6. The Secret History: Dark Academia, Greek Myth, and Murder

How does Donna Tartt combine gothic academia and greek mythology in her captivating debut novel? What do the characters tell us about the dark side of human nature? And, did her own university experience influence the story? Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett discuss all this and more in this week's episode on The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Explore our favourite Folio books at http://foliosociety.com/thebookclub Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Social Producer: Harry Balden Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Video Editor: Lorcan Moullier Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society.

• 0:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now Tabby, as you know, there are some books that you read once, but there are others, you especially, return to again and again. And those second kind of books, the ones you go back to, they really deserve to last, don't they?

• 0:16Speaker 00

  That's what the Folio Society does. They are an independent, employee-owned publisher based in London. Since 1947, they've been turning the stories we know and love into books for life.

• 0:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, every book is produced with specially commissioned, beautiful artwork and specially commissioned introduction that puts the story in its context.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Whether you're into crime, sci-fi or history, Folio Society publishes the books we love. From Bronte to Dickens, from Margaret Atwood to Tom Holland. The books can feel like works of art in their own right. They're built around the text, the stories that last in books that are made to last. If a story matters, keep it properly. Find it at foliosociety.com/thebookclub. That's foliosociety.com/thebookclub.

• 1:11Speaker 02

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• 1:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He'd been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was one of the biggest man hunts in Vermont history. It's difficult to believe that Henry's modest plan could have worked so well despite these unforeseen events. We hadn't intended to hide the body where it couldn't be found. In fact, we hadn't hidden it at all, but it simply left it where it fell in hopes that some luckless passerby would stumble over it before anyone even noticed he was missing. It's difficult to believe that such an uproar took place over an act for which I was partially responsible.

• 2:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Even more difficult to believe I could have walked through it without incurring a blink of suspicion. But walking through it all was one thing. Walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another. And though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I'm not so sure.

• 3:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that is the opening of The Secret History by Donna Tartt. It was her debut novel and it was published in 1992 to enormous critical and commercial acclaim. It's one of the great cult hits of the last forty years. It's sold almost three million copies. It's been translated into all kinds of languages. It's the kind of book, The Secret History, that people read and reread obsessively. They give to their friends, they press upon people. Tabby, it's one of the great kind of cult books of recent times, isn't it?

• 3:29Speaker 00

  It absolutely is. I mean, I first read it on a recommendation and now this is my third time rereading it. So, yeah, I can attest to that. And it's because it's this, it's this mesmeric, brooding murder mystery. I guess it's sort of captivated a younger generation of readers who want something a bit sexier, a bit darker, a bit more morally debased than classics like Brideshead Revisited, which also sit within kind of the confines of a university or whatever it is. Because this too is set in a college town in rural Vermont. And I think that location is definitely no coincidence in part.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Because it's very chilly and that sets this kind of gloomy, brooding atmosphere from the start. And it is a world of old college buildings, the spectacle scholars, you know, dorm room parties, late night homework sessions, smoky rooms, you know.

• 4:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's a lot of smoking.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  A lot of smoking, a lot of drinking wine.

• 4:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  It's an atmosphere of kind of hedonism and learning, but also, you know, drugs and poetry. And it's actually, you know, that aesthetic has inspired a whole new literary subgenre, which is called dark academia, which I'm sure lots of people have heard about, and we'll definitely talk about that a bit more later because this is like the genesis of that. It's the touchstone for that.

• 4:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  So when we were dreaming up this podcast, this was one of the first books on our list to do.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  It totally was, yeah.

• 5:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I remember reading it. I started reading it on a train. I was going, you know, kind of cross country for a sort of four hour train trip. I started reading it. I got home. I couldn't stop reading it. I just sat up all night because I was so engrossed by the story. It, I mean, it's a terrible cliche, but it's one of those books that that hooks you. And then it's very, very hard to stop or to take a break because the story, the momentum of the story is so impulsive and so irresistible.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  It really, really is. Just when you think you've got to kind of the pinnacle of the plot, this new stuff is thrown at you. And so all along, I mean, I first read it when I was at university, so perfect timing. And I was studying classics and classics has a massive, massive, it's almost a character in itself in this book. And so obviously being young and deeply pretentious, I loved the kind of the aesthetic that it presented me with. Kind of of myself, I thought that's what all classic students should be. And also the way that it suggests that the classics are something like dark, mysterious and also slightly superior. So obviously I couldn't help but be drawn, drawn into that.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  But also like it's the stylishness of Donna Tartt's writing, it's the wittiness, you know, it's her cruel but kind of secretly enviable characters and also.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  The murder mystery element. I mean, that's obviously addictive.

• 6:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the sort of the coolness of it, the perceived coolness is bound up with the author, isn't it? Donna Tartt herself. So she's a very kind of elusive figure. She's seen as very cool, as very clever. Actually, Tabby, I have to say for people watching on video, you've dressed as Donna Tartt for the occasion.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  I literally have. Look, I'm wearing a collar, I'm wearing a large mannish black jumper and I'm wearing red lipstick. Which Donna Tartt always does in the very, very few interviews that she gives. She even often wears a tie, but I couldn't find one, so I'm sorry to let you all down on that front.

• 6:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's a bit different from the traditional Tabby aesthetic, which is slightly more.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I put my, I put my trackies aside for today. Yeah, it's a huge step up for me.

• 6:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Donna Tartt wouldn't, I mean, you know, you're here bearing your soul to the listeners, but Donna Tartt wouldn't do that because she's very elusive, isn't she?

• 7:06Speaker 00

  She's very elusive. She definitely cultivates her own mystique. And because she gives very few interviews, she gives very little away about her life, you know, her personal details. She's definitely become a cult figure for readers and writers alike. And also, you know, there's something extraordinary about the fact that she started writing The Secret History when she was 19. And it took her 10 years to write and it was her debut novel and it obviously became this total sensation. There were massive bidding wars for it and stuff and that in itself is, is pretty extraordinary. And we'll, we'll talk a little bit more about her and the secret history behind the secret history.

• 7:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very good.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  Later, but just to give people a sense of her, she is from Mississippi and she speaks with this kind of lovely sort of very clipped, pronounced southern drawl.

• 7:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Like that?

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Just like that. Yep. Yep. She went to Bennington College, also in Vermont, and that is what Hampton College, where the book is based, that's what it's based on. And she wrote it while studying. Classical literature, Greek tragedy. And obviously, that comes out throughout the book because at Bennington, she studied classics. But also, she was very bookish anyway. I mean, she's read everything. If you watch interviews with her, all she could, the thing that she really speaks about and is happy to speak about is books and how much she loves them. But like her characters, she had a very wild side, a lot of drink, a lot of drugs, a lot of sex allegedly. And also like her characters, she had a very specific, she has a very specific stylized retro image embodied by me today.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  And it's kind of androgynous, it's black suits, it's the chicest bob you've ever seen, an incredible sense of poise and self-possession. All of which is massively added to her allure.

• 8:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is that you or Donna Tartt?

• 8:51Speaker 00

  No, yeah, I was kidding. We are one and the same.

• 8:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  We're both literary sensations before the age of thirty.

• 8:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, okay, well, that's for the listeners to decide a bit.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Tabby, the title, The Secret History, this doesn't come from nowhere, does it? Because it actually comes from a book about the Byzantine Empire.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  It does, and it's no coincidence because when Donna Tartt was writing The Secret History, she was studying classics. So, you know, she was deep in that world. And The Secret History comes from a book written by Procopius in the sixth century A.D. It lifts the curtain on the secrets of the court of Justinian and Theodora in Byzantium. It presents this perfect elite who are in fact corrupt underneath and the terrible deeds done by the emperor and more particularly his wife, Theodora, who was said to be a massive whore essentially, and do all sorts of sexual acts with animals in public, particularly geese.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  She would scatter grain over herself and let them peck away at their leisure, for pleasure, and lots of exciting things like that. Obviously, this was a massive, massive inspiration for Donna Tartt when writing about a seemingly perfect group of students who get up to all sorts of sordid sexual acts behind the scenes.

• 10:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  So we're looking at the secret history of the secret history in the second half. But for now, let's just talk about the book itself. And for those of you who haven't read it, I'm guessing there'll be a fair few people who haven't read it will give a sense of its flow. So when it was published in 1992, the New York Times reviewer said it's basically a cross between Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Euripides's The Back Eye, Bret Easton Ellis's campus novel, The Rules of Attraction, and Evelyn Waugh's Bright Head Revisited, which you've already mentioned, Tabby.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  Killer combo.

• 10:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  But for the, I mean, I'm guessing a fair, there's a lot of people who haven't read all those books. So that's not necessarily a very helpful description. Tabby, I reckon you can do better than the New York Times at explaining what it's about.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Perhaps even better than the Daily Mail columnist. We shall see. So it's a very stylish, darkly funny, utterly gripping story told by a young Californian called Richard Papen. And he is transferred to the fictional Hampton College in Vermont. So that was the one based on Donna Tartt's college. And there he convinces this mysterious magnetic, but we will later discover quite controlling, classics teacher, Julian Morrow, to take him on as a student. And we say convincing because Julian only takes on a very small group of students and they're very elite and they're very, very exclusive. And they are in themselves extraordinary

• 11:28Speaker 00

  and exceptional. It's four boys and one girl. They wear outdated, expensive clothing. There's a lot of unnecessary tweed and kind of black umbrellas.

