This fourth novel by poet and novelist, Tobias Hill is as illuminated and finely crafted as you would expect from a writer who can move between both forms with equal success. This is a novel that delivers, perhaps too well: one is conscious of the writerly-ness of this, and at times the technical joins and seams are too much in evidence. There is the feeling though, of watching a master juggler, breathlessly waiting for something to be dropped, but believing at the same time in some supernatural power he commands to keep it all aloft.
The first thing that strikes you is the poet’s eye for beautiful detail succinctly rendered and brought to the reader’s attention, anomalous, perhaps, for a central character, Ben, who avowedly ‘doesn’t like poetry’ ( is Hill attempting to put a distance between Ben and himself, a distance that isn’t wholly realised?). Ben is an archaeologist, a student of antiquity, the destination, both literal and metaphoric, is Greece; the book is carefully layered, a palimpsest, itself an artefact to be ‘dug up’. The parallels with poetry and poetic technique are unavoidable, and the poetry tends to seep in through the proliferation of images and symbols and the tautness of the language.
Following the breakdown of his marriage, the story of which is given a slow reveal, Ben Mercer takes leave of his studies in Oxford, his ex wife and young daughter, for a period of ‘escape’, perhaps recovery. He heads for Athens with no clear plan and finds himself working in a steakhouse in a district on the edge of the city named ‘Metamorphosis’, his workmates Albanian, the boss’s son known to be dangerous; violence simmers barely containable in the heat of the kitchen. Perhaps it works as a process of breaking down the character, tenderising the meat before it is cooked, but this episode turns out to be something of a preamble, or preface to the main narrative, and is never returned to. It is here that Ben meets a former fellow student, the enigmatic Eberhard Sauer (there are echoes of Brideshead here, when Charles Ryder first meets Sebastian Flyte, the emphasis on class difference is certainly carried through), and learns of a dig under way in Sparta. The reader already knows of Ben’s obsession with Sparta. The unfolding third person narrative is inter-cut with first person journal entries, or ‘Case Notes’. These form a fascinating counterpoint to the story, mini-narratives in their own right, their tendency to impart information giving way to greater intimacy with the character as the novel progresses.
Ben decides to join the dig; it seems he has been given an obvious and essential purpose. The reader knows Ben is likely to not be welcome, and much of the story revolves around Ben’s attempts to be accepted by the seemingly disparate group of men and women who have come together over the internet through a ‘shared interest’. But he does not know, and is not prepared for what he is asking to become a part of. The reader, on the other hand, is alert to the theme of violence and its unending echo through time and history; alert to mystery, to the knowledge that much is being kept from us..
What follows is as cleverly paced and well woven as a murder-mystery. The scent is laid, everyone is suspect, the victim is yet to be unearthed. We worry for Ben, clumsy and inept as he is, led by the nose to the sacrificial altar, or as a latter day Actaeon torn apart by the hunt. Just as Ben is unwittingly acting out an ancient ritual, each character takes on mythic form – the Hellenic Eleschen, the Apollonian Eberhard – as if they would be gods or demi-gods come to walk the earth again.
There is a double dénouement: one unearthing is hiding another, the danger here, not fully avoided, of a cancelling out of one more subtle revelation for the shock of the other. We leave Ben stumbling, hallucinating through the back streets of Athens, and we are unsure whether he has survived or not. The novel acts as an alchemical cauldron, attempting an alloy of mythic and modern time.
One of the real achievements of this novel is its evocation of place, and again, it is the poet’s acute sensorial attention that transports us. We come away with the smell of meat on our clothes, the earth under our fingernails. This is a contemporaneous culture rarely glimpsed on package holidays, but viscerally palpable non-the-less. Greece is the location of not only ancient atrocities, but more modern ones too, and whereas it may not be the obvious location for a novel about the effects of terror in the 21st century, it calls our attention to the origins of Western civilisation, soaked in blood and fear and murder but conveniently hidden from view.
Sarah Corbett