Ben Mercer had read Classics and Archaeology at Oxford. His marriage had broken up, and he went to Greece to get away for a while. He worked in a restaurant in an Athens suburb; a fellow student from Oxford turned up at the restaurant and mentioned that he was working on a dig at what was Sparta. Ben thinks that would be ideal work for him - he had always been interested in the Spartans, not least because there is so little direct evidence about them: they left hardly any writing, and archaeological evidence is extremely meagre. Most of what we know about them comes from non-Spartan sources. Ben has been working on a thesis about Sparta, and the novel is interspersed with notes for it, and a grimly pathological, paranoid, cruel and savage society it must have been. He goes to the British School in Athens and gets himself sent to join the dig. He is looking also to work with a group: all his life he has been outside or at the most at the edge of groups. The dynamics of this particular group are both complicated and secretive: an inner circle does not welcome him and for a long time ignores him. Half-way through the book, they seem to accept him, and the scene where he is allowed to accompany them on a hunt to shoot a jackal is one of the few gripping passages in the book. The scenes towards the end of the book, which reveal what the group has been secretive about, are certainly unexpected but don't seem (to me, at any rate) to have any organic `rightness' about them, the supposed link with Spartan ways very tenuous.
I found the book disappointing. For a long time the plot did not seem to be going anywhere. The story is peppered with inconsequential events and inconsequential conversational exchanges. If it were not for the jacket hinting at a dangerous outcome, one does not sense danger for a long time, and I certainly missed the "astonishing grace and power" with which the blurb says the book is written. The characters do not really come alive: they are all seen from the outside, except for Ben and possibly Missy Stanton, the American head of the party who, like Ben, is treated by the group as an outsider. The description of some of the key-scenes is oblique. The dialogue, annoyingly punctuated, consists mostly of laconic one-liners (OK: `laconic' relates to Spartan, but that doesn't make the dialogue any less irritating); and it is sometimes hard work (and at times impossible) to know who is speaking. Sometimes it is not clear who "he" is - and that is really clumsy writing. I suppose that all these features of the style are meant to be as secretive as the story it depicts, but it sure makes for rebarbative reading.