• 11:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Popping around here.

• 11:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Too much tweed, I think, frankly.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  From you. God, I'm.

• 11:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't wear tweed.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  No, that's true. Actually, no, that's true. You wore tweed once on a photo shoot, but that's a story for another day.

• 11:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Again, yeah, involuntarily.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Against your wishes. We forced you to wear tweed. Yeah.

• 11:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  But they keep to themselves. Richard is obviously massively, massively drawn to them, almost magnetically drawn to them. And that is in part because they are so stylish and so beautiful. And that reflects actually an ancient Greek concept called kalakakateia, which is the idea that. Physical beauty and physical perfection reflects inner moral beauty and inner moral perfection. So obviously in this, Tart is flipping that on its head. She's basically saying, look, like we have a group of perfect, beautiful people who must therefore be morally perfect. But of course, as the book goes forward, as we, as we read into it, we learn that on the contrary,

• 12:33Speaker 00

  their physical beauty hides a core of deep, deep moral ugliness and rottenness. And the book basically unfolds as a series of massive discoveries and revelations. So we learn the truth about this exclusive inner circle, like who they are, what they're all like. You know, it's Richard getting to know them and we along with him. Then there are these revelations about how far they go to immerse themselves in the moral and spiritual universe of the ancient Greeks. And above all, it's the truth about those first few lines of the book. The dead body hidden in a ravine outside this New England college town.

• 13:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  So to go back to those first few lines, I mean, I think that's one of the great openings in.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Oh, it so is.

• 13:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Brilliant. You know, what's, uh, the snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. So you've got the snow, you've got the mountains, you've got the setting in Vermont. But you've also got the fact that somebody is dead and they've killed him. And the narrator is complicit in this, but the sort of the, the wry, slightly matter of fact conversational way in which he's talking about this. And the interesting thing I think is that, you know, it's called the secret history, but the biggest secret of all is, you know, with a murder mystery is who, who's going to die and who did it. And we know that right from the beginning.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  She was reading a lot of Greek tragedy when she wrote it and it follows the form of a Greek tragedy or actually just a lot of Greek literature because, you know, Greek audiences didn't expect to learn something later on. They know from the start, like when Agamemnon walks onto the stage.

• 14:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  The whole audience knows that he's going to die. Agamemnon's the only one that doesn't know he's going to die. Like even in the Iliad, like sing, oh goddess of the wrath of Achilles, everything is revealed right at the outset. And then the exciting element is kind of the consequences of the terrible deeds rather than terrible deeds themselves. So again, there. Donna Tartt is referencing Greek tragedy.

• 14:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  And so the effect is that it's basically, it is a murder mystery, but it's a murder mystery in reverse. So we lose the uncertainty, we lose that kind of tension, but we get a different kind of tension, which is inevitability, which is a kind of fatalism, which I guess goes back to your point about Greek tragedy. So the idea of the story moving towards this kind of inevitable end point.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  The point where the murder happens is about halfway through, isn't it? So the first half of the book, it's moving towards the murder. Second half, it's the implications for Richard Poppen and Narata and his friends.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So because we're going to be following the same model as the book, be warned, there are going to be spoilers in the second half. The first part of the book follows Richard arriving in Vermont and we see everything through his eyes, the eyes of our narrator.

• 15:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  And he is from Plano, California. He doesn't care for it at all. He describes it as very dull, hot. He just doesn't fit in there at all. He doesn't get on with his parents.

• 15:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, it's suburban and dull, isn't it?

• 15:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. It's the opposite of romantic and he definitely is a character with quite a fevered imagination who longs for a bit of romance, maybe for, you know, a bit of feeling.

• 15:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  His father's ran a gas station. So did Donna Tartt's father, actually. And he only arrives in Hampton by accident because bored of California, he finds an old brochure for Hampton in a coat pocket one night after a row with his parents. And he goes to great lengths to get himself transferred there.

• 15:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So I thought his name was quite interesting because there's basically only one person called Poppen, who's well known in all kind of human life. And that's a guy called Franz von Poppen, who was a conservative German politician who ended up collaborating with the Nazis. And I wonder whether there's a slight moral compromise behind the name and the sort of corrupt, again, the point about corruption behind the veneer of respectability. So to go back to Richard, Richard is a narrator, and I think his narrative voice is really cleverly constructed because we never really know. I mean, you can even see it in that first paragraph. You never quite know where he stands or whether he's telling us the truth or what his attitude to the story is. So that reading at the beginning, there were two successive paragraphs, basically.

• 16:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  That begin with, it is difficult to believe that. So it's as though he's kind of surprised by the story he's telling. And he's distancing himself from his own story. And he does that again and again, actually, throughout the book. He says, you know, now I see, I, once I thought this, now I see that. Like, he's a bit surprised by his own story, as though it happened to somebody else. And maybe this is the way that you would talk about something. There was a terrible crime that you did in your past, that actually maybe you don't feel that guilty about.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's the thing. We never really know if he's looking back with incredible remorse, or if he's still slightly infatuated by that world. And the other thing is that not only do we know if he's telling us the truth, we don't know how many of the other characters are telling him the truth or manipulating him. So that, you know, that adds a whole other dimension. But then it also means, this ambiguity means that two people can read this book in completely different ways and get completely different impressions about Richard. You know, is he an innocent kind of caught up in the crossfire of a dreadful crime? Is he kind of the worst of them and a sinister sociopath going along with them?

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Is he just weak and easily led? Like, basically, it's up to each individual reader to draw their conclusions.

• 17:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Definitely, definitely. So he goes to this college, Hampton, which becomes rather like classics, becomes a kind of character in the book in and of itself. And he says himself, doesn't he, that he's still trapped in this world, that he's still, he kind of can't get beyond it.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  And there's a, there's a line, he says, I suppose there's a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever. And for me, it was that first full term I spent at Hampton. And that line is actually from Donna Tartt's own, almost verbatim, from her own speech when she graduated from her own college.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  That's so interesting, because she actually, she said in an interview that I watched that so much of the book, because it took her 10 years, so, and so she was moving further and further and further away from her time. At Bennington, she said so much of it was an exercise in nostalgia and kind of longing to be back there.

• 18:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  In that world.

• 18:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  The love of the institution. And when I was thinking about this, and I was thinking about something that I know you love, so I know you're a massive fan of Harry Potter.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  And specifically of the play The Cursed Child.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 18:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  You love The Cursed Child, don't you? And then The Cursed Child, Harry Potter, he, he's basically, you know, his time at Hogwarts.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Has shaped him and he can't really escape from it.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  That's how I feel about The Cursed Child.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  If only we could all move on. That isn't an entirely insane comparison, I have to say.

• 19:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a brilliant comparison. It's a brilliant comparison because the point of like a boarding school story like Harry Potter Hogwarts is, um, you know, kids love the rules, the hierarchies, the institutional nature of it, the sense of shifting relationships within a closed environment, the rituals, all of that kind of stuff. And in a weird way, campus novels are the kind of books that you graduate to when you finish the school stories. So the secret history is precisely the kind of book, actually, think about your reading timeline. Once you've read through all Harry Potter, there might be an interval of a few years, but then the secret history is the kind of book you might graduate to. And again, it's a closed environment.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Rituals, you know, a series of very, very intense relationships. And this idea of there being inner codes and secrets, I mean, that's obviously a huge part of Harry Potter. I mean, they even have their own language that was a parcel tongue.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  Parcel tongue.

• 20:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I do think that's genuinely a fair point. I mean, it's, it's as if Harry had been put in Slytherin, then ganged up with Draco Malfoy and Lord Voldemort and to murder Neville Longbottom or something like that.

• 20:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  But I know what you mean. It's the same kind of setting, Gothic university vibes.

• 20:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  This was a tremendous point. And actually, and I should now try and redeem myself by making it a more serious point, which is that it didn't just, Richard doesn't just recall Harry Potter. He recalls the narrator of another great American novel, much more highbrow, a, a novel that we've actually talked about already in this podcast, which is The Great Gatsby. So he mentions it specifically in an early passage, he's struggling to sleep, is sick of his Greek homework, and he says, he read The Great Gatsby. It's one of my favourite books. And he says, the one thing, it didn't cheer me up, I just was struck by what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  I think that's really interesting. I mean, I think the Great Gatsby is clearly a massive inspiration on the secret history. Tart has admitted that herself. But I think it's interesting that Richard sees himself as Gatsby, i.e. a self-made man who hides his past and is desperately trying to fit into this kind of glittering, upper-class world that is not his own. I actually see him much more as Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby. You know, they're always watching from the edges. They become kind of whatever the people that they like or are drawn to want them to be.

• 21:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  They lack the idealism of the characters that they are kind of watching and observing, or certainly, you know, like Gatsby's idealism. And they both actually leave the tragic events of their story, disenchanted and depressed. But also, like another of Tart's influences in the secret history, which is Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder, the narrator of that book, like Nick Carraway and like Richard, they're all kind of outsiders looking in. And that makes for a brilliant narrator, because you see things that no one else can see.

