What Book to Read?

The Hidden (2009) is the fourth novel by Tobias Hill. I’ve read one of his earlier ones, The Love of Stones (2001), and was intrigued enough by it to try this one.

Hill was born in London in 1970. He was at first best known as a poet; he was at one time Poet in Residence at Regent’s Park Zoo, and his third collection of poems was entitled Zoo. His first novel, Underground, was published in 1999. He has been acclaimed as one of the best young writers in Britain and has won prizes for his poetry and short stories.

The Hidden is about Ben Mercer, a young man adrift after the failure of his marriage and academic career. Ben flees to Greece, where after a period working in a cafe, he joins an archaeological dig in Sparta. There is a group of friends among the workers; they seem special and different. Ben desperately wants to be accepted by them. But when at last he is, he finds that he is involved in something rather more than friendship. The group of friends clearly admire the values of Sparta, and, as Ben finds, seek to emulate them. But many things are ‘hidden’, and exposing them to the light of day does not always have good results.

I have to say I didn’t understand the end, which one critic described as an anti climax. Certainly the tension and drive that have been building up don’t seem to be resolved, for better or worse. Yet this didn’t spoil the book for me – even though I often judge a book by how well it ends. It was too good in other ways for this to really matter.

Perhaps the fact Hill is a poet –and therefore one to whom words and rhythms matter enormously – is reflected in his prose, because I think he writes beautifully. This of course raises the issue of what I mean by ‘beautifully’. What is good writing, and how is it different from, say, ordinary writing? I like John Carey’s definition of literature – which I take to be good writing – in his book What Good Are the Arts (2005). It is, as he notes, a subjective definition. He says ‘literature is writing that I want to remember – not for its content alone, as one might want to remember a computer manual, but for itself: those particular words in that particular order’. Let me quote you a paragraph, and you may – or may not – agree this is good writing.

He drank sweet tea and watched the dig. He had studied Therapne at Oxford and had refreshed his reading in Athens, but the reality drew him out of himself. He recognised the lay of the land, the hills and the saddle that ran between them. He knew the history of the ruins on each, the palaces and shrines and graves built one atop the other, like corals, the living on the dead. But the green of the slopes in the sunlight, and the flash of spring flowers; and beyond the ziggurat of the Menelaion, the clear air across the valley, and the city below, and the mountains beyond the city, white-capped, momentous … it was spectacular. Nothing he had ever read had thought to mention that.

I like those particular words, in that particular order.

But as Carey also points out, it isn’t just words that matter – it is also ideas, and what the reader’s imagination can do with them. The ideas at work in ancient Sparta are threatening, not only in themselves, but also in the way Hill uses them to bring alive their modern equivalents. Ben’s need to find acceptance in the group is compellingly described, and his failure to heed warnings that he is entering on a dangerous path set up a high level of tension in the story. There came a point where I had to put the book down for a few days, not because I was bored, but because I could imagine only too well how one particular incident – his initiation into the group – would work itself out.

Ben was studying archaeology at Oxford and his thesis was about Sparta. ‘Notes towards a thesis’, giving some of the little information known about Sparta, are interspersed through out the narrative; they become more disjointed as the story progresses. The ‘notes’ counterpoint the action; for example, digging for evidence of the lost civilisation seems to Ben a worthwhile thing to be doing, yet what we learn about the society shows it as militaristic and cruel. The Spartans had a particular military reason for relying on each other; Ben desperately seeks the friendship of those who have no need of him. The ‘Hidden’ were a group of Spartans who had a specific role in the subjugation of the helots, or slaves, whose labour supported the whole Spartan social, economic and military system; Ben’s ‘friends’ also have a specific purpose that mirrors the purpose of the ‘hidden’. There are many more cross currents and echoes, and it is this that gives the book such depth.

For all that, it is not a book I would want to read again. But this probably says more about me than it does about the book. Try it and see what you think.