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

Now Tabi is, you know, there are some books that you read once,

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And those second kind of books, the ones you go back to,

they really deserve to last, don't they? 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. Yes, every book is produced with specially commissioned,

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That's foliosociety.com/thebookclub. The book is called "Fall Us" for the book. It's called "Fall Us" for the book. It's called "Fall Us" for the book. It's called "Safe".

It's called "Fall Us". It's called "Fall Us". It's called "Fall Us". The book is called "Fall Us". It's called "Fall Us".

It's called "Fall Us". It's called "Fall Us". It's called "Fall Us". It's called "Fall Us". It's called "Fall Us".

It's called "Fall Us". It's called "Fall Us". 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 10 days before they found him. It was one of the biggest manhunts 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's simply left it to 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, 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 they once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April after noon long ago. Now, and not so sure.

So that is the opening of the secret history by Donna Tart. 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 40 years. It's sold almost three million copies. It's been translated into all kinds of languages. It's the kind of books the secret history that people read and read 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?”

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 Bride's Head 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. 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, vespectacles, scholars, dorm room parties, late night homework, sessions, smokey rooms. Yeah, there's a lot of smoking. A lot of smoking and a lot of drinking wine.

Yeah. It's an atmosphere of kind of hedonism and learning, but also drugs and poetry. And it's actually that aesthetic has inspired a whole new literary subgenre, which is called Dark Academia, which I'm sure lots of people have heard about.

It's the touchstone for that.

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

It totally works, yeah. And I remember reading it. I started reading it on a train. I was going, you know, kind of cross country for sort of a 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. I mean, it's a terrible cliché, but it's one of those books 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. It really, really is that 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, the kind of myself.

“I thought that's what all classics 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 into that. But also, it's the stylishness of Donna Tart's writing. It's the wittyness. It's her cool, but kind of secretly enviable characters.

And also, the Marda mystery element. I mean, that's obviously addictive. And this sort of the coolness of it, the perceived coolness is bound up with the author's net Donna Tart's herself. So she's a very, it's kind of elusive figure.

She's seen this very cool, that's very clever. Actually, Tabia, I have to say for people watching on video. You've dressed as Donna Tart for the kids. I literally have, look, I'm wearing a collar. I'm wearing a large, managed black jumper.

And I'm wearing red lipstick. Yeah. Donna Tart all is done in the very, very few interviews that she gives. She's, she even often wears a tie, but I couldn't find one. So I'm sorry to let you all down on that front.

Yeah. It's a bit different from the traditional Tabi as Thetick, which is slightly more rewarding. Yeah, I put my, I put my trackies aside for today. Right. Yeah. It's huge step up for me.

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

Well, and it took her 10 years to write, and it was her debut novel. And it obviously became this total sensational, a massive bidding wars for it and stuff. And that in itself is, it's pretty extraordinary. And it will talk a little bit more about her and the secret history behind the secret history. Oh, very good.

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 draw. Like that. Just like that. Yeah. Wow. Yep. She went to Bendington 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, uh, Greek tragedy. And obviously, that comes out throughout the book, because at Bendington, she studied classics. But also, she was very bookish anyway. I mean, she's read everything. If you watch interviews with her, or she, 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, or sex allegedly. And also like her characters, she had a very specific. She has a very specific stylized retro image

embodied by me today. 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 a lure. Is that you or Donna Tart? No, yeah, how's it? We are one and the same. Yeah. We're very literary sensations before the age of 30. So, okay, well, that's for the listeners side of it. 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.

“It does. And it's no coincidence, because when Donna Tart 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 a Procopius in the 6th century AD. It lifts the curtain on the secrets of the court of Justinian and Theodore 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, Theodore, who was said to be a massive whore, essentially, and do all sorts of sexual acts with animals. In public, particularly geese, she went scatter grain over herself and at them peck away at their leisure for pleasure.

Obviously, this was a massive, massive inspiration for Donna Tart when writing about a seemingly perfect group of students who get up to all sorts of sorted, sexual acts behind the scenes.

“So, we're looking at the secret history of the secret history in the second half,”

but for now, it'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 haven't read it. We'll give a sense that it's

flavor. So, when it was published in 1992, the New York Times reviewer said, it's basically a cross-between,

"Dostoyevsky's crime and punishment. Your ripperedease is the back-eye. Brett Easton Ellis's campus novel, The Rules of Attraction, and Evelyn Wars, Brice Edward Visited, which you've had mentioned, tabby. Hello, Bobo. But, I mean, I'm guessing a fair, and there's a lot of people haven't read all those books. So, that's not necessarily very helpful, description. Tabby, I reckon you can do better than New York Times. Add explaining what it's about.

Perhaps even better than a daily male columnist. We shall see. So, it's a very stylish, darkly funny, utterly gripping story told by a young Californian called Richard Papin. And he is transferred to the fictional Hampton College in Vermont. So, that was the one based on Donna Tart's College. And there, he convinces this mysterious magnetic, but we were later discovered quite controlling. Classics teacher, Julian Morrow, to take him on as a student. And we say convincing

because Julian only text what 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 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 popping around here. Too much tweed, I think. From you. God, I don't know where to eat.”

