Please let the Secret out of the bag
The Secret History was the kind of book that haunted you, the way the characters were haunted, left you obsessed, going back time and time again to try to make sense of it.
Isn’t it weird how Donna Tartt’s third novel, The Goldfinch, is the first of her stories to make it to the movies? It’s particularly strange that there hasn’t been an adaptation of her debut, the sumptuous, cinematic and, as some unkind reviewers have since suggested, best novel The Secret History.
Published in 1992, the book about a group of erudite, murderous university students at an ivyclad New England university obsessed with beauty, each other, and the classics, was a massive hit. With 5 million sales, it hit the all-time-best bestseller charts, and was translated into more than 20 languages.
It was the kind of book that haunted you, the way the characters were haunted, left you obsessed, going back time and time again to try to make sense of it. A friend of mine read it so often he could recite whole sections. A colleague confessed she’d read the book too many times to count.
Even now, more than 20 years after I first read it, scenes from the novel that reviewer Ted Gioia called ‘‘especially laudable for how persuasively
[it] chronicles the steps from studying classics to committing murder’’, play in my head like a movie.
From the chilling, confessional prologue, which opens with the almost blase account of a murder, Tartt’s writing is intrinsically visual. Dark skies ‘‘shiver above the apple blossoms’’, search and rescue teams are ‘‘sprinkled over Mount Cataracts like ants in a sugar bowl’’, a dead body lies at the bottom of a ravine being softly, inevitably, covered by snow.
The main characters, young, beautiful and enormously privileged – a few of Hollywood’s favourite things – are introduced by what they’re wearing, their clothes a visual shorthand for the archetypes they embody: Henry’s dark English suits and umbrella and Francis’ ‘‘french cuffs’’ and ‘‘magnificent neckties’’.
Even their emotions for one another have a look.
‘‘I loved her,’’ Richard says at one point. ‘‘I loved the very sight of her: she was wearing a cashmere sweater, soft grey-green, and her grey eyes had a luminous celadon tint.’’
This group of hedonistic young people then drink, commit incest (maybe – it’s never clear, but like that’s ever stopped Hollywood before), perform bizarre bacchanalian rites, plot and carry out murder, and conspire to undermine the police investigation, like the classiest David Fincher movie ever.
The Secret History even has movie lineage. Think of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 psychological horror Rope, a film in which a charismatic professor slowly comes to realise over the course of a dinner party that his impressionable students have taken his lectures on Nietzsche to heart and murdered a classmate. Flip Nietzsche for Aristotle and Plato – and switch the point of view from the teacher to the students – and you have The Secret History.
It’s all the stuff Hollywood – its 10,000 eyes ever on the lookout for Oscar gold – goes bonkers for.
So why is Ansel Elgort playing a mawkish Theo Decker in The Goldfinch (in cinemas now), instead of portraying Richard Papen, the socially ambitious narrator of The Secret History?
Just as it haunts the characters in the book, death haunted The Secret History’s adaptation.
According to Town and Country magazine, the movie rights were snapped up in 1992 by Warner Bros producer Alan J Pakula (To Kill a Mockingbird, All the President’s Men, Sophie’s Choice) who, in a fit of inspired genius, tapped fabled essayist Joan Didion to write the script.
Things were just about to kick off when Pakula was killed in a car crash in 1998. The project died with him.
Four years later, with Tartt’s second novel The Little Friend about to hit the shelves, film writer Jeff Dawson announced with alarm in The Evening Standard that the rights to the most beloved book had been bought for Gwyneth Paltrow by Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax.
Paltrow would produce, and her untried brother Jake would direct (and possibly write).
The siblings shelved the project later that year when their father, Bruce Paltrow, died suddenly of pneumonia.
After that, the book’s rights reverted to Tartt and, like Pandora shutting the lid of her box of horrors on hope, she has not parted with them since.
None of that need stop us from daydreaming about the film that could have been.
Indeed, the internet is loaded with fantasy castings for the film, including one that plucks its stars entirely from the cast of Vanderpump Rules.
My own, slightly more traditional, dream casting is as follows: Director: David Fincher There can be only one man behind the camera here. He may be more of a misanthrope than Tartt, but his often chilly style is a perfect match for her detached authorial voice.
Julian Morrow: David Thewlis
Imagine Thewlis’ arrogant, disaffected Johnny from Naked, aged up and mashed up with his shabby Dark Arts teacher Remus Lupin from the Harry Potter movies. You feel me?
Richard Papen: Jack Reynor
Like a half-formed Jay Gatsby, Richard is playing a part in order to fit in with a group of people who’ve utterly dazzled him. He’s also strangely detached from the murder he helps commit. What could be more chilling than someone as inherently warm and charming as Reynor playing that? It worked like a charm for him in Midsommar.
Judy Poovey: Aidy Bryant
With her ‘‘wild clothes, frosted hair, and red Corvette’’, Judy is a ‘‘terrifying tropical’’ counterpoint to Camilla. Bryant can bring all that Californian brashness to Richard’s would-be paramour.
Henry Winter: Liam Hemsworth
If anyone could convince you to get massively wasted and go on a wild, violent, possibly cannibalistic rampage through the countryside, it’s this magnificent, slightly smarmy man. Francis Abernathy: Manny Jacinto
Elegant, dramatic, debonair – not words you might automatically put together with the guy who plays Jason Mendoza, the loveable yet empty-headed character from The Good Place. He also doesn’t have red hair, which I am sure will annoy fans, but he’s still the Francis for me.
Camilla and Charles Abernathy: Daisy Ridley and Douglas Booth
I originally had Tuppence Middleton here, as she and
Booth have played vaguely creepy brother and sister before, in the criminally underappreciated Jupiter Ascending. But Ridley’s dramatic chops won out.
You need Ridley’s aristocratic air to play the coldyet-alluring Camilla, the object of Henry, Richard and apparently Charles’ lascivious affections, sympathetically.
Edmund ‘‘Bunny’’ Corcoran: Caleb Landry Jones
If you’ve seen him in Get Out, you know this rubber-faced star has everything you want in an obnoxious, clingy, amoral brat whose brutal death nonetheless delivers a helping of pitiful pathos.