So it has to be our #NovelPairing.Ernest Hemingway in front of Shakespeare and Company in Paris with owner Sylvia Beach It’s all there waiting to happen in the glass and on the page. Would you – could you – imagine going as far as them? The Psi buzzes with their youthful energy but gives us a hint of darkness to come. The great charm of The Secret History is the sense of being let in on, well, a secret – of being admitted to this elite clique and swept along. “It’s complex but not subtle,” says Simon. “And so is this story-the motivations, the consequences.” I fear this Barolo is too big. “Barolo La Tartufaia Giulia Negri 2010 is complicated,” says Rebecca. We end, as the novel does, in very dark territory. “I can imagine Julian serving it at a tutorial,” says Simon. “Psi is the Greek letter shaped like a tulip and it’s referenced by Charles.” It’s deep but not unfathomable-more of a shadow on a sunny afternoon. Next up is richly spiced Psi 2011 by Peter Sisseck. Richard could have walked away.” But a white wine for a book so steeped in blood? “It’s a real echo of how it all begins,” says Simon from Foyles. Sometimes the citrus sauvignon comes forward, sometimes it’s the more savoury Semillon character.” “This wine teeters on a tightrope,” says Rebecca. To begin we taste Gathering 2013 by the Lane. “I’ve shortlisted three wines – one for each stage of this incredible book.” “Happily for us, Dionysus is the god of wine as well as theatre,” says Rebecca from Corney & Barrow. Drink, drugs, prayer, even small doses of poison.” Their need to silence him intersects with their desire to escape the mundane – to experience a Bacchanal: “to escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one’s moment of being, to lose one’s self utterly. Bunny knew something he shouldn’t about the group and threatens to expose them. What follows is not so much a whodunit as why. The novel opens with the FBI discovering Bunny’s body. This clique is under the spell of their charmingly enigmatic Classics professor, Julian Morrow.

There he basically falls in love with a group of five intensely eccentric Classics students: Henry, Bunny, Francis and the twins Charles and Camilla. A campus much like the one Tartt attended. He flees Plano, California, arriving at the fictional Hampden College in Vermont and reinvents himself. The book’s narrator, Richard, has echoes of Charles Ryder from Brideshead Revisited-a young man abandoning beginnings he’s embarrassed by in search of sophistication. You don’t expect murder, an encounter with Dionysus or such a specular unravelling. It’s a campus novel so you’d expect drinking. The Secret History has our booziest bibulous-o-graphy so far ranging from Beer to Whisky with everything in between including blue Margaritas and a very fine Chateau Latour. “As a matter of fact Charles did drink a lot,” confesses Richard Papen, with characteristic understatement.

Richard papen the secret history