The Secret History

I was a bit disappointed by this, especially as I'd always had in mind that Tartt's debut novel was one of the great reads of the 90s that I had somehow missed out on up until now.

It starts off well enough. There are obvious echoes of works like Brideshead Revisted and The Dead Poets Society, but strangely enough the set-up reminded me a lot of The Magus, another fat novel that I polished off on holiday in Antigua a few years ago.

Yet while the concept, to which the prologue gives the reader a substantial taster, is pretty good, after a hundred or so pages I began to have to recognise that it has not been especially well realised (or indeed well-written.)

The underlying storyline is the familiar one where a young 'everyman' suddenly finds himself mixed up with a mysterious, gilt-edged elite, from which he invariably ends up being spewed out at the end. (Christopher Booker has also noted that the narrator/protagonist of this story type will almost always fail to end up attached to the girl that has stirred his affections inside this excitingly exotic wonderland.)

The trouble here is that I knew a number of people in Cambridge the like of Julian and his amoral classics clique and somehow Tartt's attempt to realise them as fictional characters falls well short of what might have been imagine-able.

Julian and Henry in particular are like place-holders for characters that need a lot more work if they are to engage our interest as much as the story seems to require. We hear reports of Julian's special character and charisma from his pupils, but Tartt neglects to show us directly just how he inspires such devotion.

Perhaps the one character that takes shape rather better than the others is the victim, Bunny. I kept thinking of Freddy Miles as played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Talented Mr Ripley, but there are several other real life equivalents for me to be reminded of too.

When a long narrative like this winds up and the narrator reflects on the trajectories of the key characters, I'm used to having a strong sense of nostalgia for the way things were back in the first act. There's usually a poignant sense of the impact of time and fate on the key relationships. In the epilogue Tartt tries rather archly to deliver this effect...and fails.

I hear that an attempt is under way to bring this story to the silver screen. If so, there's a great deal that will have to be cut out or worked up, and the dialogue will have to be significantly improved. Perhaps if these characters can be made to say cleverer, more thought-provoking things the whole plot will be more immediately interesting. As it is in the novel, I couldn't really have cared less if they had all ended up driving off a cliff at the end.