• 22:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, not just the outsider, though. The interesting thing is, in all those stories, the narrator is sort of complicit in the plot at the same time.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the issue of how complicit the narrator is, particularly in this book, actually, where it's a murder, you know, readers can kind of make up their own minds about it. That's one of the brilliant things about Tart's ambiguity.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Definitely.

• 22:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  As you were saying earlier, two different people can read this book and reach completely different conclusions about whether Richard, an narrator, is being swept along by other people's designs, or whether he's actually at the centre of them and is this kind of dark intelligence, who's kind of masterminding the whole thing. Anyway, he arrives at Hamden, and he becomes completely obsessed, doesn't he, with this, he sees this little clique of people who are studying Greek, and he wants to be part of their secret society. He wants to understand their code, I guess.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, he sees them around campus, and he becomes obsessed with their air of strangeness and exclusiveness. And the idea that they're from another age, you can see the allure there, you know, they wear old fashioned clothes. They use fountain pens, they drink tea and and religiously drink only whiskey rather than kind of silly cocktails, whatever. So they're a bit like kind of the bright young things from between the wars, you know, characters from Evelyn Waugh novels, you know, Sebastian Flight, Antony Blanche. They're definitely of of that mould.

• 23:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  But if I was being harsh, I would say they're massive. I mean, this is the nineteen eighties. They're massive kind of tryhards, aren't they? I mean, wearing, I I've already accused them of wearing tweed jackets unnecessarily. And they're sort of, well, they're very affected, using fountain pens in nineteen eighty five or whatever and.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Ah, you're just jealous.

• 23:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Really? You think so?

• 23:40Speaker 00

  Well, the thing is, do you not think that all college students, all university students of that age are a little bit affected? Like, everyone's trying to be a certain something.

• 23:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Speak for yourself, Sammy. Speak for yourself.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  I have to say, rereading it this time around.

• 23:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  I think it's an age thing. I think the older you get, the less sympathetic you feel towards them. But when I was younger, I thought, basically, there's a scene from Twilight, which I'm sure you've seen and loved, where.

• 24:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, all the time.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, where the Cullens, who are vampires, like walk into this canteen and it's like, they're like in slow motion and then there's this like really cool kind of punky music playing or whatever. And they're like it and they're all shiny and beautiful. That's kind of what these guys are like.

• 24:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  When you're reading it.

• 24:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm glad you, well, it's nice that you think so anyway.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  And they are quite vampiric, come to think of it.

• 24:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  They are, actually. Richard agrees with you. He's infatuated by them and and we're meant to share his infatuation. And he basically persuades the tutor, this guy Julian Morrow, to let them into his Greek class. And Julian, who is this classic inspirational tutor that you've seen a thousand times in so many campus novels and boarding school stories and school stories and so on. He's a little bit Dead Poets Society, isn't he? I mean, if I was being harsh, I would say he's a sort of knockoff Robin Williams in Dead Dead Poets Society. He comes out with some absolute, I mean, when when they start a class and he says, I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  He's Professor Trelawney from Harry Potter.

• 25:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  We should start our episodes that way.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  I actually think that is harsh. Because I think there's something much more subtle and thereby slightly more sinister about Julian. You know, there's something of the cult leader about him. He's kind of, he's very charismatic. I think he's genuinely intellectual. You know, and there are constant references to his sparkling eyes and I think he is genuinely irresistibly charming. And he makes you feel like you're the only person in the room.

• 25:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  One of the things that makes Julian so thrilling to them is that he goes on and on about the strangeness and the darkness of the classical world. He makes the classical world incredibly sexy, doesn't he? And Tabby, this is very much your thing for a couple of reasons. First of all, because you are personally a fundamentally strange and dark person.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  I am.

• 25:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  But also because you did classics at university, so you know all about this.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Yes, I'm an all-knowing ancient goddess. I actually found it as a sort of magnetic, as the characters do, this obsession that Julian has with beauty and terror. And these lectures that he gives in his classroom, they set up the revelations that we later get about the Dionysian rituals that occur later in the book. And he goes on and on about death and violence and he's always referencing, you know, he says the most memorable moments in classical literature are always the most violent. So it's the murder of Agamemnon, very bloody. It's the wrath of Achilles. It's Dido burning alive on the funeral pyre. It's the daggers of traitors. He's kind of the opposite of anything mundane and he's, it's why he doesn't really like Christianity either.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  He doesn't like the meek homeliness of Christianity. He likes the cold wrathfulness of the pagan world.

• 26:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  And, you know, he says things like, oh, the Greeks were in love with the old gods, emotion, darkness, barbarism. And I think that reference to emotion is quite interesting because emotion doesn't always fare that well in this book. All the characters are sort of constantly trying to hunt that strange ancient emotion, you know, and like, you know, gods of old who are enlivened by sacrifices of blood. The characters in the book almost need offerings of blood to feel like this, to feel like Julian is inspiring them to feel.

• 27:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  So two of the characters, we'll come on to this, two of the characters say. Or two of these, two of the characters is said of them, they feel dead, they don't feel anything, they need extreme emotion.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Extreme trauma or suffering of others to feel alive themselves.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and he says, Julian says, beauty is terror, whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And 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. How glorious to sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of the night with no more awareness of mortality than an animal. These are powerful mysteries, the bellowing of bulls, springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls, we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face. Let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones, then spit us out reborn. I mean, that is stirring stuff.

• 28:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is, but if I come out of this, I, I'm just imagining when I used to be an academic, if I'd come out of this to my students, there would just have been a dead silence, then someone would have said, is this gonna come up in the exam?

• 28:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it'd be a bit weird if you kind of spoke about, you know, Margaret Thatcher's economic policies in those kind of terms, wouldn't it?

• 28:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  It would be very weird.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Surely that's how, you know, playing command and conquer makes you feel like everyone has their kicks.

• 28:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Anyway, Richard, unlike me, is not a cynical person. Well, or is he? Or is he? Well, we'll find out. He's entranced by this, isn't he? And he, he sits forward at the edge of his chair and he feels so excited. He says, you know, I'm so close to the, the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. What Julian's actually talking about there, the rituals of Dionysus, of the god of wine and hedonism and pleasure and emotional release and so on. And that you throw yourself into these rituals, you throw off the, the shackles of the mortal world and you get close to this kind of, to the sublime.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  To this sort of, the, the secrets of life itself. And Richard and the other students completely believe everything Julian is telling them. They see him as this mentor. You know, actually, we discover that Julian is not the wise man that he appears to be, that he's actually.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Definitely not.

• 29:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he's a kind of full scod in a way, right?

• 29:25Speaker 00

  He is. Also, this is very much a kind of mythologized version of the classics. I mean, there's no mention of kind of pots or coins or stella or anything like that.

• 29:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. If you apply to university, if you apply to university to do classics thinking it's all going to be this, you're going to be very, very disappointed.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  So disappointed.

• 29:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  What about, what about the people in the class? So Tabby, again, this is very much your social milieu, isn't it?

• 29:48Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 29:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exclusive, a little bit pretentious.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Beautiful, intelligent.

• 29:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sunk in the most repellent social snobbery. Talk us through your milieu, or rather the characters in this book.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Drunkards, one and all.

• 30:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  So, so much about this group is terrible. They have a sickly skewed sense of morality. They look down on everyone else. They're hugely snobbish. They are murderers fundamentally and, and they're not troubled by this. It's the fear of getting caught that troubles them, but like the killing of people doesn't bother them at all. And it's not like tart lets us forget that they're murderers, you know, it constantly comes up, but in worryingly mundane ways. She doesn't disguise what terrible people they are, and yet they are magnetic. They are enervably chic. They are truly intelligent and, and embedded in this world of like literature and philosophy. And they are funny and intriguing and oddly likeable.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  And that's because that is how Richard finds them to be, and we are experiencing them.

• 30:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Through Richard's eyes.

• 30:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  We absolutely are. And to be clear, you absolutely love them, so don't do it.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I do. I would like to be one of their number. Mine is the murder.

• 30:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  So outline them for the listeners. So first of all, we've got Francis Abernathy. And he feels very much like, you mentioned Sebastian Flight from Brideshead Revisited. He's basically that character.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  Sebastian Flight was a huge inspiration for him because he wears beautiful starchy shirts with French cuffs, magnificent neckties, billowing coats, pince-nez. You know, he really is. He's a massive fop from a former age, really. But he's also nervous and a massive hypochondriac, but he can be very snarky and cutting and cruel. I found him immensely likeable, in fact.

• 31:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Did he?

• 31:29Speaker 00

  He's somehow more vulnerable than, than the others. I think he actually cares about the friendships between them within the group more than the others. But of course, he is inevitably gay and Donna Tartt does not shy away from a stereotype ever.

• 31:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  And he has an on and off sexual relationship with another of the characters, Charles Macaulay.

• 31:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that takes us to, there's twins.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  So this amusingly named Charles and Camilla. So they're a very strange pair, aren't they, Charles and Camilla?

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  They're very beautiful, they're very kind of ethereal.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  They're like castor and polacks.

