2002 Penguin edition – the edition I own (fair use)

(15) DONNA TARTT –

THE SECRET HISTORY (1992)

“Pulitzer-Prize winning American Neo-Romanticist author of upper middle class Southern background…Tartt’s novels are devoted to the themes of guilt and beauty, and focus heavily on the tumultuous thoughts and feelings of her protagonists. It might not be inaccurate to call her literary fiction’s equivalent of The Smiths”.

“The Secret History” was her debut novel, inspired by her time as a student at Bennington College – suggesting to me that she killed someone there, because she writes so convincingly of a plot to cover up a homicide.

The moral of the story – don’t do Classics at college.

“The novel follows the adventures of a few upper class Classics students who inadvertently commit manslaughter and try to hide the details from their new acquaintance, the story’s lower middle class narrator who idolizes their culture and lifestyle…Left to deal with the consequences of an accidental murder, the group slowly starts to plan a deliberate one.”

What would Dionysus do? Can I interest you in an experience of our lord and savior, Dionysus? No, seriously, it all starts to go wrong when the group of Classics students try to replicate a Dionysian revel – or more precisely, it reveals the rot that was already within them.

Interestingly, that brief invocation of fantasy earned it a thinly based entry in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy – “The Secret History as slight fantasy interest in that its plot hinges on the successful attempt by a group of Classics students to recreate the requisite conditions for a bacchanal…During this they see the god Dionysus; the female among them is perceived, even by herself, as a deer, and is hunted; and they unwittingly tear to pieces an innocent bystander. That this is not merely a fantasy of perception is indicated by the fact that, afterwards, one of their number displays the bite-marks of an unknown monster”.

Although as a Dionysian, I’m not sure I’m a fan of its anti-Dionysian agitprop