Satire is at its best when it combines humour with an ability to razor the very real flaws of the world. Donna Tartt mastered this formula in The Secret History (1992). There’s a sense in which the novel has a connection to Oxford: both settings are cloistered, academic, moody, moneyed. Oxford is known for its Classics department and The Secret History features a class of (very rich) Greek students. If art mirrors life, then we should expect similarities in other areas. Turn to look at the cast of characters.
First is Henry, the super-scholar, a cold and calculated mastermind. Like every character in the book, he is a total self-parody, best summarised through a series of satirical vignettes. He loves Gucci out of lofty fascination: “I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.” Another time he quips a helpful historical backlog to flesh out his brainstorming (“The Persians were master poisoners”, he explains, while strategising ways to murder his friend.) He is so engrossed in his own academic world that he has never even heard of the moon landing. (“The others had somehow managed to pick this up along the way,” adds Tartt pithily.) Brainy and commanding, he’s the one who leads the central murder plot.
This is what Tartt has to say about Henry: “Henry’s fatal flaw is that he’s tried so hard to make himself perfect […] he’s tried to hard to root out things in himself which he finds unpleasant or distasteful that he’s really managed to tear out a lot of what makes him human as well.”
Since Oxford has a lot of nerds who have been told all their life that they’re much cleverer than the people around them, it would probably feature quite highly on a global ranking of places with the most Henrys. Of course, by “most Henrys”, I don’t just mean sociopathic murderers. There are traces of Henry in every academic genius who lacks even one particle of warmth, in every involuntarily blunt tutor who speaks with a smug twist in their voice, in every disciplined scholar who has spent so long in the RadCam that they’ve lost touch with what they have in common with others. I absolutely feel for people whose commitment to efficiency and pragmatism can unintentionally appear to others as lovelessness. Less so for those whose efficiency and pragmatism has turned into actual lovelessness.
Second is Bunny, the archetypal dumb jock. Bunny is the source of more than half of the comedy; even in death his ironic stamp never leaves the pages. If your college has a “gap yah” crowd and a big sports team, then it probably has its own local Bunny. The narrative is a stream of constant subtle digs at him. It is specified the Greek class play Go Fish because it is the only card game Bunny knows. Early on in the book he steals a cheesecake with a taped note that says “Please do not steal this. I am on financial aid.” Chapters later, we hear him “explaining vigorously and quite unselfconsciously what he thought ought to be done to people who stole from house refrigerators.” He writes a spirited paper on “Metahemeralism”, which is not a word. With self-confidence that far exceeds his intelligence, Bunny is the college rugby player who gets into a lot of arguments and turns up to his tutorials with an out-of-charge laptop.
Finally, there’s Richard, the narrator. Like a lot of young people – and this is not specific to Oxford – he is anxious to fit in. But beyond that, he exemplifies a very specific Oxonian social dynamic: a desire to join the elite, Classics friend group. These people lament that they are misunderstood; Richard is all too happy to agree. He is mostly blind to their flaws, partly willfully, partly because he has something in common with them. By the time he realises that they are not brilliant, he has effectively cut himself off from everyone else in his college. Freshers: avoid this mistake, pick solid friends over shiny ones, and steer well clear of his “morbid longing for the picturesque.”