No, you never see where to eat. No, that's true. You wore tweed once on a photo shoot, but that's

a story. I'm not kidding. I guess you'll wish it. We've forced you to wear tweed. Yeah, exactly. But they keep to themselves. Richard is obviously massively massively drawn to them, almost magnetic, 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 Calacacathia, which is the idea that physical beauty and physical perfection reflects in a moral beauty and in a 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 read into it, we learn that, on the contrary, 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. So to go back to those first few lines, I mean, I think that's one of the great openings in English. Oh, it so is brilliant, you know, what's 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 got the snow, you got the mountains, you got the setting in the months, 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 rye slightly matter of fact conversational way, you know, she'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 this up here with the murder mysteries, who's going to die and who did it. And we know that right from the beginning. She was reading a lot of great tragedy when she wrote it. And it follows the form of a Greek tragedy. Or actually just a lot of great literature because, you know, Greek audiences didn't expect to learn something later on. They know from the start. Like when I can mм on walks onto the stage. Yeah. The whole audience knows that he's

going to die. I can mм on the only one that doesn't know he's going to die. Like even in the illid, like singer goddess of the Roth of Achilles, everything has revealed right at the outset. And then the exciting element is kind of the consequences of a terrible deeds rather than terrible deeds themselves. So again there, Donna Tart is referencing Greek tragedy. And it's 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 endpoints. Yeah. The point where the murder happens is about halfway through, isn't it? So the

Richard Papernan and the racer and his friends. Yeah, exactly. So because we're going to be following

“the same model as the book B 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. Yeah. And he is from Plano, California. He doesn't care for the tool. He describes it as very dull. He just doesn't fit in there at all. He doesn't go along with his parents. Yes, for suburban and dull isn't it? 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 a feeling.

Mm. As far as the ranne gas station, so did Donna Tart'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. Yeah. So I thought his name is quite interesting because there's basically only one person called Papernan. Yeah. It is well known in all kind of human life.

And that's a guy called France from Papernan 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 there's sort of corrupt. Again, the point about corruption behind the veneer of

“respectability. So to go back to Richard, Richard is an eraser. 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 why he's attitude to the story is. So that reading at the beginning, there were two successive paragraphs basically that begin with it is difficult to believe that. So it says 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 that was a terrible crime that you didn't in your past that actually maybe you don't feel that guilty about.

Yeah, that's the thing we never really know if he's looking back with incredible remorse or if he's

still suddenly 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, right? I mean, it's relating him. So that, you know, that as 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 as soon as to sociopath going along with them? Is he just weak and easily led? Like basically it's up to each individual reader to draw their conclusions. Definitely, definitely. So he goes to this college, Hampton, which becomes rather at classics, becomes a kind of character in the book in and on himself. And he says himself that doesn't he? He's still trapped in this world.

That he's still, he kind of can't get beyond it. And there's a line. He says, I suppose there's a

certain crucial interval in everyone's life when characters fix forever. And for me, it was that

first full term I spent at Hampton. And that line is actually from Donna Tart's own, almost verbatim from her own speech when she graduated from her own college. That's so interesting. Because she actually, she said in an interview that I watched it so much of the book, because it took her 10 years. And so she was moving further and further and further away from her time at Bennington. She had so much of it was an excise and nostalgia and kind of longing to be back

there. Yeah, 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. Yes, specifically of the play, the Curse Child. You love the Curse Child. And in the Curse Child, Harry Potter, he's basically, you know, his time at Hogwarts has shaped him and he can't really

“escape from it. That's how I feel about the Curse Child. Only we could all move on.”

That isn't an entirely insane comparison. It's a brilliant comparison. It's a brilliant comparison because the point of boarding school story like Harry Potter, Hogwarts, is some 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 the precise, 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, you know, a series of very, very intense relationships. And this idea of the being in

language that was a parcel sound. I mean, yeah, I do think that's a genuinely a fair point. I mean,

it's as if Harry had been put in slithering, then going up with Draco Malphoy and Lord Voldemort and Timard and Neville Longbottom or something like that. But I mean, you mean, it's the same kind of setting, Gothic University Fibes. This was a tremendous point. And actually, I'm not sure now trying to redeem myself. I make it seem more serious point, which is that he didn't just, Richard doesn't just really, well, Harry Potter, he recalls the narrator of another great

American novel, much more high-brown, a novel that we've actually talked about already in this podcast, which is the great Gatsby. So he mentions it specifically in early passage. He's struggling to sleep. His sick of his Greek homework. And he says, he read the great Gatsby. It's one of my favorite books. And he says the one that he didn't cheer me up. I just was struck by what I construed a certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself. I think that's really interesting. I mean,

“I think the great Gatsby is clearly a massive inspiration on the secret history taught as a”

myth that has self. But I think it's interesting that Richard sees himself as Gatsby. I, a self-made man who hides his past and is desperately trying to fit into this kind of gistering upper-class world that is not his own. I actually see him much more as Nick Carroway than a raster 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. 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 Bride's head revisited, Charles Ryder, the narrator of that book, like Nick Carroway and like Richard, they're all

kind of outsiders looking in. And that makes for a brilliant eraser because you see things that no one else can see. Yeah, not just the, well, just outside of there, the interesting thing is in all those stories. The narrator is sort of complicit in the plot at the same time. Yeah. So the issue of how complicit in 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. Definitely. As we were you was saying earlier, two different people can read this book and reach completely different conclusions about whether Richard and a writer is being swept along by other people's designs, or whether he's actually the center of them and is this kind of dark intelligence, who's going to kind of master molding the whole thing. Anyway, he arrives at hand them and he becomes completely obsessed, doesn't he? With this,

he sees this little click of people who are studying Greek and he wants to be part of their secret society. He wants to understand their code, I guess. Yeah, he sees them around campus and he becomes obsessed with their air of strangeness and exclusivity and the idea that they're from another age. You can see the alert that, you know, they wear all fashion clothes, they use fountain pens, they drink tea 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 walls, you know, some evil and war novels, you know, Sebastian Flight, Anthony Blanche, definitely of that mold. But if I was being harsh, I would say they're massive. I mean, this is the 1980s. They're massive kind of tri-hards, aren't they? I mean, wearing, I've really accused them of wearing tweet jackets and necessarily, and they're sort of, well, they're very affected using fountain pens

in 1985 or whatever. And you're just jealous. Really? You think so? Well, thing is, do you

“not think that all college students, all university students are that age or a little bit affected?”

