metaphortunate | The Secret Place

On rereading Tana French's The Secret Place…

Little more spoiler space…

Okay.

It's a fantasy book, right? It's clear that, in the framework of the book, the magic the girls do is real? That is the conclusion I came to. I mean, not only do the lights turn on and off, or in extreme cases break, at moments of high emotion, not only does the key heat up so Joanne can't grab it, not only can one of them float in the cypress grove - but also Holly can, when bored, idly float a candy wrapper into Julia's face just to annoy her.
Also Holly recognizes that it was one of the four of them who did it when the light bulb blows when Alison sees the ghost, and it would be unfair to the reader to have a plot point like that turn on nothing. I love the ambiguities in this book, but there's a difference between ambiguity and inconsistency.
But I think it is also clear that, even in the world of the book, this is a temporary magic. Holly realizes that someday she will honestly, genuinely think that it was all her imagination. Her mother illustrates how intense, even perhaps magic, friendships fall apart in the adult world. There's that moment where Stephen describes Julia crossing the border between childhood - where adults are "faceless mentallers trying to wreck everything, no point trying to understand them" - and adulthood - where adults are the people you have to deal with. And that you don't know who'll still be with you on the other side.
Rebecca will not be with them.
My god, Rebecca. She permanently gave up her life for a temporary forever. Do you think the girls will visit her? In prison or in a mental ward? What do you think Rebecca will be like when she's fifty?
What I really, really loved about this book was the way it illustrated the way you say forever when you're young, and you genuinely honestly mean it, with all your heart, but it still doesn't actually last because you don't understand how time works. What you're describing is intensity. Your emotion, your bond, or whatever you're talking about, is deep enough to take up the whole world - at the moment. And that's real and it is important. But it's deep, it's not wide; it doesn't last, because nothing lasts with time eating away at it like waves at Highway 1, unless you put in the work to rebuild it, constantly, boringly, like the way construction crews go out to repair Highway 1 all winter. Ugh, it's so pedestrian! It's the opposite of emotion.
So the whole thing could have been different if the girls had done the awkward and horrible work of talking to each other about what was going on. Instead, they all dove into the intensity, the magic. Selena let herself dissolve into the magic of first love, of sex, and then of noble sacrifice in the name of her vow; theoretically in the name of friendship, but she never told her friends what was going on with her, she never asked them to help her. Julia embraced self-sacrifice, she gave up her body rather than talk to Selena. Rebecca of course took up blood sacrifice. And Holly, perhaps the most down-to-earth one, decided that clearing the situation up by using the police as flushing dogs would be simpler than having a conversation.
Rebecca is right that Chris Harper is the one who broke them all apart, even if he never touched her or Holly. So…was she also right in the message she read in the world, the sky, the cypress grove? The sky speaks to her like it does to Childermass in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. If the girls' ESP is real…is that real too? Within the context of the book, was she right to kill Chris Harper?
Or was it that she should have killed Julia? Or Selena? She remembers: "In old times, there were punishments for forcing a girl who had taken a vow." She leaves unsaid that there were also punishments for girls who had taken those vows and broke them. And neither Selena nor Julia were forced.
I loved the Picasso portrait we got of Chris Harper. Was he a manipulative teenage asshole who would have done anything to get in Selena's pants? Was he the holy in love guy Stephen saw on the cell phone video? Was he the private, gentle and kind boy who made the world make sense for Selena? Was he an asshole who was using his private gentleness and kindness to get into Selena's pants because he was in love? He used Rebecca's phone problems to get a secret phone to Selena: but he really did fix Rebecca's phone problems, though she never knew he had another motive. Who was he? How many licks does it take to get to the center of Chris Harper? The world will never know.
All the classism and sexism stuff with the cops was perfectly done but I don't really care. I can't even really enjoy most cop detective fiction these days because I just can't swallow the axiom that the cops are good guys who are trying to find the guilty and protect the innocent, not right now. I started rereading this because it was still on my device and I had no internet connection and it was so magic realist that I was okay with it, but the cops, whatever.
Selena:
"After a while she understands that something destroyed Chris to save her.

After a while longer she understands that this means it wants her for its own, and that she belongs to it for good now."

I think she means the cypress grove, or the magic, or something. But actually she's describing Rebecca.
Rebecca killing Chris didn't fix them. They didn't stick together, they didn't start talking. Do you think Rebecca going down for the crime will?

I took the magical realism aspects as a shared delusion, actually. For what it's worth. (They didn't bother me, though, because I think that sort of thing happens.)

-J

How come?

I find that answer unsatisfying for a few reasons. Partly because if the magic is all a delusion, then it's just a much less interesting mystery because so much of the story comes down to "they were crazy". There's far fewer elements in the book, if you see what I mean. Partly because it's not like the girls were into that sort of thing before it happened; if magic was their big thing and they were trying to cast spells and summon shit and eventually convinced themselves that they really could, then yes, okay. Then the interesting thing could be the exploration of that. But it wasn't like that at all. Just out of the blue? Eh. And partly because my gold standard for that particular trope is Stephen Fry's The Hippopotamus, and if that's what French was doing here, it was much less good than that book, so I prefer to think that she was doing something else.

Three reasons, I suspect: one, I'm predisposed to believe reality in fiction over fantasy; two, Tana French's other work (which all clearly takes place in this same universe) often plays with the power of imagination, but never in a way that suggests that the realistic interpretation is the wrong one; and three, I really do think that sort of all-encompassing friendship is conducive to that sort of collective delusion, and that it doesn't at all mean they were crazy. The stuff at the end about Holly looking at those aspects of what happened differently and no longer believing them fully really drove that interpretation home for me.

-J

Edited 2014-12-29 22:16 (UTC)

I stopped reading your post and downloaded the book a couple bulletpoints in. This sounds fascinating, thank you.

It is indeed a fascinating book, and I'd love to hear what you think after you read it!

The Secret Place

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