• 32:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they're damaged though, aren't they, in some way, that's in some obscure way. They're often dressed all in white. Richard is obsessed by Charles and Camilla, particularly Camilla.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  I think he thinks that they are kind to him as well. And the scales slightly forward from his eyes as the book progresses. But yeah, so Charles, he unravels entirely as the novel continues. He becomes a massive alcoholic. He also becomes quite abusive towards Camilla.

• 32:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  And then there's Camilla herself, and I find her to be one of the most interesting and enigmatic characters of the whole book. Obviously, I wanted to be her for a while when I was about eighteen. A bit like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, she's constantly defined by other people's obsessions with her and by her looks. She's always described as being slim and, and, and golden and constant references to her hair and, and things like that. And she's also there based on, or certainly her name is a callback to the Aeneid. There's a character called Camilla in the Aeneid. And interestingly, she is one of the only female characters in the Aeneid who's treated like the male characters. And the male characters in the Aeneid, as all kind of Greek here, or Greek or Roman heroes are, are very chilly and hard.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  And Camilla is just that, though she seems very soft. And I think her role in the murder is arguably the most troubling of all. She's secretive, she hides everything beneath the surface, and yet she seems very warm, particularly to Richard. And so she's a massive enigma.

• 33:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, she's always slightly off, off, out of focus, I think, Camilla.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think she's totally heartless, though. She's like the statue Galatea or something, but it's the other way around. She goes from being a flesh and blood person and then increasingly in the eyes of the reader becomes stone.

• 33:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that's interesting. Okay. So what defines this group of people? We'll come on to some of the other members of the group in a second. What defines them? I mean, you mentioned Charles and Camilla. They are taking loads of drugs. They are, there's enormous quantity of smoking and drinking in the book.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Donna Tartt, really, she loves those scenes.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  She loves that stuff, doesn't she?

• 34:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's a lot of kind of, I mean, that's the thing that recurs in her fiction.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, the goldfinch, there's like whole chapters of just a character sitting in a hotel room on a kind of a drug-induced spiral.

• 34:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  She describes herself as a miniaturist as a writer.

• 34:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  So I think that's kind of maybe one criticism you could level against her. She gets caught in a moment rather than thinking about the whole, but yeah.

• 34:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the hedonism is a huge part of it, but the other thing that really defines their clique is this absolutely kind of unrepentant social snobbery. They're very rich, they're very exclusive, they're incredibly judgmental about other people. So even Francis, who we're meant to think of as one of the nicer characters in this group, he makes fun of Richard's accent, his Californian accent. He sort of mocks him and says, totally weird, really? You know, he kind of does this.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, he does your American accent.

• 34:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, my American accent actually is Anthony Scaramucci's American accent. Would he fit in in this milieu? I don't think he would. So the man who ends up dead, right? We know this from the first sentence, is a guy called Bunny. His name is Bunny Corcoran.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  The most WASP-y name ever. She is so good at names, Donna Tartt. She just catches their social milieu in a name. It's incredible.

• 35:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Bunny is from Old Money in Connecticut. He went to a New England boarding school. He had his summers on Cape Cod. He's an absolute kind of WASP, sort of East Coast stereotype. He's very loud, he's very confident, he's very outgoing. A lot of readers of this book, I know, will find him completely insufferable. They, when you go online, you see people saying, well, he's a dreadful oaf, you know, he's this, that and the other.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  He's the most snobbish of the lot.

• 35:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  But Tabby, read, please, to the listeners.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  The words that you have written and the notes that we, from which we are basing this podcast.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Hilarious. He would be Dominic Sandbrook's best friend in real life.

• 35:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Tabby, justify that claim, please.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  Well, I think I more mean that, not morally, but in terms of kind of taste and persona. And let me justify that statement. So you both mock other people's choice and suits.

• 36:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, what?

• 36:05Speaker 00

  That's a big part of who you both are.

• 36:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's a massive part of who I am.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a fundamental part of your personality and your moral compass. You are both very boisterous, dare I say it, occasionally funny. Yeah, you're quite boisterous. You both enjoy a big lunch and colourful cocktails.

• 36:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I don't know about colourful cocktails. I like colourless cocktails.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  You definitely, definitely like a cocktail. You, you both like to flaunt your learning.

• 36:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Fine, but that's.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  You're on two podcasts. What else do you think you're doing?

• 36:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, fine.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  And you also like to bang on about your school days. Your school days were the best, best moments of your life.

• 36:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  You're not wrong. You know, I mean, they're a lot better than doing this podcast, that's for sure. Yeah, well, well.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  So there, you see, I've justified mine.

• 36:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, fine, completely. I mean, I'm convinced. But actually, do you know what? There is a good case for Bunny being a brilliant person. So here we go.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Bunny is the first person to welcome Richard into this little clique. He's the most affable. He's the most straightforward. He is the most normal of them. So he's the most, you know, he's the least affected, actually.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  He's the least mystical.

• 37:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, which I think is definitely a good thing because I like Bunny. I don't place a high premium on mysticism, frankly. Even Richard admits that Bunny was very popular. So after Bunny is dead, Richard says, oh, I'm reading back what I've written. I've done Bunny in a justice. People really did like him. Bunny's flaws, such as they are, are very human flaws. So he's a bit boastful, which I'm obviously not. He's tactless, which I never am.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  No.

• 37:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's a massive snob. I wouldn't actually say I was that much of a snob. I mean, he is always mocking Richard's Californian background and his clothes and so on. And he's stolen another student's cheesecake from the fridge.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  He is perpetually thieving. He has that thing that very, very posh. Kind people, you know, brought up slightly the silver spoon in their mouth have, where they come down very hard on theft.

• 37:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  But they kind of assume that everything is theirs, so they just kind of take. And there's a terrible moment where he steals a cheesecake from the, the college fridge with a little note on it, saying that the girl is on a scholarship and, and is short on money and then doesn't even like it.

• 38:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  I would never do that because I don't like cheesecake, just to be clear.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Oh, well, for that's a comfort. So in, in some ways, yeah, hi- his sins are those of a greedy child. But there are two worse parts of his nature that do make him fairly unpleasant. First of all, he's, he's very sexist. He's always telling Camilla to iron his shirts and, and make tea and stuff like that. And he's also quite homophobic.

• 38:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he is. Again, I can't believe you're bringing out the big guns and knocking him down in that way.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  I know, I know. Well, I have no choice.

• 38:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  But I think all of that said, he is, he, he would be a great laugh.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, he, he's so much fun. Donna Tartt herself said that she loved writing him and she was sad when he was gone.

• 38:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  When they go out for one of their long lunches.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's a tremendous laugh. Admittedly, he then pretends he's lost his wallet, so he doesn't have to pay. But, and the other thing that I think massively to his credit, he doesn't take all the stuff about beauty and terror and the ancient Greeks seriously.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  So to him, everybody else is taking it incredibly seriously, being very pretentious. Bunny, I think he's like, come on, this is all a bit of nonsense, isn't it?

• 39:10Speaker 00

  But he's also very bad at it. Like the thing he's best at is Greek or Latin or whatever it is.

• 39:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and he's not that good.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  No, it turns out after he's died, that he's actually been two years older than they all thought he was the whole time, which I think is so amusing.

• 39:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  But there isn't that thing, there's that line that you love more than any other, which is basically they're mocking his work.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Oh my God.

• 39:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  He wrote an essay about John Donne.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's got to write this big scary final paper on John Donne for one of his other courses. And he's pressed for time and he doesn't know what he's doing. And it's meant to be about John Donne and metahemoralism, whatever that is.

• 39:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  No one knows what that is.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  No one knows what that is. Anyway, he definitely doesn't. Anyway, he's panicking. And then he hears somewhere that John Donne had known Isaac Walton, the biographer who wrote a famous fishing manual. And basically he makes this the hinge, the central point of his whole paper. He conflates his acquaintance into a seminal literary friendship and builds the whole paper nonsensically around it. And. As part of this writes the funniest line, I think of all time. And it is this. All I remember about the paper was that it ended with the sentence. And as we leave Don and Walton on the shores of metahemoralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

• 40:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Chums of yore.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  That is superb. I've been finding ways. Chums of yore, that's.

• 40:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Chums of yore. That's what the podcast should be called.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  I've been finding ways to crobar that into sentences.

• 40:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  Incongruously, ever since I reread it. It's so good.

• 40:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Talking of fond farewells and chums of yore, we should get to Bunny's terrible fate. So how is it that such a person ends up being murdered and murdered by the narrator and his friends? And the answer is there's a series of clues, aren't there? When we get about halfway through the book.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Richard notices as a strange tension has emerged between Bunny and some of the others. And when they're all staying in Francis's house in the countryside, he also notices a series of strange things. First of all, they all seem obsessed with the weather. Then secondly, they all keep getting these odd cuts and bruises and muddied feet in the night. He then overhears the twins secretly washing sheets stained with mud. And then he comes across a load of weird herbs boiling in a massive pot. So what on earth is going on?