Like everyone's probably be a certain something. I think they're absolutely sweet for yourself. I have to say, rereading at this time around. I think it's an age thing. I think the older you get, the lesson with that, that 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 love, where, yeah,

where the Collins who have vampires, like walk into this canteen, and it's like, they're like in slow motion, and then this is like really cool kind of punky music playing whatever, and they're like it, and they're all shiny and beautiful. That's kind of what these guys are like. Okay, are you reading it? Well, it's nice that you think so anyway. And they are quite vampiric. Yeah, they are, actually. Richard agrees with you. He's infatuated by them,

and we're meant to share his infatuation. And he basically persuades the tutor, this guy Julia Moro, to let them into his Greek class. And Julian, who is this classic inspirational tutor that you've seen a thousand times and so many campus novels and boarding

“school stories and school stories and so on, he's a little bit dead poet society, isn't he?”

I mean, it was being harsh. I would say he's a sort of knockoff Robin Williams in their Deborah society. He comes out with some absolute, I mean, when they start a class and he says,

He's Professor Triloni from Harry Potter. We should start our episodes that way.

“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. One of the things that makes Julian say 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, but also because you did classics at university, so you know all about this. 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 are 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, 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 diversians of traitors. He's kind of the opposite of anything mundane. And he's, it's why he doesn't really like Christianity either. He doesn't like the meek, homeliness of Christianity. He likes the cold, roughfulness of the pagan world. 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, in like, you know, gods of old who are in live and 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. So two of the characters will come on to this. Two of the characters say, or two of these two of the characters

have said of them, they feel dead. They don't feel anything. They need extreme emotion, extreme drama, suffering of others to feel alive themselves. 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, mortality than an animal, fuse a 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, devar us, unstring our bones, then spit us out reborn. I mean, that is stirring star. It is, but if I come out of this, I just imagine 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 going to come

up in the exam?" Yeah, a bit a bit weird if you kind of spoke about, you know, more of a

“batch of economic policies in those kind of times. Surely that's how we are no playing command”

and conquer makes you feel like everyone has their kicks. Anyway, Richard, unlike me, is not a cynical person. Well, or is he or is he? Well, we'll find out. He's in trans by this, isn't he? And he he sits forward at the end of his chair and he feels so excited, he says, you know, I'm so close to the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. What Julian is actually talking about there, the rituals are Dionysus of the kind of god of wine and hedonism and pleasure and

emotional and release and so on, and that you throw yourself into these rituals, you throw off the shackles of the mortal world, and you get close to this kind of to the sublime, to this sort of 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 these actually. Definitely not. So he's a kind of full squad

in a way, right? Yes. Also, this is very, very much a kind of mythologised version of the classics. I mean, there's no mention of kind of pots or coins or salai or anything like that, but if you apply to university, if you apply to university, do classics think he's all going to be there, so you're going to be very, very disappointed. What about the people in the class? So Tabi, again, this is very much your social media, isn't it? Yes. Exclusive, a little bit

pretentious, beautiful, intelligent, sunk in the most repellent social snobbery. Talk us through

this group is terrible. They have a sickly skewed sense of morality. They look down on everyone else. They hugely snobbish. They are murderers, fundamentally, and they're not troubled by this. It's the fear of getting caught, the 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 invariably chic. They are truly intelligent and embedded in this world of literature and philosophy. And they are funny and intriguing and oddly likeable. And that's because that is how Richard finds them to be. And we are experiencing them

“through Richard's eyes. We absolutely are. And to be clear, you absolutely love them. So don't you?”

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

So outline of the list. So first of all, we've got Francis Abernathy.

And he feels very much like, as you mentioned, Sebastian Flight from Brian said, we visited, he's basically that character. Sebastian Flight was a huge inspiration for him, because he wears beautiful starchy shirts with French cuffs, magnificent neck ties, billowing coats, pondsneurs. You know, he really is. He's a massive fob from a former age, really. But he's also nervous and a massive hypercondriate. But he can be very snarky and cutting

and cruel. I found him immensely likeable, in fact. He's somehow more vulnerable than the others. And 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 Tarts does not shy away from a stereotype ever. Right. And he has an on and off sexual relationship with another of the characters, Charles McCorley. So that takes us to the twins. So they're amusingly

named Charles and Camilla. So they're a very strange pair on their Charles and Camilla, because they're very beautiful. They're very kind of ethereal. They're castren Pollux. Yeah, they're damaged. They weren't there in some way. And some obscure way. They're often dressed all in white. Richard is obsessed by Charles and Camilla, particularly Camilla.

