Reviews

I don’t know how to feel about this book. It had some good lines and some scenes were quite fascinating. But otherwise I was bored. I might recommend it to some people but very few.

meharmannava's review against another edition

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3.0

After my venture into the dark academia subgenre with [b:Babel: An Arcane History|57945316|Babel|R.F. Kuang|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1677361825l/57945316._SY75_.jpg|90789229], I thought it would be interesting to pick up The Secret History, perhaps the most famous dark academia book of all. My expectations were very high, and I did really want to like this book, but unfortunately, what I felt most while reading this book was indifference. I didn't care about the characters, and I normally love morally grey characters—but I didn't find any of them to be compelling beyond the crimes they committed. Why were they this way, beyond privilege and boredom? What motivations did they truly have? For characters that were supposed to be interesting and grey and anti-hero-esque, they were surprisingly dull. Sure, they're supposed to be unlikeable characters, but unlikeable shouldn't mean uninteresting. Other than Bunny,

Spoiler

who isn't even present for 2/3 of the book

, Richard was the most complex character, and that's saying something because I can maybe name two of his personality traits (three if I tried hard enough). And why was Julian painted as this huge paternal figure and divine influence when he rarely got more than a paragraph interspersed here and there? His presence barely made a dent in this book.

Spoiler

Also, the random incest? Good lord WHY??

Honestly, I was teetering between rating this 2-3 stars, but since I did enjoy some parts of this book, I thought 3 stars might be more fitting. Maybe it would have been 3.5 stars if 150-200 pages were shaved off this novel. The the latter 2/3 of this book crawls at a snail's pace. The amount of times I had to read about these college students smoking, doing every single drug they could find, and drinking to terrible excess while "enjoying" each other's company (and enjoying is a strong word, because half the time they barely seemed to tolerate each other, and rarely ever seemed to have genuine conversation sober), was ridiculous. Like each scene felt like a deja vu because it was a same thing over and over and over again.

When there was something actually happening, like the action and investigation and the tense suspense of the will-they-won't-they-be-discovered, the book picked up, and I'd be invested again for 50 or so pages. And then it would be back to the dull, repetitive scenes. This cycle repeated so many times throughout the last 300 pages.

I also didn't find any of the intellectual discussions to be in any way compelling, not that they had many, and for a dark academia book, I can't say I really felt the academia part like I did with Babel (hate to compare, but that is my only reference in this subgenre so far). I understand that the book was portraying the shallowness of their "knowledge" and how they're more about the aesthetics, but when the blurb promises a moral dilemma that is so philosophically charged, the book did not come through with those promises. What drew this cast of characters to their actions? What type of intellectual discourse could so greatly corrupt a person's morality? What aspects of ancient Greek history and philosophy and mythology influenced these students to behave this way? These were the types of questions I was expecting to be answered, the type of interesting discourse to be present throughout the book, but there was none of that. Rather, the few discussions of ancient Greek philosophy we were presented with were superficial and seemingly there just to remind us that, oh yeah, these students do study ancient Greek. Cool.

Overall, I felt like the world of Hampden College was such a privileged, white, shallow world, and maybe that was why I had a hard time getting invested. It was trying to be a profound, literary-fiction-on-steroids indictment of human morality, but the lack of depth of the characters and their motives didn't allow any real and meaningful exploration of these ideas. I just wanted so much more from this book—and I do think it had the potential of greatness, but it just didn't quite hit that mark for me.