The Secret History - Review
The Secret History was a book I picked up out of sheer crazed curiosity of a fandom/aesthetic called dark academia. This genre revolves around your typical idea of the classic academic, leather messenger bag and old books, a wool coat and horn-rimmed glasses, reading by candlelight on a winter night. But the catch is the darker themes often involving murder, suicide, and other areas of moral grayness (Dead Poet’s Society, Kill Your Darlings, If We Were Villains, The Goldfinch). Since The Secret History appeared to be a sort of origin point in which every book that followed was compared to, I decided the 500 page mammoth of a thriller would be the best way to test the waters.
From the start, our narrator Richard lays out the novel’s trajectory: we are somewhere years after Bunny’s murder and he has never told anyone besides those who were involved the truth and we are going to look back on those days as an observer of a past we continue to hold dear, no matter how dark it was. Very similarly to Looking for Alaska, the book is split into sections of Before and After, in this case, before and after Richard and his friends kill their best friend Bunny.
The group of friends meets in the small Virginia college of Hampden where they are the five sole students of an eccentric Ancient Greek teacher. A tight-knit set of wealthy, elite academics, their exclusive club is everything the broke and aimless Richard could ever hope for after transferring from a school in California. He decides to try and play the part of well-off and well-bred and manages to be accepted into the class and their group. But they have a long history and a growing number of secrets between them that leave Richard piecing together fragments of the people he is allowed to see and must decipher who they really are, as well as maintain his own facade.
This was by far the longest non-classic novel I’ve read since Harry Potter and the first that has managed to hold my constant attention through its meandering story and detail. In many ways, The Secret History reflects that wandering, nostalgic style of the classics and an old way of life which its main characters are obsessed with and wish they could experience first hand. If academia, mystery, and characters who are beautiful and flawed interest you, I can’t help but recommend this book.