“I think he thinks that they are kind to him as well. And the scales, slightly far from his eyes,”

as the progresses. But yeah, so Charles, he unravels entirely as the novel continues. He becomes a massive alcoholic. He also becomes quite abusive towards Camilla. Yeah. 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 18. 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 just being slim and golden and

constant references to her hair and things like that. And she's also there based on all certainly her name as a callback to the eneared. There's a character called Camilla in the eneared. And interestingly, she is one of the only female characters in the eneared who's treated like the male characters. And the male characters in the eneared as all kind of Greek or Greek or Roman heresars are very chilly and hard. And Camilla is just that. So 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. Yeah, she's always slightly off of, yeah, at a focus, I think Camilla is. Yeah, I think she's totally heartless. So she's like the statue Gallitaire or something. But it's the other way round. She goes from being a flesh and blood person and then increasingly in the eyes of the reader becomes stoned. Yeah, that's interesting.

Okay. So what defines this group of people? We're coming to some of the other characters

of the group in a second. What defines them? I mean, you mentioned Charleston Camilla.

They are taking loads of drugs. They are enormous quantity of smoking and drinking in the book. Yeah. And Donna Tart really, she loves those things. She loves that stuff. There's a lot of kind of, I mean, that's the thing that recurs in her fiction. Yeah, the goalfinch. There's like whole chapters of just a character sitting in a hotel room on a kind of a drug and do spiral. She describes herself as a miniaturist, as a writer. 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. So the hedonism is a huge bar to 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 judgemental about other people. So even France is who we're meant to think of as one of the nicer characters in this group. He makes fun of Richard's accent as California accent.

He sort of mocks him and says, totally weird, really, you know, we kind of besties. Yeah. He does your American accent. Yeah. My American accent is actually a scaramoochism American accent. Would he fit in in this millia? I don't think he would. So the man who ends up dead, right?

the most bossy name ever. She is so good at names on the touch. He just catches their social

millia in a name. It's incredible. So Bunny is from old money in Connecticut. He went to a New England

boarding school. He had his summers on Cape Card. 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. We'll find him completely insufferable. When you go online, you see people saying, well, he's dreadful. Oh, you know, he's this than the other. He's the most snobbish of the lot. But Tabby, we'd please to the listeners. Yes. The words that you have written in the notes that

we from which we are basing this podcast. hilarious. He would be Dominic Sandbrook's best friend in

“real life. Tabby, justify that claim. What I think I'm 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. That's the part of who you both are. That's a massive part of who I am. Yeah. It's a fundamental part of your personality and your moral compass. You are both very boisterous, deaf, and occasionally funny. You both enjoy a big lunch and colorful cocktails. Yeah, I think about colorful cocktails. I like colorless. You definitely definitely like a cocktail.

You both like to flaunt your learning. You're on two podcasts. What else do you think you're doing? Okay, fine. And you also like to bang on about your school days. Your school days were the best best moments of your life. You're not wrong. You know, I mean they're a lot better than doing the podcast. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, well, well. So you see, I'm just doing fine. Completely. I mean, I'm convinced. But actually, do you know what? There was a good case for bunny being a brilliant

person. Oh, so here we go. Yeah. 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. He's the least mystical. Yeah.

“That would, I think, is definitely a good thing. Because I like bunny. I don't”

replace a high premium or mysticism, frankly. Even Richard admits that bunny was very popular. So after bunny's dead, Richard says, oh, I'm reading back what I've written. I've done bunny and just as 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 tackless, which I never am. No.

Uh, he's a massive snob. I wouldn't actually say I wasn't that much of a snob. I mean, he is always mocking Richard's California in background and his clothes and so on. And he's stolen other students, cheesecake from the fridge. He is perpetually feeling. Yeah. That thing that very, very posh kind people, you know, brought up suddenly the sort of spoon in the mouth have, where they come down very hard on theft. Yeah. But they kind of assume that everything is theirs.

So they just kind of take 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 it's sure on money. And then doesn't even like it. I would never do that because I don't like cheesecake. Just to be clear. Oh, well, for that to comfort. So in some ways, yeah, 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 the very, um, sexist. Because it was telling commemorative iron, his shirts,

and make tea and stuff like that. And he's also quite homophobic. Yeah, he is. Again, I can't believe you'd bring you out the big guns knocking him down in that way. I know. I know. Well, I have no choice. But I think all of that said, he's, he would be a great last. Yeah. He, he's so much fun. Donna Tart herself said that she loved writing him. And she was sad when he was gone. When they go out for one of their long lunches, he's a tremendous laugh. Admittedly, he then

pretenses lost his wallet, so he doesn't have to pay. But, and the other thing that I think massively through his credit, he doesn't take all the stuff about beauty, and terror, and the ancient Greeks seriously. Yeah. So to him, everybody else is taking incredibly seriously,

“maybe very pretentious. Bunny, I think he's like, come on. This is all a bit of nonsense, isn't it?”

But he's also very bad at it. Like, the thing he's best at is Greek or Latin or whatever it is. Yeah. And that's not that good. No. It turns out after he's died that he's actually been two years old, and they all thought he was the whole time. We don't think it's so easy. But there isn't that thing that's that line that you love more than any other, which is basically they're mocking his work. Oh, my God. He's writing essay about John Dunn. Yeah. He's got to write this big

scary final paper on John Dunn for one of his other courses, and he's press for time, and he doesn't know what he's doing. And it's meant to be about John Dunn and meta-hemma realism, whatever that is. No one knows what it is. He definitely doesn't. Anyway, he's panicking. And then he hears somewhere that John Dunn 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.

non-sensically 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 Dunn and Walton, on the shores of meta-hemma realism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of y'all. I just think that is super hard. I think it's fun. It's fun. I think it's fun. It's fun.