• 41:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, the answer is tied up with one person in the group we haven't talked about at all. Who's the fifth member of the group? He's the presiding genius of the whole thing. He's called Henry Winter and we'll be exploring his secrets and indeed the much promised secret history of the secret history after the break. Hi everybody, it's Dominic here. Now, Tabby, nobody can say that on this podcast, we do not have ambition.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  That is definitely true because in September, Dominic and I will be on stage together to present the book club live.

• 41:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  We are going to be, I believe, opening up the library is the, is the technical term. We're going to be talking about our favourite books, our favourite authors. We're going to be having a lot of fun. It'll be incredibly inclusive. We'll be very interested in what the audience think. It's basically a book club. Well, it is a book club. I mean, that's the name of the show. So we'd like as many club supporters to come along as possible, wouldn't we?

• 42:18Speaker 00

  We absolutely would. And the Rest Is Fest is running from the 4th to the 6th of September at London's South Bank Centre.

• 42:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, so this is one element of this wider festival and tickets for our show will go on sale on the 26th of March at 10 o'clock in the morning. That's 10 o'clock on the 26th of March.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  Visit southbankcentre.co.uk to find out more. That is southbankcentre.co.uk.

• 42:47Speaker 02

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• 43:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Welcome back everybody to the book club. So we promised you loads of revelations about the secret history. Tabby, let's start with what Richard discovers because you you mentioned all this, the boiling pots of herbs and mysterious injuries and strange goings on in the night. So what is it that Richard discovers about his new friends?

• 43:39Speaker 00

  Right, so this is the first great revelation of the book. So we we obviously mentioned the first half how they were all transfixed by Julian's account of Dionysian rituals, which comes from Euripides' dark and bloody play, The Bacchae, in which a man on the urging of Dionysus is ripped apart bloodily and violently by a group of women. So the twins in Francis, led by this bloke Henry, who we haven't actually described yet, but we will come to, have been trying to hold an authentic Dionysian bacchanal of their own in order to experience some kind of, I don't know, pagan oneness with the gods or ecstasy. And this involves fasting, lots of alcohol, lots of drugs.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  And then they go out at night and basically try to get berserk. I mean, I say fasting, Bunny on multiple occasions has caught eating cake.

• 44:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's exactly what I would do.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, me too, to be honest. And then finally, they achieve it, or they think they achieve it. It's for the readers to decide, like, they could just be tripping. But Henry tells Richard, it was heart shaking, glorious, torches, dizziness, singing, wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. That's actually a reference to what Julian had said earlier.

• 44:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 44:52Speaker 00

  The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky, vines grew from the ground so fast, they just twined up the trees like snakes, seasons passing in the wink of an eye.

• 45:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that could be the drugs, or it could be they're genuinely having a religious experience.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  And during all this, Richard discovers, they tell him, a farmer, a bloke from Vermont, stumbled across them in the dead of night and they literally tore him to pieces. And actually, they're completely unrepentant about it, aren't they? Camilla, that you mentioned before, the Chilean, somebody who's the most elusive of the characters.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, the warrior maiden.

• 45:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  She says to Richard that she remembers, and I quote, "That dead man lying on the ground, his stomach was torn open and steam was coming out of it. The smell was like when my uncle used to cut up deer."

• 45:42Speaker 00

  I'm still staggered by the fact that they are able to do that much damage, kind of with their bare hands or whatever. Anyway, I guess that's beside the point. To cut a long story short, Bunny, who had been left behind that night, finds out about this murder and has been blackmailing them and extorting vast sums of money out of them in order to keep his silence. But the problem is, is that he actually goes into a spiral of moral anxiety, one of the few characters in this book to do so. And it makes him less and less likely that he'll be able to keep their secret. You know, when he's drunk, he starts blabbing about it. He starts making references to it in public. He goes to Julian and starts kind of asking him all these strange moral questions.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  And so the group decide that they must take drastic measures to keep Bunny's silence.

• 46:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  So just as I said, Bunny is actually the hero because Bunny is the only person, well Bunny has moral qualms, Bunny is very disturbed that. His mates have murdered this farmer.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  I will say that in that instance Bunny is the best of them because he is the only one to be deeply troubled by the murder of another human being.

• 46:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I mean, contrasts with like some of these other characters. So there's a point when they're sitting around and Francis, who's the sort of Sebastian Flight fop. He says, it was a terrible thing what we did. I mean, it wasn't Voltaire that we killed. This man was not Voltaire that we killed.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, the snobbery, the intellectual snobbery.

• 47:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  It was, it's a shame. I feel bad about it. And then Henry says to him, yeah, but you don't feel so bad that you'd go to jail. And Francis says, no, not that bad. I mean, that, again, the snobbery, the intellectual snobbery is pretty repulsive.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  Pretty unforgivable.

• 47:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  So we've mentioned this character, Henry. We should come to him now. So he is the presiding genius of the group. He's the dominant figure. He's the de facto leader. And Tabby, I seem to remember that you and Nicole, our producer, when we were planning this podcast, describing him as hot.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, there is, there, yeah, he has that kind of dark vampiric sexiness to him, you know. He's kind of chilly and you want to save him and warm him up. Anyway, that's by the by.

• 47:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  Anyway, so everyone is totally enthralled to him, except Bunny and Bunny, whose death he instigates. And I actually, I was thinking about it in a, in a funny way. There is something quite godlike about Henry. He's very, very chilly. You know, his, his surname, Winter, is, is no coincidence. He's very large. He's very, he's almost utterly without feeling. He's utterly unbothered by the farmer's murder. Or Bunny's actually. He's in love with Camilla and it's almost like he is the Dionysus of the book. Who encourages his kind of disciples to go out and commit these terrible, terrible murders.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  And he is the one who, it's like bloodlust allows him to feel something other than this kind of dull humanity.

• 48:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  So his name, I mean, you mentioned in the notes that you think his name is very revealing, Henry Winter.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  He's icy.

• 48:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  The coldness, he doesn't feel anything and he needs. The suffering of others or the extreme.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Or murder or something. Yeah, yeah. But he's also ridiculously, ridiculously clever, which allows him to be manipulative. He's highly intelligent. You know, he's constantly wandering around with a massive tome under one arm, generally in some ancient language. So yeah, harking back to the hot thing. I don't think he'd be that amusing.

• 48:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's performatively like reading Sanskrit and stuff at various points, isn't he?

• 49:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. There's actually quite a comical sequence when they're trying to think about how they will murder Bunny, where he keeps picking mushrooms because he's trying to find the perfect poison.

• 49:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  But you never quite know whether or not the version of the story that we get is the truth, or whether it's the one that Henry is twisting to make Richard believe is the case. Like, we only know that Bunny knows about the murder and everything and is becoming dangerous because Henry tells Richard.

• 49:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  So it could be that this is all some big plan that Henry orchestrates in order to kill again. We don't know. But he's a very unnerving character, but he's actually also probably modeled on T S Eliot.

• 49:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm, interesting.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  He comes from St Louis, like Eliot. He dresses in dark English suits. He always has an umbrella. And he's described as kind of cutting a sway through groups of hippies and punks and being utterly, utterly incongruous.

• 49:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Looking like Neville Chamberlain.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 50:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but he's also, I mean, we talked about The Great Gatsby in the first half. So there's something very Gatsby about him. So Henry, well, Henry is from Missouri. You know, we mentioned T S Eliot's from Missouri. He's an outsider. His father is a construction tycoon. He's a sort of, rather like Gatsby, he has this idealistic side to him. He's created an ideal of himself and his life, which he is trying to live up to. And the other thing that I think is interesting about The Great Gatsby reference, so you know, in that first half, Richard talks about reading The Great Gatsby. And you said, Tabby, you think he's like Nick Carraway, the narrator of Gatsby.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, people who listen to our show back, The Great Gatsby, will remember that the narrator, Nick, and Gatsby, the central character, they're almost like two halves of the same coin. They're doubles of each other. And I think there's a definite aspect of this with Richard, our narrator of this book, and Henry.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Definitely. Like, yeah, there's a Jekyll and Hyde quality.

• 50:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, Jekyll and Hyde, actually. Donna Tartt was reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when she wrote this book, and she said it was one of the most influential books on the secret history. And there's a moment when, so it's after the murder. Richard goes to see Henry and Henry basically says to him, you and I are the same. You know, we're both sociopaths. And he says to to our narrator, you don't feel a great deal of emotion for other people, do you? And and Henry says, Richard denies it. And Henry says, I know you don't because I know that we're the same. The world's always been an empty place to me. I was incapable of enjoying even the simplest things. I felt dead in everything I did, but then it changed the night I killed that man. And Richard denies this. He says, listen, this is not me. Like, I don't know what you're talking about. And then Henry says, oh, I think you do.

• 51:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think you know exactly what I'm talking about. The surge of power, of delight, the sudden sense of the world of its possibility that you get. And Richard admits, and I quote, to my horror, I realized that in a way he was right. As ghastly as it had been, there was no denying that Bunny's murder had thrown all subsequent events into a kind of glaring technicolor. There was no denying that it was not an altogether unpleasant situation.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's brilliant writing because that's actually the way Richard expresses that sort of sort of humdrum, sort of pooterish way.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  And not altogether unpleasant sensation of having killed somebody.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  Like a Dickensian diarist or something like that. Yeah, totally. So, yeah, I think Richard is as guilty as the rest of them. And he has that same thing that Henry has in that he he's very flat all the time. Like, he constantly talks about this low level depression that he feels. But also, he's a very good mimic. He's he's very good at fitting himself in places.

