Closed Circles by MARIA RUSSO

THE HIDDEN

By Tobias Hill

353 pp. Harper Perennial. Paper, $14.99

Ancient Sparta fascinates for many reasons beyond its military might. For Ben Mercer, the protagonist of Tobias Hill’s latest novel, the lure of Sparta is more subtle. To Ben, a strung-out archaeology grad student, Sparta’s appeal lies in the communal identity that made such martial prowess possible: its citizens’ unwavering faith in the very idea of their city. He’s also challenged by Sparta’s tantalizing scarcity of artifacts and written records. As the novel opens, Ben’s marriage has ended painfully, his Oxford thesis is stalled and he has decided to ditch England for an open-ended stay in Greece. Alternate chapters recount his increasingly dangerous adventures and lay out his ruminations on ancient Sparta as Ben confronts the questions that drive this resonant and ambitious novel: Why did such a great power leave so few historical traces? Is there something pure about the ancient Spartans’ devotion to militaristic values, or something hideously distorted?

“The Hidden” is Hill’s fourth novel — in addition to a story collection and three volumes of poetry — and like his previous novels, it’s an unusual, exhilarating hybrid of high-stakes, propulsive narrative; erudite yet breezy summations of specialized historical data; and strikingly evocative language. He excels at the rendering of place, often freezing a scene to make it a charged tableau of wonder and menace. “His world narrowed to that of the kitchen and the front of house,” Hill writes of Ben’s wretched stint working behind the grill at a restaurant in Athens, the beginning of his sojourn in Greece: “The flare of incendiary fat. . . . The fish as green as celadon, as dull-bright as lead, as pink as grazed flesh. . . . A gallon jar of cucumbers, broken in the kitchen yard, the pickles shriveled in the sun like the cadavers of lizards.” Among his ragtag co-workers tempers flare ominously, but just when you’re afraid Ben might spend the entire novel in culinary servitude, an Oxford acquaintance appears, dropping hints about a dig in Sparta. Ben tracks it down and gets hired for a menial job as what one of the team calls a “shovelmonkey.”

In Sparta, both Ben and the novel begin to unfurl. The modern town is “the source of his waking joy,” but the dig calls up many of his demons. There’s a strange, desultory mood in the air. He and the few native Greek workers are kept at some remove by an inscrutable in-group made up of his laconic Oxford acquaintance, a mysterious and beautiful American woman, a mysterious and beautiful Japanese woman, a vaguely thuggish Georgian and a laddish Londoner. These five are icy even with the project director, a comically drawn, excitable, overly intimate American who makes Ben feel “frail again beside her, insipidly English.”

What attracts Ben to Sparta is what makes him exult when the clique finally warms to him: he is a lifelong outsider, “the friend-of-a-friend, the last-minute dinner guest”; he wants at last to penetrate a closed circle, to find out the nature of its power. As hints increase about some terrifying secret kept from Ben by his new friends, he must re-evaluate his drive to belong. At the same time, he must consider the possibility that the silence of ancient Sparta may hide not untold glories but ugliness and banality. His thesis notes describe a group of chosen youths, known as “the Hidden,” who lived in the hills, emerging at night to murder helots, the noncitizen majority population brutally subjugated by the Spartans. At the dig, Ben is let in on escapades, like the illegal hunting of a jackal in the hills by moonlight, that partake of a similar air of brutish, unpredictable violence.

In “The Hidden,” human bonds seem provisional, even suspect. Ben has abandoned his young daughter in England for reasons he can’t quite explain. Men and women are drawn together romantically by precarious visceral forces — the animal pull of a person’s smell or an ordinary gesture turned suddenly poignant. Likewise, Hill’s male friendships can be easily companionable but also full of unpassable tests, and turn quickly toward aggression and ridicule. Viewed from the outside, relationships are magical and desirable, yet when finally seen in close-up they seem shallow. Sometimes, though, they’re unconvincing: it’s never quite believable, for example, that the five members of the clique would be devoted to one another to the exclusion of all other ties, despite what we learn about their common cause.

In a way, the novel’s ever-lurking disconnect seems intentional; Hill, after all, is of the “hell is other people” school. Ben’s existential predicament is made clear in his status at the dig, first as a pining outsider, then as an ambivalent insider. He hates both the awkward stab of exclusion and the nauseating compromise of the self that comes with being included.

Hill’s novel “The Love of Stones” also centered on a solitary, questing soul in love with a mystery that resonates through the centuries. In both these books, he renders history and his contemporary characters’ passion for it vividly and lustily. But in “The Hidden” he also engages directly with contemporary events. Ben’s Spartan obsession culminates in a gruesome confrontation with modern global politics, terrorism and psychological warfare. “All extremisms are alike,” he realizes too late, “and in Sparta all are prefigured.” But while the novel’s intellectual undercurrents come together elegantly, its denouement feels rushed. Hill tries to grasp so much that inevitably some of it scuttles out of his reach. In the end, “The Hidden” doesn’t sustain the tight focus a successful thriller requires, nor does it grapple entirely convincingly with the specifics of recent history.

Still, the novel’s ideas are explored with stylish rigor and a rare boldness made all the more powerful by its surprising lyricism. The setting and many of the themes in “The Hidden” call to mind Don DeLillo’s novel “The Names,” but where DeLillo suggests a glamour inherent in obfuscation and enigma, Hill dismantles that whole notion. “Nothing is ever really hidden,” Ben ruefully concludes as his Spartan dream curdles. He’s forced to turn inward, back to himself, in the probably futile hope that next time he can be strong enough to see the simple, horrible patterns of history on his own.

Maria Russo has been a writer and editor at The Los Angeles Times, The New York Observer and Salon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Russo-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3