“Chums of y'all. That's fun. That's what the podcast is called. I've been finding ways to”

grow barbide sentences. Yeah. In congressly, ever since I reread it, it's so good. Talking of fond farewells and chums of y'all, we should get to bunny's terrible fate. So how is it that such a person ends up being murdered and murdered by his the narrator and his friends?

And the answer is, there's a series of clues on there when we get about halfway through the book.

Yeah, so Richard notices that a strange tension has emerged between bunny and some of the others. And when they're all staying in France'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 his 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 and a massive pot. So what on earth is going on? Well, the answer is tied up with one person in the group. We haven't talked about it at all. He'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.”

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 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? Right. So this is the first great revelation

of the book. So we obviously mentioned the first half how they were all transfixed by Julian's account of dynasty and rituals, which comes from Euripideses' dark and bloody play, the back eye, in which a man on the urging of Dionysus is ripped apart, bloodily and violently by a group of women. So the twins and 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 back and now of their own.

In order to experience some kind of, I'd no pagan oneness with the gods or ecstasy. And this involves fasting, lots of alcohol, lots of drugs. And then they go out at night and basically try to get berserk. I mean, I say fasting, funny on multiple occasions is called eating cake. That's exactly what I would do. Yeah. I mean, me too, do you honest? And then, um, finally, they achieve it or they think they achieve it. It's for the readers to decide like they could just be tripping. Henry tells Richard,

it was heart-shaking, glorious, torches, dizziness, singing, wolves howling around us and a bull ballowing in the dark. That's actually a reference to what Julian had said earlier. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning clouds rushing across the sky, finds groove from the ground so fast, they just twined up the trees like snakes, seasons passing in the wink of an eye. So that could be the drugs or it could be their genuinely

having a realistic experience. Yeah. 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 on their Camilla, that you mentioned before, the chili in some ways, the most elusive of the characters. Yeah, the warrior maiden. She says to Richard that she remembers, and they 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." 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 specified 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 Julie and then starts kind of asking him, will he strange moral questions? And so, the group decide that they must take drastic measures to keep money silence. 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.

troubled by the merger of another human being. Yeah. I mean, contrasts with some of these other characters. So the support when they're sitting around and Francis, who's the sort of Sebastian flight fob, he says, it was a terrible thing what we did. I mean, it wasn't full tear that we killed. This man was not full tear that we killed. Yeah. The snobbery, intellectual snobbery. 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 repartible. 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 dollar and

“figure. He's the de facto leader. And to happy, I seem to remember that you and Nicole are producer”

when we were planning this podcast, describing him as hot. Yeah, he has that kind of dark of Amperic sexiness to him. He's kind of chilly and you want to save him and warm him up. Anyway, that's part of the by. Okay. Anyway, so everyone is totally in through all to him, except Bonnie and Bonnie who's death he instigates. And I was thinking about it in a funny way, there is something quite godlike about Henry. He's very, very chilly. His surname winter is no coincidence.

He's very large. He's almost utterly without feeling. He's utterly unbothered by the farmer's murder or bunnies 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. And he is the one who, but it's like bloodlust allows him to feel something other than this kind of dull humanity. So his name, I mean, you mentioned in the notes that you think

“his name is very revealing. Yeah, he's icy. The coldness, he doesn't feel anything and he needs”

the suffering of others or the extra. Or murder or something. Yeah, yeah. But he's also ridiculously reduce the clever which allows him to be manipulative. He's highly intelligent. He's constantly wandering around with a massive tone under one arm, generally in some ancient language. So yeah, hacking back to the hot thing. I don't think he'd be that amusing. His performatively like reading Sanskrit and stuff at various points, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. There's actually quite a

comical sequence when they're trying to think about how they will murder bunnies, where he

he was picking mushrooms because he's trying to find the perfect poison. Yeah. 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 bunnies knows about the murder and everything and is becoming dangerous because Henry tells Richard. Yeah. 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.

Interesting. He comes from St. Louis, like Eliot. He dresses in dark in the suits. He always has an umbrella and he just described his kind of cutting of sway through groups of hippies and punks and being utterly utterly incongruised. Looking like Neville Chamberlain. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I mean, he's also, I mean, we've 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 MTSL it's from Missouri. He's an outsider. His father is a construction tycoon. He's a sort of rather light 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 here in that first half, Richard talks about reading the great Gatsby.

And you said, Tabby, you think he's like Nick Carrowade, the narrator of Gatsby. Yeah. I mean,

“people 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 and a raise of this book. And Henry. Definitely. Yeah. There's a jettel and hide quality. Well, jettel and hide actually. Donna Tart was reading Dr. Jettel and Mr. Hide when she wrote this book and she said it was one of the most spiritual books on the secret history. And there's a moment when, because 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 an narrator, you don't feel a great deal of emotion for other people to you. And Henry says, Richard, to nice it. Henry says, I know you don't because I know

that we're the same. The world's always been empty place to me. I was in April of enjoying even

the simplest things. I felt dead and everything I did, but then it changed the night. I killed that man. And Richard denies this. She says, listen, this is not me. I don't know what you're talking about. And then Henry says, oh, I think you do. I think you know exactly what I'm talking about. The

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 technique. There was no denying that it was not an altogether unpleasant situation. That's brilliant writing, because that's actually the way Richard expresses that sort of sort of humdrum sort of puterish way. Yeah. And not all together unpleasant sensation of having killed somebody like a decency and, um, direst 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 all he's very good at fitting himself in places. Yeah. And that's quite sociopathic itself. Of course. You know, it's very, um, Mr. Tom Ripley. Yes. That's kind of thick. 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 done, what they're all doing. They're all playing parts. 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. Whatever he actually says at one point, you think someone

“with his fever and imagination as my own would have been kind of captivated by the idea of this”

dead body in the night. But he says, and 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 closer to them. And then in the end, he betrays bunny to them. And it is because of him that bunny is killed. There's one last point about that. That's just like the great Gatsby that Nick the narrator

betrays the characters. Exactly. And it's complicit. 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. It's sort of forested wilderness. They're pushing into a ravine. If the fool 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.”