• 52:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  And that's quite sociopathic itself.

• 52:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  You know, it's very Mr. Tom Ripley.

• 52:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  That kind of thing.

• 52:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  The the talented Mr. Ripley, I was thinking about that a lot while reading this book. That Ripley's chameleon like character, the way that he insinuates himself into these exclusive inner circles and sort of secret groups of the rich and famous. And then he mimics them. That's exactly what Richard is doing in a way, what they've all, what they're all doing. They're all playing parts.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  Totally. But Richard more than the rest, and he admits it of of himself, that he's very good at kind of fitting in everywhere. But also, he has no moral scruples with the murder of the farmer. Whatsoever. He actually says at one point, you'd think someone with as fevered an imagination as my own would have been kind of captivated by the idea of this dead body in the night. But he says, but I barely ever thought about the farmer, if I'm honest. And he also utterly supports the group in the wake of the murder against Bunny and he uses it to become closer to them. He uses the chance that Bunny might snitch to become close to them. And then in the end, he betrays Bunny to them. And it is because of him that Bunny is killed.

• 53:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Just one last point about that. That's just like The Great Gatsby, that Nick, the narrator, betrays the characters.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 53:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  And is complicit in their deaths. So the plan to do with Bunny, there's talk of poison, but actually Henry works out this plan. They're going to lure Bunny into the mountains above the college, this sort of forested wilderness. They'll push him into a ravine. If the fall doesn't kill him, they will drown him in the stream. And Henry, when he describes it, I mean, that flatness, Henry says, I shouldn't think that would take more than a couple of minutes. If he was conscious, maybe a couple of us could even go down and walk him over.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  It's unbelievable. And then Charles says, with kind of a stab of humanity, says, it's cold blooded murder. And Henry kind of nonchalantly lights a cigarette and says, I prefer to think of it as redistribution of matter. You can see this guy is a monster.

• 54:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  I can so imagine you doing that, Tabby. So the plan is put in train. And actually, the brilliance of the way the murder happens, this really is excellent writing.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  It's so brilliantly done.

• 54:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  So they're lurking up in these kind of bushes in the forest.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  It's oddly comical, actually, because Richard comes up the path to warn them that Bunny is coming and they all kind of pop out of hedges.

• 54:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And then Bunny finally arrives and he says, he's baffled. He sees them all there and he says, tell me, just what the Sam Hill are you guys doing out here anyway?

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Bunny's always speaking like that, isn't he? Says, you know, old sport, you know, Jiminy Cricket, that kind of stuff.

• 55:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then Donatart writes, the woods were silent, not a sound. Henry smiled. Why? Looking for new ferns, he said, and took a step towards him.

• 55:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's an article on the website Literary Hub where somebody called Emily Temple, basically dissecting that line.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  So sinister.

• 55:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Henry just smiling and saying, why, looking for new ferns. And she says, you know, that's Henry's whole character in just a few words. He's learned, you know, the idea of like looking for new ferns.

• 55:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's false, it's menacing, but there's a kind of weird innocence, almost childishness to it. As she says, it's such a sweet and weird and terrifying thing to say before you murder somebody.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then, then that's it. Then the action cuts off and then you turn the page and there's about blank page after blank page. Cause that's the end of a section of the book. And then you're into the second half and the next line is Richard justifying himself. Just for the record, I do not consider myself an evil person, though how like a killer that makes me sound. And the murder has taken place in the blank pages between those two lines.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  It's so brilliantly done. It's the same way that all the sex in the novel is kind of off screen. All the drunkenness in the novel is slightly off screen.

• 56:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 56:28Speaker 00

  It keeps it kind of very tight. It's not messy. It's as sort of clinical as Henry Winter. It's, it's very, very cleverly done. But then also this opening again leads us to doubt Richard once more or to trust Rich once more. We're not sure because then after saying, oh, how like a killer that makes me sound. He goes on to talk about how he's comforted by the fact that all these killers that he sees being interviewed on TV always try to justify the terrible grisly things they do. And you can't tell if he's simultaneously trying to be very self knowing, but also setting himself apart.

• 57:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  From people that do things like murder 12 nurses.

• 57:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Again, it's the ambiguity. Then from that point onwards, at one level, what follows is basically the story of the killers unraveling under the pressure. But again, this is so brilliant from top because we're only halfway through the book and the major event has happened. And yet she keeps you hooked the whole way through with a series of new shocking revelations.

• 57:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I think what's good about this, so. The idea of a crime and then the killers disintegrating under the pressure of guilt and whatnot, that is such a well-worn literary theme. I mean, it's crime and punishment. There's a British book called La Bête du Men by Emil Zola, a French book, in which that's, again, a huge theme of the book. It's a very 19th century theme.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  It's also very Greek tragedy, though.

• 57:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course, yeah.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  The gods will have their pound of flesh. Orestes will be chased to the ends of the earth by the Furies. It's the inevitability of Greek tragedy.

• 57:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the difference here is that it's really funny. And this is the point. So the second half of The Secret History, which you'd think would be so morbid and mournful.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  Impulsive at all.

• 58:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is, yeah, but it's so, it's generally so funny, I think. So, for example, when Bunny disappears, the sentimental reaction of the other students and the college authorities, Tartt is really hilarious on the sort of performative nature of this. I mean, I guess it's Richard, the narrator, being very funny. He says, you know, people were walking around doing things and they keep saying to each other, it's what Bunny would have wanted. Bunny would have wanted this. And he said, they had no idea what Bunny would have wanted.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the best bit is the college trustees decide, and I quote, "To honour the unique spirit of Bunny Corcoran, they make a massive donation to the American Civil Liberties Union." And as Richard says, "An organisation Bunny would certainly have abhorred had he been aware of its existence."

• 58:44Speaker 00

  Because Bunny is literally the most right-wing person in the world. Like, there's a bit about how all the hippies kind of mourn him and stuff. And Bunny, literally, like, there is no bit where he practically used to go after them and chase them with sticks or something like that.

• 58:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, yeah. So basically, it's that sort of performative sentimentality that often happens in the wake of a great tragedy.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's horse chasing. It's an unforgivable trait that people have.

• 59:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  But then the funniest scene, I know our producer Nicole loves this scene, is basically when the Corcoran family decide they're going to invite all Bunny's closest friends to his funeral at their family home. Of course, they don't realise that his closest friends are the people who murdered him.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  Dark irony of it.

• 59:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the students arrive, and the students, of course, they're such massive snobs, so they're dripping with social snobbery towards what they see as the vulgarity of the Corcorans. And they sort of say, oh, they're greedy and shallow. Charles Corcoran says of Bunny's family, the family of the people he's killed, "They're just a bunch of zeros," like something from an ad. I mean, what a thing to say.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  And yet, they do turn out to be a collection of grotesques. They're dreadful. You have Mrs Corcoran, who's... So chilly and without feeling and is kind of obsessed with Chanel suits and is a massive social climber, then you have Mr. Corcoran, who is kind of the epitome of the stricken father and keeps wailing onto everyone's shoulders and bursting into wildly over the top sobbing fits and telling them all how much old Bunster loved them, etc. But then getting distracted in a moment. So at one point, he's sobbing on Richard's shoulder, doesn't even know who Richard is. And then his little grandson comes along and he sort of brightens up and starts bobbing him up in the air.

• 1:00:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  The fact that he calls Bunny the old Bunster.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  The old Bunster, yeah.

• 1:00:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, I think this is a brilliant bit of writing, actually, because the tone, you might say, oh, it's veering wildly, but that's the point. So at one point, Richard will be overcome by this terrible sense of, I quote, the evil of what we've done. When he sees Mr. Corcoran sort of sobbing, he's overwhelmed by the gravity of what they've done. But just a couple of pages later, there's this mad scene where Mr. Corcoran, he mixes Henry up, Henry of all people, Mr. Corcoran kind of grabs him, puts his arm around him and says, oh, I remember you. I remember that time when you wanted to, you were a young lad and you wanted to go out and buy a used, a used, single-engine aeroplane against your parents' wishes. And Henry's standing there, Henry, the murderer, is

• 1:01:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  standing there with this kind of frozen look on his face.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  Death pales, sweating.

• 1:01:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  On his face, while Mr. Corcoran is telling this absolutely mad anecdote that has nothing to do with him.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  And I told you, that's a bad idea, son.

• 1:01:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they're all standing there, like, they don't know where to look. And the moment peaks, just at the point when one of Bunny's other relatives says, Dad, I think you've got it mixed up with somebody else. One of the children breaks loose from the embrace of his parents, charges across the room and headbutts Henry in the chest.

• 1:01:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  So it's just that, I mean, actually, there's never been a film of this because Donna Tartt doesn't want anyone to destroy her vision, but this would be a brilliant scene.

