Written by Sophie