It's unbelievable. And then Charles says, with kind of a star of humanity, he says, it's cold blood of murder. And Henry kind of nonchalantly writes a cigarette and says, I prefer to think of it as redistribution of matter. You can see this guy is a monster. I can so imagine you doing that. So the plan is put in training. And actually the brilliance of the way the murder happens. This really is excellent. It's so brilliantly done. So they're looking

up at this kind of bushes and the forest. It's oddly comical actually because Richard comes up the path to warm them that bunny is coming. And they all kind of pop out of hedges. Yeah. And then bunny finally arrives. And he says, he's his baffled. He sees them all there. And he says,

tell me, just what the Sam Hill are you guys doing out here anyway. But he's always speaking like

that as he says, you know, old spot, you know, Germany, cricket, that kind of stuff. And then Donna Tart writes, the woods were silent, not a sound. Henry smiled. Why looking for new ferns, he said, and took a step towards him. There's a article on the website, literary hub, where somebody could Emily Temple basically dissecting that line. So sinister. 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 the idea of looking for new ferns. It's full. 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. And then that's it. Then he cuts off. And then he turned the page and this about blank page after blank page because 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. It's so brilliantly done. It's the same way that all the sex in the novel is kind of off screen. Or the drunkenness in the novel is slightly off screen. It keeps it kind of very tight. It's not messy. It's sort of clinical as Henry Winter. It's very, very cleverly done.

But also this opening again leads us to doubt Richard wants more or to trust Richard once will we're not sure. Because then after saying, oh, how like a killer that makes me sound,

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 from people that do things like murder 12 nurses. Exactly. Exactly. Again, it's the ambiguity. Then from that point onwards at one level what follows is basically the story of the killers on raffling 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. 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 pretty book called La Betty Men by Emile Zola, French book, in which that that's again, a huge theme of the book. It's a very 90th century theme. It's also very Greek tragedy, though. Of course. The gods will have their

pound of flesh. Arrestes will be chased to the ends of the earth by the theories. See, never

tobility of Greek tragedy. But the difference here is that it's really funny. And this is the point. So the second half of the secret issue is that you'd think would be so morbid and mournful. And part of it is, it's generally so funny. I think so, for example, when bunny disappears, there's sort of sentimental reaction of the other students and the college authorities. Tart is really hilarious on the sort of performance of 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 once this. He said, they had no idea what bunny would have wanted. Yeah. And the best there is the college trustees decide. And I quote, "To honor the unique spirit of bunny courtroom, they make a massive donations, the American civil liberties union." And as Richard says, an organization bunny would certainly have an award. Had he been aware of its existence? Because bunny is literally the most

right wing person in the world. Like there's a bit about all the hope that all the hippies kind of mourn him and stuff. And bunny literally like, there's no bear way, perhaps he used to go after them and chase them with sticks or something like that. So basically, is that sort of performance of saying to mentality that often happens in the wake of a great chance. Yeah, it's hard chasing, it's exactly. Unforgivable trait that people have. But then the funniest scene, I know our producing the

cult loves the scene is basically when the core current family decide they're going to invite all bunny's closest friends to his funeral at their family home. Of course, they don't realize that his closest friends of other people in the world are dead. Dark irony of it. And the students arrive and the students, of course, they're foot, they're such massive snob, so they're dripping with social snobbery towards what they see as the vulgarity of the core currents. And they sort of

say, oh, they soak their greedy and shallow. Charles calls says of bunny's family, the family, the people he's, they're just a bunch of zeros like something from an ad. I mean, what a thing to say. 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 bonds still love them, etc. But then getting distracted in a moment. So one point he's sobbing on Richard's shoulder, doesn't even know who Richard is. And then his little grandson comes along. He's sort of brightens up and starts bobbing him up near it. The fact that he calls bunny the old bunster. I mean, I think this is a brilliant bit of writing

actually, because the tone 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, this is mad scene when Mr. Corcoran, he mixes Henry up, Henry of all people. Mr. Corcoran kind of grabs him, puts his arm out of him, says, oh, I remember

“you, I remember that fun at that time when you wanted to, you were a long lad and you wanted to go out and”

buy a used single-engine aeroplane against your parents, wishes. And Henry's standing there, Henry, the murderer, he's standing there with his kind of frozen fingers, sweating on his face. While Mr. Corcoran is telling this absolutely mad anecdote that does nothing to do with him. And I told you, it's a bad idea, son. And they're all standing there, like, I don't know where to look. And the moment peaks, just at the

point when one of Bunny's other relative says, Dad, I think you got to mix that with somebody else. One of the children breaks loose from the embrace of his parents, charges across the room

in the head, but Henry in the chest. So it's just, I mean, actually, there's never been a film

It's because the gold finish went so badly that she's now, she's now refusing, but then there's

“another 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 overcarb, 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 hack-need, 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 whale of grief from the back of the chair. So anyway, then a culminates doesn't it with this very, very moving and dark scene by the grave side 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. So this moment when they basically killed Bunny, so he remembers Camilla and

Henry climbing down the ravine, their faces blank, rocking Bunny's boat, broken neck, back and forth. They feel his pulse, they check it on their wristwatches. It's utterly chilling, and their pulling his eyelids, it's terrible. And the irony is that while Richard is remembering this shocking scene, Henry is serving as one of the poor bearers at Bunny's funeral, and it's like the back and forth the juxtaposition between Henry and his black suit carrying Bunny's coffin and Henry at the

bottom of the ravine, rocking his neck back and forth to make sure that he's dead. 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 as hard to tell, he gets that dirt, and he smears it across his suit and his white shirt. So it's as though he's this great stain of sort of earth, as though he's marked himself out as

“one of the killers maybe. 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 my asthma, and I think that almost subconsciously, Henry is marking himself up, or it's like the mark of cane or something.

