“Secret Place” a Transporting Experience

Selena, one of the Irish boarding school girls in Tana French’s latest psychological thriller, “The Secret Place,” has a copy of “Alice in Wonderland” by her bed. It’s a minor detail nearly halfway in, of no use to the plot, but it is that special kind of offhand note that reveals the tenor of the whole novel. Most of us survived, never mind how miraculously, the preteen years and their indelible horrors. But reading “The Secret Place” is like living that time all over again: tumbling down a hole into adulthood, awakening to a world terrifically distorted yet recognizable, feeling misunderstood by everyone and desperate to please. This is both the strength and weakness of the book: how entirely it takes the reader from the shores of adulthood back into the troubled waters of a young-adult Wonderland.

In the opening pages, French thrusts the girls and their lives in the reader’s face with relentless energy: “Remember oh remember back when we were, a girl’s voice clear and urgent, the fast light beat lifting you up off your toes and speeding your heart to keep up, and then it’s gone.” This isn’t the usual thriller’s speeding for the sake of speeding. The passage exudes girlish breathlessness, adolescent pangs of anticipation, elusive happiness, and fear of falling behind on the racecourse. Its elusive italicized words are lines from a popular radio song which Holly Mackey—the first student we meet at St. Kilda’s prim, proud, respectable Dublin suburbs school for girls—struggles to grasp and identify. She’s part of a gang of girls that also includes outspoken Julia, shy Becca, and dreamy Selena. They have a rival gang at St. Kilda’s: queen bee Joanne with a backup trio of fake-blond-fake-tan drones in tow. Think “Mean Girls” plus Irish accents, a larger cast of characters, and social media. Plus, one of these eight has committed a murder.

Enter investigators from the Dublin Murder Squad: cautious, smooth-talking Stephen Moran and his leader on the case, beautiful but tough-as-nails Antoinette Conway. The novel alternates between Moran’s chapters, where he narrates his single day of reconnoitring with Conway, and third-person chapters on the girls’ earlier lives. The latter have an edgy undercurrent: they lead up to the night when handsome Chris Harper, from the neighboring boys’ school, was killed with a piece of gardening equipment. When Moran gets a new clue from the school’s student bulletin board, “The Secret Place,” Chris Harper’s case beckons the detectives again.

Nothing is lost on Moran and Conway, and one of the book’s great pleasures is to watch their minds at work. To milk a confession out of Orla, one of Joanne’s toadies and the school’s slowest wit, they improvise the story of an uncooperative former suspect who gets attacked by the ghost of a pet dog he killed: “After the doctors got him cleaned up,” Conway said, “O’Farrell spilled his guts. Full confession. When we took him off in cuffs, he was still screaming, ‘Keep it away from me! Don’t let it get me!’ Grown man, begging like a kid.” They are quite the dynamic duo. Conway, extravagant, twirls and spins off the gory images to a cowed Orla while Moran furtively searches the girl’s bedroom for evidence, now and then modestly adding his own one-two into the mix. Moran’s deadpan brilliance in dialogue as well as narration accounts for some of the novel’s best writing.

The boarding-girl chapters are more unevenly written. French comes too close to the moronic girlspeak that she tries so assiduously to critique, with the result of blah passages. “It’s only half past eight and Julia is bored already,” she writes. “She and the other three are in a tight circle on the dance floor, ignoring the OMG LOL!!! mileage that Joanne’s gang are getting out of Becca’s jeans.” The novel has a lot of these “fake epic period cramps” in its style, making the reader who enjoys French elsewhere want to groan. Studied girlish parlance, understandable on page one, gets old fast when French doesn’t distance herself from it with sufficient irony.

With this drawback, though, French does get far enough inside the girls’ heads to reveal an important truth: the scariest thing isn’t even the act of the murder, or its circumstances, or who did it. It is the school itself. Cruelty, cyber-bullying, betrayal: the well-groomed inhabitants of St. Kilda’s are vicious enough to each other without any murder taking place. Moran soon feels, looking around, that “I couldn’t see any pretty any more, without seeing dangerous underneath. Splinters.” The more Moran and Conway look, the more they realize how adult the dangers lurking in this juvenile place are. In this sense French’s novel is like that other bestseller with a scholastic setting, Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History.”

French’s title also reflects this sense of hidden threats. There is the official “Secret Place,” a hokey hallway board where nothing is actually secret. Then there’s the real secret place, a glade of cypress trees outside the school where the girls celebrate rites of friendship. Poignantly French describes their first night leaving their rooms without permission for the little clearing: they are barely containing their laughter, dancing, running, and feeling over it all that “This has nothing to do with what anyone else in all the world would approve or forbid. This is all their own.” The girls will learn to enjoy this feeling of possession over themselves; each will have her secrets to guard. At the end of the day, “The Secret Place” is most profound when it reveals that the real secret places, the most impenetrable and perilous ones, are those deep inside.