- Feb 5, 2002
- 183,596
- 66,827
- Country
- United States
- Gender
- Female
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Others
Catholic readers will understand better than most the danger at the heart of Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History,” a novel about what happens when religious ecstasy is divorced from morality and Christ. The book, a beautifully written thriller, is about a group of students at a fictional liberal arts college in Vermont. Encouraged by a charismatic classics professor, they attempt to summon the god Bacchus — and succeed, to their sorrow and undoing. The book was published in 1992, at the end of the materialist ’80s, when the druggie, free-love liberation movements were a mere memory and the resulting social destruction had come into view. The novel’s emerging young adults value beauty, wealth, glamour, drunkenness, decadent sexuality and the lure of esoteric knowledge. Some don’t know better. Some, like the book’s Catholic characters, should know better but are seduced.
A significant moment occurs halfway through, when the narrator, Richard, already deeply embroiled in evil, dines with his professor, in some way seeking solace. “There was roasted lamb, new potatoes, peas with leeks and fennel; a rich and almost maddeningly delicious bottle of Château Latour,” he reports. It’s an elegant, sophisticated repast, like the world that Richard hopes his education will unlock. But a final dish, “mushrooms, steaming in a red wine sauce that smelled of coriander and rue,” causes him to fear that the banquet may be poisoned — as metaphorically it has been by his sin.
Continued below.
www.oursundayvisitor.com
A significant moment occurs halfway through, when the narrator, Richard, already deeply embroiled in evil, dines with his professor, in some way seeking solace. “There was roasted lamb, new potatoes, peas with leeks and fennel; a rich and almost maddeningly delicious bottle of Château Latour,” he reports. It’s an elegant, sophisticated repast, like the world that Richard hopes his education will unlock. But a final dish, “mushrooms, steaming in a red wine sauce that smelled of coriander and rue,” causes him to fear that the banquet may be poisoned — as metaphorically it has been by his sin.
Continued below.
Lamb with a hint of danger
Explore Donna Tartt’s The Secret History through a Catholic lens, with a roasted leg of lamb stuffed with wild mushrooms and red wine sauce.
www.oursundayvisitor.com
