REVIEW: THE SECRET HISTORY BY DONNA TARTT
I’m honestly not sure how to feel right now. Oh, yeah: WARNING!!!! There are so many spoilers ahead. It’s hard to talk about this book without spoiling things!
God... where to start. Richard is that classic, Lockwood/Carraway-esque narrator. He’s stuck in the middle of it all. In the end, it’s almost as if he’s the thread which holds them all together. He’s the newcomer, but somehow he’s the one they all end up relying on — he becomes a pillar of (naive) good among them, and perhaps the least morally-twisted of them all.
I find myself completely devastated with the way it all ends. The way that Richard can never seem to let go of Camilla, and Camilla, all along, loves Henry. The way that Francis will never get the ending he deserves, the way that Henry will always be stuck in his sort-of limbo, his incomparable mind forever gone. Charles’ inability to lead a normal life — his controlling nature, all hidden beneath Richard’s incredibly unreliable narration. How am I supposed to feel about all of this? The ending is what hurts the most. The place in which Richard finds himself in his dream, where he and Henry both acknowledge the fact that neither of them are happy where they are, and that neither of them will ever be happy where they are. These are the things I will daydream about for the next week, I know.
Somehow Richard becomes the thread which holds them all together. It almost seems that Henry is using him — but it’s so hard for me, as a reader, to see the bad in a character like Henry, who is so obviously struggling. Henry is so much more complex than the others, and in a way, Richard is, too. He and Richard were never happy where they came from. I feel that Henry and Richard are parallels. It’s almost as if their lives tell two different stories of the same person. Perhaps Richard could have been Henry in another life, and Henry Richard.
Henry’s story is the epitome of full-circle. He is certainly the most vibrant, interesting character in the book. His dialogue, in my opinion, is more interesting and beautiful than even Julian’s. Richard paints him as a hero from beginning to end — and, in a way, he dies a hero. An antihero; flawed beyond belief, so unbelievably selfish, but also somehow relatable.
The ending sticks in my mind. I don’t think I can talk about the technicalities of the book, about the prose and the language and such, without my mind wandering quickly back to the way it all ended. I won’t overanalyse it. It’s almost simple, but at the same time so, so complex. It’s probably one of the best endings I’ve ever read, and one of the most haunting books I will ever pick up.
“Time is something which defies spring and winter, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible.”
What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?
I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backward glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears.
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