Poor Little Rich Kids: Privilege, Murder and Melancholia in Kevin Power's Bad Day in Blackrock and Tana French's The Secret Place

This article explores the representation of Irish youth attending exclusive boarding schools as portrayed in Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock (2008) and Tana French’s The Secret Place (2014). Both novels paint a bleak picture of privileged young men and women coming of age during the years of Ireland’s economic boom, the Celtic Tiger. The setting of their expensive boarding schools is shown to be a place where material privilege, toxic masculinity, and an elite status, which seems almost reminiscent of the old colonial elites in Ireland, intersect and ultimately culminate in murder. Bad Day in Blackrock and The Secret Place offer a cultural critique of twenty-first-century Ireland, drawing attention to stark social divisions and growing materialism, the toxic atmosphere fostered in boarding schools, the entitlement of students and the repolarisation of traditional gender roles. And yet, the novels go beyond mere criticism: this article shows that they also express a sense of melancholia prevalent in Ireland at the end of the Celtic Tiger boom, as the deaths of two young men become intertwined with the unconscious loss of an imagined bright future. The melancholic tone of both novels is further amplified by the use of conventions from the genre of the Irish Big House novel, which throughout Irish literary history has appealed to writers chronicling the end of an era.