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. 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 brought out into the open, and he starts sort of 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 it's so superbly done because in a group of students who are untouched morally or ethically by what they have done. They have one kind of

“moral arbiter that they look up to, and that is Julian, and that's why he's discovery of their”

crimes affects them so badly, especially Henry, and Richard reflects that the discovery of what they've done, this exposes Julian's true nature. He's revealed not as the benign old sage indulgent and protective good parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral who's begiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless. I mean, that there is something so of the pagan gods about that, isn't there? Yeah, that's basically describing a Greek god. Exactly.

Watchful, capricious, and heartless. Exactly. 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. But it also shows him to be a coward because he basically

runs away after this happened. Yeah. But Henry is so affected by Julian's discovery. He thinks that first of all he's very upset to have Julian's perception of him shot it, but also he thinks that exposes Julian as a moral coward. And this, for Henry, is it destroys him. He never recovers from it. Right. And there's a final meeting, isn't there? They have this showdown. This final get together at the Alba Mal 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

very much have the atmosphere. A Greek tragedy doesn't it? The one question I for me hang in

“in the air at the end of the book is whether Richard, what we do with Richard the narrator,”

because he's got a way with it, as they all have. They all have, yeah. And does he realize how the what they've done is evil? You know, at times he says it would wasn't that bad, at other times he says it's evil. But actually we already mentioned Jekyll and Hides that don't talk. It was reading my shoes right in the book. And actually there's a list online. She gave an interview one of her errands of you. So she talked about all the books she was reading. Two of them

he mentioned. Jekyll and Hides and the Tans are 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 Hams and didn't he? And he went to another university, he ended up studying English and specifically Jacobian drama. I love his detail. I thought this was wonderful. There's a paragraph where he says, you know, why Jacobian 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 Jacobian plays, well, like trap doors to something beautiful and wicked that trickle beneath the surface of mortality. They understood not any evil it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks 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. Yeah, I do too. 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 had done an evil thing. 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 as 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 as evil. They just think that a very dramatic thing happened and they

came very close to being thrown in jail. Right. And they're more worried about that being

“called than their moral consequences. Exactly. All right. So there's one more secret to uncover”

the tabby you promised us this. Yes. And I actually know that you have spent weeks down a dark rabbit hole researching this. Yeah, I have no life. And this is based in the secret history of the secret history. So the story of Donna Tart and how she came to write it because, you know, on the surface you can read this book and you can say brilliant book, it was just a little whatever. But actually there is a history behind it, which is really, really interesting. Yeah. So I mean, let's lift the

card and on, on Dan Donna Tart 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 Schleeman. So you can see

there the fascination with mystery from very start. And she was a baratious reader. She first

all went to the University of Mississippi. But she hated it. She said that everyone there was was massively snobbish. She was basically the only person there who wasn't blonde and interested in like cheerleading. 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, much, much more like that. So she transfers to Bennington in Vermont

to have the model as be said for Hampton. And this is a small exclusive liberal arts college, originally only women and only has 500 students. And it's very chic. It's 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. So I'm like five of them became published authors laterally, which is quite impressive. And it's as she became quite a big campus character, very controlled

herself by lots of drink and drugs. And she's always wearing tailored boy suits. She's famously

well read and Greek and Latin. In fact, in her cadre of classics students, she like Camilla is the only girl. And she's very into kind of heavy weights like proof, store whatever. So that's quite heavy. There's quite something quite Henry about that. And classmates at the time said that she was copying herself on Sebastian Flight. So at Hampton at that time, there was a massive obsession with the world, Evelyn Moore, creates and bright head revisited. Because Brian said it was in a big TV here.

Because the TV show had come out exactly. So that was very much the aesthetic. And you know, how time of Bennington has very much become a story in itself. It's very much mythologised. Like there's a whole podcast dedicated to it. I mean, I think it's probably slightly overdone,

students, drinking and doing drugs. I kind of think, get over yourselves a little bit.

“Totally tabby. I mean, this podcast was based on an article in, was it Esquire?”

Yeah. And the article was 13,000 words long. All about Donna Tart's time and what an amazing

time they had. And I was reading one quote. It was really made me laugh. It was from one of her classmates. She said, um, you had this feeling that life was performance hard. That everyone was living in his or her fantasy. I'm trying to find language to describe the electricity that was there. The decends, the feeling of mystery and enchantment in this ridiculously pastoral setting. I might come on. We've all been students. Like get over yourself a bit.

