The Secret History – Donna Tartt

This is deservedly a best seller with strongly coloured characters, plenty of action, lots of unexpected plot twists, and descriptions of extreme experiences. For its time it displays an unusual breadth and depth of learning, which never feels artificially imported by a show-off author, but which plays a key role in character and plot development. Tartt actually expects her characters to be motivated by ideas and ideals and the thirst for knowledge – it's great to come across an author who believes in her characters in this way.

It's clearly a young person's book – but that is to say in an exciting, not a callow way. Its young people are avidly exploring ideas, experiences, life. There is the desperation to be part of a group where you are accepted and known. There's the disillusionment, at first with the hollowness of much of the rest of life which makes their more esoteric pursuits so alluring, and later with their charismatic older mentor Paul, who in spite of his stirring words about "beauty is terror" drops his young protégés as soon as they seem likely to get him into trouble – this is a young person's "never trust anyone over thirty" cynicism.

Part of the power of the book is that you never quite know where you are or what is going on. Instead of an omniscient narrator, Tartt gives us Richard, feeling his way into a new place, a new intellectual and aesthetic realm, and into relationships with a new set of people. He only gradually finds out the horrible truths that encompass him or what is really going on in the lives of his new friends. In exactly the same way that in life we begin friendships with new people unable to know who they are or where the relationship may take us, so the other characters only gradually reveal their inner life to Richard's mind. And those inner selves themselves change as the pressure mounts on each one of them.

The story starts when Richard, who is a rather aimless Californian student, finds himself in an East Coast university, where he succeeds in breaking into a small elite of classics students with an enigmatic but inspiring teacher. The others are

·         Bunny – the least motivated student, very clever at irritating other people but little else, a sponger with no conscience, whose weak sense of loyalty to the group leads to the denouement.

·         Henry – physically powerful, introverted but in every way the Alpha Male who leads the group, a highly gifted scholar with an analytical mind which becomes too easily seduced and obsessed by the logical conclusions of his own theories, so falling into tragic mistakes that a less intelligent person would avoid.

·         Francis – patrician, also a very gifted scholar but less motivated than Henry, more able to see that wonderful theories can lead to devastating results, a homosexual.

·         Camilla – the only girl in the group, with a fey beauty, probably the quietest member, but all the boys, including Francis, are besotted with her.

·         Charles, twin brother to Camilla, whose self-destructive streak emerges and becomes more pronounced as extreme circumstances engulf the group. This streak manifests itself in incestuous jealousy of his sister, perhaps leading to actual incest – we don't know – and alcoholism.

The book was clearly written just before the advent of mobile phones for all and the Facebook generation. Slightly too often, bits of plot turn on people looking for a payphone and then finding that the person they desperately want to speak to is not in or will not answer.

Otherwise it reads like a very contemporary work. This is largely because of the social habits of the whole campus milieu and the complete lack of any moral consensus for anybody in that community. It is just assumed that everybody will take drugs, drink to excess, sleep around and all of that. Nobody even questions it. When Camilla and Charles are suspected of incest, nobody is horrified or even particularly surprised. When somebody is nightmarishly killed in one of the group's excesses, nobody suggests that confession of the truth is a possibility. When Bunny is murdered by the group, they are all terrified, horrified, not to mention massively inconvenienced. But nobody suggests it was wrong – Richard only really starts to consider this when he meets Bunny's grieving family for the funeral.

These then are people completely without any moral compass, any commitment to traditional mores, any boundaries at all. Paul their mentor finds Christianity faintly distasteful, the Jesuits rather less so than the rest because at least they aim for intellectual rigour: but it doesn't cross anyone's mind to ask, "Could this be true?" The use of the classics is rather like Shakespeare's, in the sense that it enables the author to take people completely outside the values of Christendom. It is impossible to avoid the reflection that their lives would have ended up far less severely damaged had they had any kind of ethical baseline. It's almost as if Tartt is pursuing a moral experiment – what might life be like for people who acknowledge no boundaries at all?

There are some longueurs. The section dealing with Bunny's funeral and the hideously awkward time that they as his killers spend with his family doesn't really take us anywhere much beyond some comedy of embarrassment and Richard's reflection mentioned above that perhaps murder is wrong. Tartt doesn't seem to be at her best here. She even names a billionaire character Paul Vanderfeller, a rather lazy combination of Paul Getty, Vanderbilt and Rockerfeller.

For me it is very odd that in their pursuit of Henry's obsession with Dionysian mysteries they actually experience an altered form of consciousness (except for Richard who hears about it later.) This includes an encounter with a mysterious interloper who may be Bacchus himself – who is certainly presented as a personification of their transcendental ecstasy (in the old sense of leaving oneself behind, not the modern meaning of intense pleasure). Yet they make nothing more of this experience. Nobody says, "is this the key to the universe?" or "have we met God?" Nobody reflects on its meaning for their ongoing lives. Nobody even seems to think it worth trying to repeat the experience. It's as if "an experience" is all that can be said about it – one amongst many, to be given no greater or less weight than any other event in this fugitive life. No truth value is accorded to this encounter with the divine – or daemonic. Good or bad (and it led to murder), it's just another thing that happened. Is this a Generation X thing – or possibly Y? To this extent the author's early assertion that the group is highly disciplined intellectually is suspect. They don't seem to focus on meaning, implication, or consequences. Instead Tartt means simply that they take their studies very seriously and work hard.

So their encounter with Dionysius – was it divine or demoniac? In their ecstatic frenzy they kill a stranger they bump into, tearing him apart with supernatural strength, as the Maenads were said to do in the Greek era. Then they murder Bunny as it becomes apparent that he is likely to betray them. Fear, jealousy (it looks like Henry and Camilla performed some kind of sex act to invoke the deity) and depression stalk the group, which is shattered by the pressure.

They all end up deeply damaged: Charles tries to murder Henry, Henry commits suicide, Francis tries to, Charles becomes an alcoholic, Camilla is unable to form deep relationships any more. Their great gifts are flung to the winds. It could be a morality tale about what happens to you when you mess with the occult, except that Tartt is too much of a writer to descend to the level of lectures: she lets her characters speak for themselves. It certainly calls for the classic tag "Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." But perhaps Tartt's own classicism makes her fastidious about quoting what seems to be a Victorian line spuriously attributed to Euripides.

The other spiritual reflection I want to bring to this excellent novel is really from C S Lewis. In his essay on the inner circle, reflecting on an incident in Tolstoy, he considers that there are few things with greater power to make a decent person do evil than the desire to enter an esoteric group and to keep their approval. I suppose Tartt's title – The Secret Society – shows us that this is the dynamic she is seeking to explore. Henry's classics class has the hallmarks of such an inner circle: an elite group, it's closed to outsiders and looks down on them. It possesses esoteric knowledge, it's bound by shared secrets, and it keeps its own codes. In this atmosphere of exclusion from society at large the group creates its own rules, or lack of them, and feels no obligation towards the laws, customs and beliefs about right and wrong which obtain on the outside.

In this state of isolation anything is possible, including terrible things. It's powerful, it's intoxicating - and it totally devastates everyone involved.