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  It's because the goldfinch went so badly that she's now, she's now refusing. But then there's this other funny bit in the middle of the funeral, which actually in the funeral, there is a moment, as we say, it's the back and forth in tone, when Richard is kind of overcome. And he's like, and he says he feels a stab of pain at the thought of Bunny being gone. But then Bunny's old football coach goes up and makes the most hackneyed cliched speech imaginable and says things like, you know, young Bunny left the game too soon, but it's worth saying that never was there such a player. And then there's like a wail of grief from the back of the church.

• 1:02:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  So anyway, then it culminates, doesn't it, with this very, very moving and dark scene by the graveside?

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Where Richard, it's the first time we get, we get clues as to what actually happened in the murder. Because Richard gets flashbacks, doesn't he, to Henry and Camilla, who have now become a couple, basically, to this moment when they basically killed Bunny. So he remembers Camilla and Henry climbing down the ravine, their faces blank, rocking Bunny's broken neck back and forth.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  They feel his pulse, they check it on their, on their wristwatches.

• 1:03:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  It's utterly chilling and they're pulling his eyelids up. Yeah, it's terrible. And the irony is that while Richard is remembering this shocking scene, Henry is serving as one of the pallbearers at Bunny's funeral. And it's like the back and forth, the juxtaposition between Henry in his black suit, carrying Bunny's coffin, and Henry at the bottom of the ravine.

• 1:03:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  Rocking his neck back and forth to make sure that he's dead.

• 1:03:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then right at the end, when the body is in the grave, Henry throws a handful of dirt into the grave, as he's expected to do as one of the kind of chief mourners. And then distractedly, or not distractedly, it's hard to tell, he gets the dirt and he smears it across his suit and his white shirt. So it's as though he's, there's this great stain of, of sort of earth, as though he's marked himself out as one of the killers, maybe?

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  I think that's really interesting as well, because Henry doesn't really do anything. Thoughtlessly, and I think that was thoughtlessly because he's on such a combination of kind of drugs at that time. And everyone notices it, especially Julian. And it's really interesting because in ancient Greece murderers would sometimes smear themselves with mud or with ash as a sign of kind of ritualised pollution, and this was called miasma. And I think that almost subconsciously, Henry is marking himself up, or it's like the mark of Cain or something.

• 1:04:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you know what? It was puzzling me why he did that. And I thought, if only I was doing this podcast with somebody with deep classical knowledge, who would be able to enlighten me on this point. So let's talk a little bit about how things play out, just briefly. Obviously, things unravel for them. Not necessarily, though, in the way you might expect, I guess.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  It's what we keep referencing. It's the inevitability, the tragic inevitability of the Greeks. Like, there's no happy ending. Things just go horribly awry. Charles becomes an alcoholic, increasingly abusive towards Camilla. Their incest is kind of brought out into the open. And he starts sort of like kissing her in public and stuff. Camilla disappears into this strange, obsessive relationship with Henry, in which he is very controlling. And then this sort of culminates in two more great set piece moments. The first of which is a final encounter with Julian, which is just, oh, it's so superbly done. Because in a group of students who are untouched morally or ethically by what they have done,

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  they have one kind of moral arbiter that they look up to, and that is Julian. And that's why his discovery of their crimes affects them so badly, especially Henry. And Richard reflects that this, the discovery of what they've done, this exposes Julian's true nature. You know, he's revealed not as the benign old sage, you know, indulgent and protective good parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious and heartless. I mean, that, there is something so of the pagan gods about that, isn't there?

• 1:06:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that's basically describing a Greek god.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:06:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Watchful, capricious and heartless. So actually, although Richard is saying this shows that Julian was not what he pretended to be, you could argue that actually, that is what Julian always was, a Greek god.

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  But it also shows him to be a coward, because he basically runs away after, after this happen, happens. But Henry is so affected by Julian's discovery.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  He thinks that, first of all, he's very upset to have Julian's perception of him shattered. But also, he thinks that exposes Julian as a moral coward. And this for Henry is, it destroys him. He never recovers from it.

• 1:06:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, and there's a final meeting, isn't there? They have this sort of showdown, this final get together at the Aubrey Mall Hotel. And Henry makes this one last attempt to channel what Richard calls the high cold principles of the ancient Greeks. And I guess there's some people who haven't read the book, so we shouldn't spoil exactly what happens at the end. But it does very much have the atmosphere of Greek tragedy, doesn't it? The one question that for me hangs in the air at the end of the book is whether Richard, what do we do with Richard, the narrator? Because he's got away with it, as they all have.

• 1:07:10Speaker 00

  They all have, yeah.

• 1:07:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  And does he realise how what they've done is evil? You know, at times he says it wasn't that bad, at other times he says it's evil. But actually, we already mentioned Jekyll and Hyde, that Donna Tartt was reading while she was writing the book. And actually, there's a list online. She gave an interview, one of her rare interviews, where she talked about all the books she was reading. And two of them, we mentioned, Jekyll and Hyde and The Talented Mr Ripley, both of which are portraits of evil lurking in what appears to be a kind of good person. And at the end of the book, we discover that Richard left Hampton, didn't he? And he went to another university and ended up studying English and specifically Jacobean drama.

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  I love this detail. I thought this was wonderful.

• 1:07:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's a paragraph where he says, you know, why Jacobean drama? I liked the candlelit and treacherous universe in which they moved, of sin unpunished, of innocence destroyed. He says, even the titles of the Jacobean plays were like trapdoors to something beautiful and wicked that trickled beneath the surface of mortality. They understood not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good. I felt they cut right to the heart of the matter, to the essential rottenness of the world. That, to me, I think whether consciously or unconsciously, Richard is talking about himself and his friends.

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do too.

• 1:08:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  And their own evil and their wickedness. He has come out of this with an awareness of the darkness of human nature. And actually, he knows, although he's denied it earlier in the book, I think he knows deep down that he and his friends were evil people who'd done an evil thing.

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  Definitely. And also, they all, there were so many references towards the very end of the book of how they're all kind of sick of each other. Like, they all know that they're carrying a contagion. Like, they all know that they're polluted and they just can't bear to be in the presence of that same contagion, looking back at them. So I think you're absolutely right. I think he absolutely does know that what they've done is evil. But I also think that with maybe the exception of Charles, I don't think any of the others ever really think that what they've done is evil. They just think that a very dramatic thing happened and they came very close to being thrown in jail.

• 1:09:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. And they're more worried about that, being caught, than the moral consequences.

• 1:09:22Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:09:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right. So there's one more secret to uncover. And Tabi, you promised us this.

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:09:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I actually know that you have spent weeks down a dark rabbit hole researching this.

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have no life.

• 1:09:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is basically the secret history of the secret history. So the story of Donna Tartt and how she came to write it, because, you know, on the surface, you can read this book and you can say, brilliant book, irresistible, whatever. But actually, there is a history behind it, which is really, really interesting.

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, I mean, let's lift the curtain on Donna Tartt a little bit more. So she was born in 1963. She's the daughter of a Mississippi gas station owner, as we said, and a local politician. And she's an incredibly clever girl. You know, she wanted to be an archaeologist. She was obsessed with Heinrich Schliemann. So you can see there the fascination with mystery from the very start. And she was a voracious reader. She first of all went to the University of Mississippi, but she hated it. She said that everyone there was massively snobbish.

• 1:10:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  She was basically the only person there who wasn't blonde and interested in like cheerleading.

• 1:10:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Funny enough, in the same way as, you know, Hampton is presented as being very obsessed with kind of class and status and stuff. She said that Bennington was less like that, but Old Miss was much, much more like that. So she transfers to Bennington in Vermont, the model, as we said, for Hampton. And it's a small, exclusive liberal arts college, originally only women, and it only has 500 students. And it's very chic, it's...

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  Very bohemian, there's a lot of drugs, alcohol, sex, dandies, but it's also very, very genuinely very intellectual. Like, if you look back at her class from the time, something like five of them became published authors latterly, which is quite impressive. And so she became quite a big campus character, very controlled herself, but lots of drink and drugs. And she's always wearing tailored boys' suits. She's famously well-read in Greek and Latin. In fact, in her cadre of classic students, she, like Camilla, is the only girl. And she's very into kind of heavyweights like Proust or whatever. So that's quite Henry. There's quite something quite Henry about that. And classmates at the time said that she was copying herself on Sebastian Flight.

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  And at Hampton at that time, there was a massive obsession with the world Evelyn Waugh creates in Brightshead Revisited.

• 1:11:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because Brightshead Revisited had been a big TV hit, right?

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  The TV show had come out, exactly. So that was very much the aesthetic. And, you know, her time at Bennington has very much become a story in itself. It's very much mythologized. Like, there's a whole podcast dedicated to it. I mean, I think it's probably slightly overdone because it's an aesthetic that everyone loves, like a bunch of kind of academic chic students drinking and doing drugs. Like, I kind of think, get over yourselves a little bit.

• 1:12:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Totally tabby. I mean, there's a, basically this podcast was based on an article in, was it Esquire?

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the article was thirteen thousand words long, all about Donna Tartt's time and what an amazing time they had. And I was reading one quote which really made me laugh. It was from one of her classmates. She said, um, "You had this feeling that life was performance art, that everyone was living in his or her fantasy. I'm trying to find language to describe the electricity that was there, the decadence, the feeling of mystery and enchantment in this ridiculously pastoral setting." I'm like, come on, we've all been students. Like, get over yourself a bit.