But you can tell that she loved her time that, because she mentions it often in interviews. And I watched while in TV where the interview asked her if she'd been back to Benington. And she kind of says, oh, it's a very different place now than I was there. So you can see it's very fond of it. But much more interestingly, Julian's click in the book is based on a real life click

of which Donna Tart was a member. And basically, at Benington at the time, was an eccentric

Greek professor and polymath and man of letters, a guy called Claude Frederick's who taught that for almost 30 years. He was gay. He wrote a mad diary for 81 years covering something like 65,000 pages. People say this is one of the longest diaries. And he's like, I felt down a massive rabbit hole really about this diary. It's so interesting. But like dancing across its pages are some of kind of the great socialites of the 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 an

“normal classroom. He had a secluded office, upper 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 handful of students, you know, who were seen as eccentric, exclusive a bit odd. As I said, Donna was the only woman and she worshiped him and actually he really took against her portrayal of Julian in the book. He was very offended by him. They massively fell out of the years. But the interesting thing is then they she dedicated

the goldfinch in parts 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 that the spell that Julian casts in the secret history and in diaries she remained captivated. But basically, she had a good friend at Bennings and called Brett Easton Ellis, who I met Dominic, who you've met. I met. Yeah. He didn't he come to give a talk or something. And you're in charge of a ranger. Yeah, I was in charge of the

green room. Yeah, charming fellow. Thank you drank a whole bottle of gin because of the evening coffee. He was lovely. He was very nice. So eloquent. So he describes this group in his book Rules of Attraction and the Rules of Attraction was set at a college like Benningson. 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. Oh, there you go. There you go. And this is before the secret history would be published. Yeah. Isn't there a thing where the whole of the secret history is a rumour accly, meaning basically, everybody is somebody. They all have real life models. And in particular, from this clique around this Professor Claude Fredericks and the basically the people that some don't attack didn't like. She put them in the book. The accusation is that the secret history

is in no way a fiction. It's actually a thinly-bailed reality. The main characters from real life reflect in the book. Yeah. There's a three guys, Todd O'Neill, Matt Jacobson and Paul McLeod. Of course, there's one that could Todd. Yeah, that's like, um, have you seen trading places? Yeah. The most fierce character in the whole movie. Yeah. So Donna was said to have hated Matt Jacobson and he is supposed to do the basis for bunny. Yeah. And the book, the hot and tire book, is a justification

for murdering. Yeah. My favorite thing here is that, Matt. When the book was published, everybody said to Matt Jacobson, "Bunny's you, you in black people's election, 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, what would do that to you?" Unless you read the book, read the portrait of Bunny, who is obviously, I mean, a lot of readers I like him, but a lot of readers say he's an oof, he's a terrible person. He's a monster. He's a monster. And his mum rang him back and said, "That is you. That is you. That is you. Yeah." And he said it, he admits to himself, he said, "I'd invite people to lunch and then realize I didn't have any money. Something dearled

Bunny does. I was kind of a horrible boulder. In my case, it was never intentional." I think

if you were a hobo boulder, but it's not intentional. It's fine. Isn't it? No, that's not fine. That's worse. I think it's fine. But Donna Tart 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

that the Lord of the Rings is in any way allegorical, right? Yeah. It's like, it's, I know that this came straight from my imagination. Yeah. Divinely reward. Exactly. The story of the book is the

basically she wrote this book to mock her classmates. She showed it to her friend Brett E. Snell.

She said this is brilliant. He gave it to his agent. He sold it for loads of money. Massive literary sensation. Massive literary sensation. And actually now the book is taken on a life well beyond that. Massively it hurts. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of the stark 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? Yeah. It's, it's massive. The secret history is like the Bible

to dark academia. It's where it all began. And like, if you go on to YouTube or book talk, whatever, the hashtag, the secret history, it has more than 150 million views on TikTok. Whoa. And it features everything from young people, cosplaying the books, 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 or whatever. I mean, it's a huge

thing. And it has spawned so much since. But the question is, do we really think it's as good as

“all that the secret history? 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

center 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 re-inventing themselves and about the sort of darkness the lies behind the great Gatsby, the talented Mr Ripley. This is definitely in that league. I totally agree. It remains one of my favorite books of all time. She unspools the plot so deliberately,

so carefully. But it's perfectly past. 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've filled with doubt this time

“around as well. I think, yeah, the characterizations are brilliant. I don't agree with people that say”

there once you get to Bonnie's death, the book is over and the second half is boring. Absolutely not. No, because the funeral stuff is so funny. It's so funny and brilliant. But also there are new revelations to calm 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 contemporaries. So we're going to mark this. I think we should mark this in dead bodies after 10. 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, it's dead births. The point stands. It's all right. So our dead bodies out of 10, who's going to go first? How are you go first? Okay, I'm going to give this nine dead bodies out of 10. I'm docking one point because I think in very tardy and fashion, sometimes her like long passages where someone's lying in a room on some kind of drug field trip is a bit exhausting. But other than that, solid nine out of 10.

The excessive drug use you're docking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to give it also nine out of 10. Wow, we're going to waringly similar. Yeah. But I'm deducted up to your point. So don't turn up being mean to Matt Jacobson who was clearly an absolute legend. So yeah, well clearly you have no flesh in that game. So that's a fair judgment. All right. So what's coming up next week, actually something very different. We're doing Frankenstein by Michelley. And then in all

the lights that in the U.S. The Golden Compass by Philip Paulman. Wow. And then lots more exciting things after that. So much to read. So much to read. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So thank you very much for

“listening to the book club. Enjoy forming your own secret cabal and conducting dynamising”

rituals and murdering farmers. I know we will. Yeah. For people who are just listening, she said that with real venom and real venom. So that's it. That's just a normal Wednesday night for me. That's what you're just going to do. Right. And that's what I'm so goodbye. Bye, everybody.