The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

Excellent… Donna Tartt has discovered not the usual collegiate mix of sex, drugs and rock and roll, but a heart of darkness as stony and chilling as any Greek tragedian ever plumbed… she keeps the pace fast and the tension taut… a thinking person’s thriller. (Newsday)

My thoughts (hastily scribbled on a postcard):

Perhaps more than a murder story and less than a novel. Certainly, all the Greek allusions are interesting - but mostly to someone who already knows them. James (my brother), I think, likes it because it contains so many of his hopes and fears, set against a college background with which he’s more or less familiar. But for my part, the first section of the book is too short, the second too long. What takes place in the second is really only a deepening of the characterisation, which had it occurred in the first section would have made the climax more startling. I should talk to James about it, I think.

The Discovery of Heaven, by Harry Mulisch

He can write and he can make scholarship exciting. Unless you’re exceptionally cultivated you’ll learn a lot from this novel… the final chapters are sparkling and irresistible. (Tibor Fischer in The Times)

 This masterly synthesis of idea and story makes complex concepts perfectly comprehensible and dramatic. Mulisch's bid for a masterpiece works commandingly on every level. Could be one of the best novels of the last twenty years. (Kirkus Reviews)

 Exhilarating, magnificent and dangerous. (The Times Literary Supplement)

My thoughts (roughly scribbled on a piece of paper):

What a load of tosh! This is being written on a bad day, but the last two weeks weren’t bad days, so it doesn't colour the view much. “The final chapters are sparkling and irresistible.” Bollocks, more like. The last quarter is dreadful. Hasn't he seen Raiders Of The Lost Ark? (or rather: when did he....?) Seeking out the tablets, how crass. And then whisking Quinten off in a flash of light as he ascends to heaven - you’re joking, surely. The final chapters are ridiculous, tedious, and unconvincing. I didn’t care what happened at all, because I had given up by the end.

If the final chapters are simply appalling, the rest of the book is more difficult to define. A philosophical novel it is not. An exercise in name-dropping platitudes, perhaps. Unlike Nicholas Mosley’s Hopeful Monsters, there is no insight into the way that ideas might affect a person’s life. The ideas - names - are there for a reader in the know to nod their head at, but little more. And as for ‘learning’ something from the book, nothing is treated in any depth or thought throughout - if you don’t know what is being referred to, you’re lost. The book is anything but ‘profound’ and only dangerous as a physical object.

So, its not philosophy, but is it literature? Perhaps. There is poignancy in the human relationships, there is tragedy, such as Ada’s coma, which has some excellent descriptions, and Max’s relationship with Sophia. There is, in the first three-quarters at least, some kind of novel in there. But the whole thing is cast within the framework of angels organising events, influencing people, even killing them, and the whole effect is that it is stripped of everything relating to emotion or poignancy. For a book which spends so much time talking about the absurdity of life and how that is in a sense meaningful, it is infuriating: the absurdity is only within the human world and it is perfectly meaningful from outside. Helga gets her throat cut, and dies trying to use a vandalised telephone box. But we know that she has only had her throat cut and that the telephone box has only been vandalised because angels decided that it should happen, which as a literary device is suicide. Every action, every thought has been implanted - so how is a reader supposed to sympathise? Answer: you don’t. All the characters, all the events are tainted by artificiality and contrivance, explicitly by the angels and implicitly by the author.

It isn’t just a pretentious novel, philosophically, but an abomination, since in literary terms it is an exercise in how not to write a novel. If you want to read a similar - but far superior - book, read Mosley; if you want to read a philosophical novel, read Stiller by Max Frisch; if you have to read this, skip the intermezzos etc. and the last quarter. But otherwise, don’t touch it with a barge-pole.

(The title, I suppose, is ironic: the book is ‘about’ the loss of heaven - we are deserted - and when Max discovered it, he was hit by a well-aimed meteor. And why have we been abandoned? Because of technology! Technology is evil and leads us away from religion, until we abandon God and He abandons us. Big Deal. Yawn)