• 1:12:41Speaker 00

  But you can tell that she loved her time there because she mentions it often in, um, interviews. And I watched one interview where the interviewer asked her if she'd been back to Bennington and she kind of says, oh, it's a very different place now than when I was there. So you can see she's very fond of it. But much more interestingly, Julian's clique in the book is based on a real life clique. Of which Donna Tartt was a member. And basically, at Bennington at the time, was an eccentric Greek professor and polymath and man of letters, a guy called Claude Fredericks, who taught there for almost thirty years. He was gay. He wrote a mad diary for eighty one years, covering something like sixty five thousand pages.

• 1:13:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  People say this is one of the longest diaries in history. I fell down a massive rabbit hole reading about this diary.

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  It's so interesting. But like, dancing across its pages are some of kind of the great socialites of that time. You know, he's very Julian. Julian is constantly referencing all the kind of the great and famous people he knew. And, you know, he refused to teach in a normal classroom. He had a secluded office up a secret staircase, very Julian. He was obsessed with love and beauty. And said Plato's Symposium was the only holy book I truly know. So you have the paganism there again. And he accepted only a handful of students, you know, who were seen as eccentric, exclusive, a bit odd. As I said, Donna was the only woman and she worshipped him. And actually, he really took against her portrayal of Julian in the book. He was very offended by it.

• 1:14:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  They massively fell out, didn't they?

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  They fell out for years. But the interesting thing is then that she dedicated the goldfinch in part to him. So it's almost as though she was kind of grovelling to get back in his good books. So it's almost like, you know, the magnetism, the spell that Julian casts in The Secret History, it endures. She remained captivated.

• 1:14:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  But basically, so she had a, she had a good friend at Bennington called Brett Easton Ellis.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  Who I've met, Dominic.

• 1:14:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Who you've met. Yeah. Didn't he come to give a talk or something and you were in charge of wrangling him?

• 1:14:38Speaker 00

  I was in charge of the green room. Yeah, charming fellow. I think he drank a whole bottle of gin. Because of the evening. But he was lovely. He was very nice. Very eloquent.

• 1:14:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he describes this group in his book Rules of Attraction. And the Rules of Attraction was set at a college like Bennington. Again, it's a kind of sex and hedonism and drugs kind of university world. And he describes a weird group of classics majors looking like undertakers, roaming the countryside, sacrificing farmers and performing pagan rituals.

• 1:15:07Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 1:15:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  There you go. And this is before The Secret History had been published.

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Isn't there a thing where the whole of The Secret History is a romancé, meaning basically everybody is somebody. They're all have real life models and in particular from this clique around this professor Claude Fredericks. And basically the people that Donna Tartt didn't like, she put them in the book.

• 1:15:27Speaker 00

  The accusation is that the secret history is in no way a fiction. It's actually a thinly veiled reality. The main characters from real life reflected in the book.

• 1:15:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:37Speaker 00

  There's three guys, Todd O'Neill, Matt Jacobson and Paul McGloin.

• 1:15:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course, there's one of them called Todd.

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's like, have you seen Trading Places?

• 1:15:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:48Speaker 00

  The waspyish character in the whole movie. Yeah. So Donna was said to have hated Matt Jacobson and he is supposedly the basis for Bunny.

• 1:15:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  And the book, the entire book is a justification for murdering.

• 1:16:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  For killing this guy she hated.

• 1:16:02Speaker 00

  Matt Jacobson. Yeah.

• 1:16:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  My favourite thing here is that when the book was published, everybody said to Matt Jacobson, Bunny is you. You invite people to lunch and you claim you've got no money. And then here's the thing, he rang his mum and he said, I'm in this book. And his mum said, oh no, no one would do that to you. Then she read the book, read the portrait of Bunny, who's obviously, I mean, a lot of readers, I like him, but a lot of readers say he's an oaf, he's a terrible person.

• 1:16:26Speaker 00

  He's a monster.

• 1:16:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's a monster. And his mum rang him back and said, that is you.

• 1:16:31Speaker 00

  That literally is you. Yeah. And he said it, he admits it himself. He said, I'd invite people to lunch and then realise I didn't have any money. Something dear old Bunny does. I was kind of a horrible bounder. In my case, it was never intentional.

• 1:16:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think if you're a horrible bounder, but it's not intentional, it's fine, isn't it?

• 1:16:50Speaker 00

  No, that's not fine. That's worse.

• 1:16:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, I think it's fine.

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  But Donna Tartt herself is very cautious about this. I mean, obviously because you're annoying a lot of people. And she always denies that the book was rooted in a very. Yeah, in her own reality.

• 1:17:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's what authors always do. That's like Tolkien denying that the Lord of the Rings is in any way allegorical, right?

• 1:17:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, no, no, this came straight from my imagination, divinely wrought.

• 1:17:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. The story of the book is that basically she wrote this book to to mock her classmates. She showed it to her friend, Brett Eastnella. So he said, this is brilliant. He gave it to his agent. He sold it for loads of money.

• 1:17:24Speaker 00

  Massive literary sensation.

• 1:17:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, massive literary sensation. And actually, now the book has taken on a life well beyond that. So.

• 1:17:31Speaker 00

  Massively it has. Yeah.

• 1:17:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, it's sort of this dark academia business. I mean, I was actually completely ignorant of this before we did this podcast. But this is a huge thing on social media, isn't it?

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's massive. The secret history is like the Bible to dark academia. It's where it all began. And like, if you go onto YouTube or BookTok, whatever, the hashtag the secret history, it has more than 150 million views on TikTok.

• 1:17:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Whoa.

• 1:17:55Speaker 00

  And it features everything from young people cosplaying the book's characters to fans reciting the favorite passages or showing off annotated copies. They create dream trailers for the movie that will never be made or their dream castings, whatever. I mean, it's a huge thing and it has spawned so much since. But the question is, I mean, do we do we really think it's as good as all that, the secret history?

• 1:18:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, I think it is actually. I described at the beginning how I loved reading it first. I read it effectively in one sitting. Rereading it, I found there was so much to unpick and enjoy. I think it's it's written with enormous control. I think the mastery of tone and narrative voice, excellent. You know, you can read it purely as a page turner and it's fantastic. But actually to reread it, to see how she's constructed it, to see the relationship, particularly between Richard and Henry, and the way that kind of mirrors the relationship at the centre of The Great Gatsby and so on. No, I think it's a terrific book. You know, we think about these sort of American books about people reinventing themselves and about the sort of darkness that lies behind that, The Great Gatsby or The Talent of Mr. Ripley.

• 1:19:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is definitely in that league.

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  I totally agree. It remains one of my favourite books of all time. She unspools the plot so deliberately, so carefully, but it's perfectly paced. It never lags. The way that she delves into these characters and you think that you know them so well, and yet there's still so much room for uncertainty. You may know them, you may not. Like, this is my third time reading it and I was filled with doubt this time around as well. I think, yeah, the characterisations are brilliant. I don't agree with people that say that once you get to Bunny's death, the book is over and the second half is boring. Absolutely not.

• 1:19:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, because the funeral stuff is so funny.

• 1:19:43Speaker 00

  It's so funny and brilliant, but also there are new revelations to come. The whole investigation, working out if they're going to be caught, it's just brilliant. Yeah, I think it's one of the great contemporary books.

• 1:19:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  So we're going to mark this, I think we should mark this in Dead Bunnies out of 10?

• 1:19:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, we have a noble tradition thus far on this podcast of raising things out of dead animals. So while this isn't a dead animal.

• 1:20:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:03Speaker 00

  It's down, the point's down.

• 1:20:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right. So Dead Bunnies out of 10, who's going to go first? How about you go first?

• 1:20:09Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm going to give this nine Dead Bunnies out of 10. I'm docking one point because I think in very Tartian fashion, sometimes her like long passages where someone's lying in a room on some kind of drug fuelled trip is a bit exhausting. But other than that, solid nine out of 10.

• 1:20:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Excessive drug use, you're docking a lot for that. I'm going to give it also nine out of 10. Wow, very boringly similar.

• 1:20:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  But I'm deducting a point to Donna Tartt being mean to Matt Jacobson, who was clearly an absolute legend. So.

• 1:20:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, clearly you have no flesh in that game. So that's a fair judgement.

• 1:20:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right. So what's coming up next week, actually, something very different. We're doing Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

• 1:20:47Speaker 00

  And then The Northern Lights, in the US, The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman.

• 1:20:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow.

• 1:20:52Speaker 00

  And then lots more exciting things after that.

• 1:20:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  So much to read.

• 1:20:55Speaker 00

  So much to read.

• 1:20:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right. So thank you very much for listening to the book club. Enjoy forming your own secret cabal and conducting diomycian rituals and murdering farmers.

• 1:21:05Speaker 00

  I know we will.

• 1:21:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. For people who are just listening, she said that with real venom and kind of a sort of.

• 1:21:14Speaker 00

  That's just a normal Wednesday night for me, as we have discovered.

• 1:21:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. On that bummer show, goodbye.

• 1:21:18Speaker 00

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.