“What could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?”

People smarter than I have reviewed The Secret History much better than I could ever hope to, so this will just be a little collection of impressions.

I’m not generally one for murder mysteries, but when I saw The Secret History was basically about a bunch of angsty Classics students spiralling, I knew it was for me. It’s hard to believe this was Donna Tartt’s debut novel. Her prose is sometimes digressive and lyrical, but it also has long dialogue sequences so the pace never really slows down. The reverse structure (we learn who murdered whom in the prologue) with cleverly interspersed flashforwards, the internal narrator and the locations (both natural and manmade) where the action takes place create a sense of suffocating intrigue that completely absorbed me. And I mean that literally: on the days I read this novel I had trouble sleeping because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had dreams about Henry Winter, I was so fascinated.

The characters are wretched but oh so attractive. They are all incredibly well built through dialogue, little anecdotes and passing observations made by Richard, the narrator. As a reader you think you know them after Book I, and you are wrong. I confess when I reached the halfway point I felt apprehensive, thinking the novel could end there and dreading the possibility of it all going downhill in the second half. But Book II holds the key to the novel’s title, it is where characters shed their masks and Richard sees them with more (though not complete) clarity.

I wish there had been more of a focus on Julian and his classes. At the start of the book, readers are led to believe that the professor will be a central piece in the story, and he is, but more as a background presence. That passage where he explained Dionysiac ecstasy gave me chills. I wanted more of that, though I'm aware that this is a purely selfish desire because the book doesn’t need it.

I came here for the Classics and stayed for the decadent aesthetics, the oppressive atmosphere and the moral ambiguity. The Secret History is mainly a novel about obsession, vice, hedonism, appearances, theater, the layered self. So—for my fellow classics’ enthusiasts—a novel about Dionysus. The more I think about it, the more genius I find it. I need to read it again.