The Hidden

Perhaps some of my comments I made as I was reading this book will best show what I thought of it as I was reading it -

"Wow, now here's an unlikeable protagonist." The main character is not a very likable kind of guy. He's just gone through a messy divorce and he's a bit gloomy. As we find out in the story, everyone else is fairly similar to Ben in the sense that they are, as a group, very unlikeable. No one really likes Ben and we find that no one has ever really liked Ben. Then again, these people that do not like Ben aren't really likable themselves.

I should probably mention the plot at this point - Oxford scholar goes off to Athens to find himself and escape his ex-wife and he ends up on an archaeological dig with a few people that show more really don't like him and who seem to have something to hide.

"This book is rather strange. And the main character is a bit. . .disturbing. Just reading it I feel drugged in some way, it has a heavy, distorted feel to it." There is a bit of a dreamy quality to this work. The author manages to keep things hidden and it was this aspect of the book that I liked.

"I think the only reason I keep reading this is to find out what's hidden." Then again, with so many unlikeable people that I finally thought to myself - I hope they kill each other off at the end, the only reason I made it to the end was because there really is a mystery here. Something is hidden. Is it literal? Figurative? Ever going to come to light?

The writing is very good, but there are no heroes here. show less

A truly absorbing and immensely enjoyable read (despite the fact that the 'will I love it?' 'thingy' on LT said there is a very small chance of me loving it - and which also makes me feel very lucky for having won it in the first place).

Ben Mercer, fleeing the wreckage of his marriage, joins a group of young archeologists on the outskirts of Sparta and, although he is quickly accepted as a co-worker, there is something not-quite-right about the other workers and their passion for the past. Soon, Ben finds he is falling for Natsuko, one of the diggers, and longs to be accepted into the group, but his need for acceptance soon begins drawing him into a strange and obbsessive life, based on the beliefs of the ancients Spartans.

Not only is show more this a wonderful book to take on a visit to Greece - the varied loactions around Athens and the Peloponnese are skillfully and accurately drawn, evoking in a few brushstrokes the essence of each distinct setting - but it is a gripping tale of intrigue and passion.

Other reviewers have compared The Hidden to both John Fowles's The Magus and Donna Tartt's The Secret History and the comparisons are justified. The ancient secrets, the close-knit group of obsessives and, perhaps most importantly, the unmistakeable sense of place that runs through all these books makes them a 'holy trinity' of essential reading for lovers of Greece - not to mention lovers of a gripping story, brilliantly told. Each one of them made my heart beat faster. show less

There are two words I would use to describe this book. Gripping and poetic.

As a thriller, it achieved what it set out to do. Although saying a novel is atmospheric is somewhat cliched, the tension, emotion and sense of 'being on the outside' was palpable throughout this book. The character of Ben never really belongs with the group he meets on the dig in Sparta, and the author has managed to convey that sense even when the words suggested that he had been accepted and fitted in. The climax to the book is breathtaking. As a reader, you feel as out on a limb as the protagonist. You are kept away from the secret for as long as Ben is, and you aren't given any hint until he is faced with it in all of its horror.

And yet, the tension is show more created in language that is beautifully poetic. Indeed, at times the paragraphs read like poetry rather than prose which, I think, helped create the atmosphere. I was incredibly impressed by this novel - Tobias Hill is an author with a gift of language. show less

"The Hidden" is a book about obsession, and secrets, sombre in tone and full of ominous signs of things not being right, of not being what they seem. I enjoyed it, although at times I got a bit lost in the dialogue trying to follow who was speaking and had to backtrack and with the third person narrative I was unsure sometimes who the ‘he’ was. That said, it was a gripping tale of what happens to Ben Mercer. Ben, emotionally vulnerable after his divorce, leaves Oxford for Greece where he joined a group of archaeologists on a dig in Sparta. The group is made up of five people, including a fellow academic from Oxford, and two beautiful young women. Dazzled by their charisma he is desperate to be accepted as part of their group, to be show more included, to take part in the strange games they play. But it wasn’t just a game.

It’s also about the history of Sparta. Interspersed in the narrative are Ben’s “Notes Towards a Thesis” and it was in these notes that I found clues about the nature of the group. In ancient Sparta the Crypteia meant “The Secret Matter” or “The Hidden” - young men who were “an instrument of subterfuge and terror”.

I liked the contrasts in this book, the vivid descriptions of places. Here is an example where Ben is remembering Oxford:

"The fog going out through the streets to the rivers, the Thames and the Cherwell, the Evenlode and the Ock. The city always secretive and all the more so at that hour, as it slept, its acres full of unseen courts and cloisters, its lodgings and stairs full of lives, waiting, pending morning."

And again describing Athens:

"He recognised the lay of the land, the hills and 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-steps 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."

A novel about secrets, hidden things that maybe Ben should have left alone. The characters are all difficult to like, maybe because I couldn’t get a clear picture of some of them in my mind. Ben is really rather pathetic and needy and because of that he is easily manipulated. I read the chilling events at the end of this book with increasing unease and a feeling of desolation. It was both gripping and horrific. show less

The Hidden follows Englishman Ben Mercer as he flees a broken relationship and graduate school in archaeology/history, and heads to Greece. A series of happenstance encounters and decisions lead him to being on a dig in Sparta, chasing the ghosts of the Spartans of Thermopylae fame. The novel intermixes a series of "notes on a thesis", Ben's background notes for a thesis he's composing. The thesis explores the dark side of the Spartans, which contrasts with the more inspirational side of the Spartans as reflected in the story of the Battle of Thermopylae and as fictionalized by, for example, Steven Pressfield in [Gates of Fire], and the thesis notes are actually very interesting in and of themselves and not just in how they advance the show more storyline.

