I love a good campus novel. Even though I’ve never been to the US, there’s something about the allure of ivy-clad buildings, clock towers and autumn leaves that gets me every time. Perhaps it’s because I miss university life: the chance to spend every day pursuing something that you’re really interested in, seemingly unlimited time with your peers and the feeling that your whole life is only just beginning, laid out before you like some exciting adventure.
But this novel is so much more than that. All the above stands true, but slowly descends into a downward spiral of obsession, hysteria and ultimately murder. Believe me, this may be a long novel, but every line is filled with such suspense that you’ll be racing through the pages faster than you believed possible. If there’s an adult novel that brings back that childhood desire to read under the covers with a torch in the middle of the night because you can’t wait to find out what happens, this is it.
Unusually for a murder mystery, The Secret History opens with the murder, so it’s not a whodunnit kind of story, but rather a whydunnit. What are the circumstances that would compel someone to commit such a terrible crime?
The book’s main character and narrator, Richard Papen, transfers to the fictitious Hampden College, and elite liberal arts college, in order to forge a new life for himself. He becomes enamoured with a small group of classics students, taught by the charismatic Julian Morrow, and slowly gets let into their circle, only to find that moral boundaries become blurred as their obsession with the darker sides of Ancient Greek culture become apparent. Throughout the novel, the skill of Tartt’s writing is that you, the reader, always feel like you’re being let in on a secret, on part of an exclusive group that no one else has access to.
One of the few books that I will reread again and again, I can assure you that The Secret History is like nothing you have ever read before, and may continue to haunt you for years to come.
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