The Secret History

"I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?" The Secret History

I've spent this rainy Easter weekend re-reading The Secret History, Donna Tartt's wonderful dark story of the undergraduates who take their studies in Ancient Greek a little too far when they re-enact the bacchanal.  The narrator is Richard Papen, an outsider at an elite liberal arts college in Vermont who falls in love with the wintery landscape and becomes enthralled by a group of five  students; Bunny, Henry, Francis, and twins Charles and Camilla who study Ancient Greek with charming Classics professor Julian Morrow.  The classes are only open to students personally selected by Julian who doesn't take a salary and teaches in a classroom full of flowers.  They dress in a classic English style in quality fabrics, write with old-fashioned pens and exude a cerebral dark glamour.

The novel is relayed retrospectively by Richard in the manner of the unnamed narrator in Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca and this works to great effect.  Like Rebecca, too, nobody is particularly likeable or trustworthy in The Secret History.  Richard  believes he is accepted into the group and begins to study with them and spend weekends at an isolated country house belonging to Francis, but he is unaware of their occasional nightly intoxicated rampages across the countryside based on the ecstatic elements of Greek Dionysia.

The Secret History unfolds into a page-turning whydunnit with dark consequences but it is also an entertaining campus novel and so beautifully written that - along, with Richard Papen - you can almost see the 'Commons clock tower, ivied brick, white spire' of Hampden College and the Vermont nights 'disordered and wild with stars.'

Learning to love a hyacinth

You have gained a new source of enjoyment, and it is as well to have as many holds on happiness as possible.  Henry Tilney, Northanger Abbey

I'm afraid The Little Friend was a Donna Tartt too far for me.  Awful people doing awful things to each other and really, if you threw a live king cobra from a motorway bridge, what are the chances it would go through the sun roof of your victim's car at the precise moment it passed below? 

Time to return to Jane Austen.  Northanger Abbey is perfect to dispel the January gloom and each time I re-read Austen I discover nuances unnoticed before.  I was struck this time by how spare Austen is with her physical descriptions yet how much they convey.  Catherine gazing at Henry Tilney with 'sparkling eyes' tells us all we need to know of a blooming young girl falling in love.  Henry may be a bit of a clever clogs but when Catherine tells him that she is 'learning to love a hyacinth' his witty reply that loving a hyacinth is 'rather domestic' but she may in time 'come to love a rose' is very endearing both to Catherine and the reader.

I'm also fond of Mrs Allen, it has to be said, she is not very bright but she is kind to Catherine  and as she is completely obsessed with clothes and fashion she is the go-to woman for advice on sprigged muslin, Mechlin lace and silk gloves.  Then there is the vain and silly Isabella Thorpe who foolishly plays one of her admirers off against the other only to lose them both.

I do like the cloth-bound Penguin editions.  Unfortunately some of the of the pink gothic keys on my copy of Northanger Abbey have rubbed off after I spilled my tea.  Good job I took a picture first. Happy New Year!  

 

Winter novels

"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
"It's so dreadful to be poor!" sighed Meg looking down at her old dress.
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

I've never given a book away before so it's about time I did.  Little Women is a perfect Christmas read and you can almost feel the New England snow as you read it.  This is a new Penguin Threads edition which features hand-stitched cover art.  I'll randomly pick a name from the commenters on this post to receive an early Christmas present!

I would love to have visited Asia House in London last month to hear Amy Tan talk about her new novel The Valley of Amazement on a rare visit to the UK, but I couldn't get the time off work.  I've written before about my admiration for Amy Tan.  The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife and most of all The Hundred Secret Senses are some of my favourite novels.

Sadly The Valley of Amazement is not vintage Tan.  It gets off to a great start with young Violet Minturn growing up in her mother's Shanghai courtesan house at the turn of the 20th century.  Tricked into becoming a courtesan herself she is befriended and protected by Magic Gourd the sparky former courtesan who knows all the tricks of the trade and tells it like it is.  There are quite explicit details about the degradation of women in courtesan houses and their will to survive.  This part of the novel is very powerful but when the story moves on to Violet's mother and her history it becomes formulaic, overlong and the ending is far too neat.

That said, Magic Gourd, the ageing courtesan with a heart of gold is a wonderful character who reminds me of Kwan from The Hundred Secret Senses. 

Despite my aversion to 'weird twins' in fiction I very much enjoyed Curtis Sittenfeld's story of twins who share a gift for predicting dark events.  Sisterland is narrated by Kate who is married with children and tries to disown her gift.  The unconventional Vi positively embraces it and sets herself up as a psychic.  When she predicts an earthquake and becomes something of a small-town celebrity after appearing on the Today show, Kate whose husband works as a geological scientist and dismisses Vi's prediction as nonsense is deeply embarrassed.

Sittenfeld is particularly good on teenage angst and Kate's account of being invited to a slumber party at the age of 13 and messing around with a Ouija board which turns dark and ominous is very well written.  I won't give away the ending but I'll just say beware of October 16th!

2013 has been a great year for fiction.  Best of all was Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch of which more later.  Merry Christmas and see you all in the New Year!

Beginning The Goldfinch

 I do like a bit of superior chicklit and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones-Mad About The Boy certainly had its moments and made me laugh a few times but I have to say I was yearning to read something a bit more substantial by the time I got to the end.

My big autumn read is The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.  As I have not read The Secret History or The Little Friend I have no preconceptions about this writer but John Mullan's Ten Reasons why we love Donna Tartt's The Secret History from The Guardian a couple of weeks ago makes it sound very enticing.  I do like novels set in academia.

I'm about two hundred page in and it's very promising.  I liked the first chapter which is set in Amsterdam:

Outside, all was activity and cheer.  It was Christmas, lights twinkling on the canal bridges at night; red-cheeked dames et heren, scarves flying in the icy wind, clattered down the cobblestones with Christmas trees lashed to the backs of their bicycles.  In the afternoons, an amateur band played Christmas carols that hung tinny and fragile in the winter air. Donna Tartt The Goldfinch

I also loved the descriptions of Dutch paintings in a New York art gallery with 'peeled lemons, with the rind slightly hardened at the knife's edge, the greenish shadow of a patch of mold.'  The book has been described as Dickensian in some reviews and its central character has been likened to Holden Caulfield from J D Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in others.  I'll reserve judgement until I've read it  and at over 700 pages I may be a while!

Anybody read The Secret History?