As the dig progresses, Ben ingratiates himself into the dig team and strange things start to happen. Modern as well as ancient Greece are well explored in The Hidden, but I found the activities of the dig team (I won't say more to avoid spoiling) to be a bit unmotivated and muddled. Still, the exploration of the darker side the Spartans was interesting to contrast with books and movies that celebrate them ([Gates of Fire] and the movie 300). I found the front half of the book to be much more enjoyable and convincing than the latter half, but overall it's an interesting read. show less

Having fled his hometown, school and his spectacularly failed marriage, Ben Mercer has retreated to the tiny town of of Metamorphosis, Greece, where he whiles away the hours living simply as a grill worker in a meat shop and working on his thesis on the peculiarities of ancient Sparta and the customs and psychology of ancient Greeks. Metamorphosis is literally in the middle of nowhere, so Ben is surprised one day by the appearance of Eberhardt, an old classmate from university, who tells him that he is working on an archaeological dig in Sparta. Eberhardt then disappears before Ben can chat with him further and without saying goodbye.

Intrigued, Ben makes a few inquiries and gets himself assigned to the same dig in Sparta, as much to show more figure out why Eberhardt was so cagey as to further escape the dismal possibilities of his current situation. Ben isn’t welcomed when he gets there. Eberhardt remains aloof and the other archaeologists to whom he seems closely bound show Ben even less interest, which is what make them so interesting to Ben, that and the fact that they seem to have ulterior moves and share a dark secret.

When I initially began reading The Hidden, I enjoyed it very much and was (as I remain) impressed with the beauty and expressiveness of Hill’s prose. I was immediately drawn in to what seemed to me the story of a man who is trying to come to terms with the reprehensible behavior that ruined his marriage, separating him from the wife and child whom he loved deeply. His writing on his thesis, conversations with co-workers on modern Greek culture, and the ruminations which exposed the failings of his marriage were not the gripping mystery that had been promised in the jacket copy, but was a story in which I was deeply interested.

The episode, eventually uncovered, that led to the destruction of Ben’s marriage was unique and one that I would have liked to have seen explored in more detail. If I was reading uneasily it was because the book was supposed to be a thriller, and more than one hundred and fifty pages in I had seen neither hide nor hair of one, and thought that the novel, to its disservice, had been poorly marketed.

Firmly into the second half, though, the novel begins to go astray. Several players are introduced at once and the conversations they have are a jumbled mess of long sentences, where no page breaks or quotation marks make it exceedingly hard to figure out who has said what. The story that had been building throughout the first half of the novel all but completely disappears, and I felt as if I had been dropped into a completely different book, with characters who were alien and a little flat. The mystery, which might have had legs if integrated into the story earlier, was anti-climactic by the time it made it’s way into the last seventy five pages of the novel.

Hill is a talented writer and I loved one of the stories that he was trying to tell. The thesis portion of the novel was interesting but ultimately seemed unconnected to the book, while the last section fragmented what he had been building. There was simply too much going on, but not enough to tie it all together and make it compelling. Contributing to this was the fact the book description totally mismanaged my expectations. I’m definitely curious to see what Hill might write next, but would proceed with extreme caution. show less

The Hidden starts out with Ben Mercer moping around because he screwed up his marriage, is currently separated and going through a divorce. He decides to take a sabbatical from his Archeology studies at Oxford and disappears into Greece for a couple of months while he tries to sort out his life. Everything slowly continues to get worse from there. Even when things seem to be looking up it is only an up-tick on his downward spiral. I think this book was supposed to be 'dark' but personally I just found it to be completely depressing.

During the first part Ben spends a lot of time worrying and thinking about his wife Emine and his daughter. The scenes are not very coherent, scattered glimpses from different times in the relationship, which show more were hard to piece together. One knew something had happened but what that was, was a complete mystery and I felt a bit of a let down when it was finally revealed. The same kind of let down happened again and again at each new 'reveal'.

Tobias Hill did an excellent job in describing the scenes of such things as Ben’s time working in the diner, and the day to day workings of the Archeology dig in Sparta. He described the tedium with out being tedious and did a great job keeping ones interest. Then things would get muddled when we would spend some time in Ben’s head, on the roller coaster ride of his thoughts and emotions.

The Hidden sounded like it would be an interesting read, and to tell the truth it was interesting, however I would not say I enjoyed it. Actually, I didn't like it. I think what I found to be pathetic was, we have a man who for all intents and purposes, seems to be reasonably intelligent, well educated, with a wide life experience whose self-esteem issues cause him to make poor decisions. He has several people willingly trying to be his friend and warning him away from the 'others’. He can see the truth in the warnings but has a need to be accepted anyway, like a moth to a flame. Though they let him get close and pretend to let him in, even he knows he is on the outside being given the scrapes, yet he is happy because he at least is given a glimpse into the inner sanctum. Ben is a useful tool that is skillfully manipulated and used until his usefulness is gone. show less