When you read voraciously, sometimes you fall into the habit of assuming that you’ve seen it all. Every plot twist. Every surprise reveal. Everything. You may enjoy a book, but are rarely surprised by it. Luckily, every once in awhile, a book comes along to remind you that this is hubris, that there are still moments where a corner will be turned so sharply that the only possible response is surprise. Tobias Hill‘s The Hidden is one of those books.

It begins with a rootless wandering professor, Ben Mercer. Estranged from his wife and distant from his daughter, he came to Greece with a vague sense of purpose and no plan. He ends up, for a time, cooking and serving in a Athens grill. A chance meeting there with an acquaintance from Oxford leads him to an archaeological dig and the hidden secrets, both modern and ancient, buried in what was once Sparta.

Left without connections, desperate to belong, Ben struggles to find his place within the team of archaeologists, historians, and labourers that make up the dig. Here, when Ben first arrives, Hill creates some of his most poetic landscapes, evoking a Greece where the past still casts dark shadows over the present and echoes can be heard of the brutal Sparta which held itself above and apart. Interlaced throughout the main action in the novel is a doctoral thesis on Sparta and its history, taking the reader along as Ben discovers what is going on at the dig and what secrets Sparta had to hide.

Gradually, Ben begins to feel desperately as if he must belong to the part of the group that holds itself aloof from the rest. Attracted to the beauty of Natsuko, the elegance of Eleschen, and the assumed superiority of Jason, Eberhard, and Max, Ben slowly goes against his better instincts and becomes more and more involved with their group. Warned at every turn, there is a portent even in Ben’s thoughts on the word demonstration, which in his definition seems less an innocuous example and more of warning of terror in waiting:

“…these entities are vehicles of punishment and thereby of warning. The message of the monster is that the behaviour of the gods is not to be aspired to. The monstrum, the warning-in-flesh of ancient text and oral mythology, is a jealous demonstration of fate or divine power.”

The warning here, and throughout the book, is that the divine right of punishment, retribution, and terror are demeaning and destructive to the men who attempt to usurp them. Whether a soldier in Ancient Sparta, ruling thousands with terror and murder, or an archaeologist searching out jackals in the hills, the secrets that are hidden are both destructive and deformed – no one who comes in contact escapes the harpies, modern and ancient, who chase the guilty with relentless determination.

Hill’s poetic language works well to evoke the mystery that lies at the heart of the search into Ancient Rome. The writing makes it seem inevitable that Ben will ignore all of the warnings, verbal and visual, because of his own fatal flaw, a desperate need to belong. With each decision, he seals his own fate, and his desire to wait, to have the responsibility for his actions disappear and dissolve, brings the final horror to his door. The book is a surprise and the writing enthralling. Hill manages to make the tragedy centre around Ben’s decisions and his willingness to go along with a group. Even if he does not act directly, he cannot escape responsibility for the actions of the group and the secrets they hold. The Hidden is lyrical, fascinating, terrifying. Like myths. Like Sparta.

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