A PLACE IN THE HILLS - Book review

The novel A Place in the Hills is Michelle Paver’s second book, published in 2001.Though 523 pages, it’s a quick read. It’s a time-slip novel paralleling lives in Rome in 53 BC and in France in the 1980s.

It begins in 53BC in Rome during the festivities of the Day of Blood: ‘The air was thick with the smell of balsam and trampled roses, and the salty, metallic undertow of blood’ (p12). Among the crowds are a Roman officer, Gaius Cassius Vitalis, who is also renowned as a poet. His eye has caught the attractive figure of a young woman, Tacita, daughter of Publius Tacitus Silanus, one of the oldest clans in Rome. There is a mutual attraction, though a relationship is quite impossible due to their different stations in society. ‘One long look and I was brought down. She entered my blood.’

Then we briefly shift to 1972 in the French Pyrenees where Toni, eight-year-old daughter of archaeologist Charles Hunt is being bloody awkward, unlike her sister Caroline. Charles is determined to locate clues to back up his theory that the poet-soldier Cassius lived here, at the so-called Source. A book quotes Cassius writing ‘I know a place in the hills where the gods walk the earth’ (p334). In a lucid moment Toni realises that the only way she can win her father’s devotion is by becoming an archaeologist herself.

Next, we move to 1988 and meet a poor American, Patrick McMullan, who is joining his rich university friend Myles Cantellow. Myles is with Antonia Hunt, working on an archaeological site with her father, Charles. Also on the site is eight-year-old Modge (short for Imogen) and Antonia’s half-sister Nerissa.

Myles is not a likeable character. He ‘belonged to the fast set, which took hard drugs, was far too cool to do any work...’ (p51).

Against her father’s wishes, Antonia wanted to prove that Lycaris – the woman Cassius referred to in his love poems – ‘was not some dry poetic construct, but a living woman whom he had loved with all his heart’ (p365).

The dig is claustrophobic, passions are in conflict, there’s a love triangle, a misguided Modge who has a crush on Patrick, an intransigent father, and a tragedy that changes everything, and all seems lost for almost fourteen years.

The parallels between the past and the book’s present are mainly quite subtle – whether that’s a love-bite on Cassius’s neck, a piece of broken pottery in Tacita’s hand, or the convoluted relationships of the characters.

Perhaps there was too much gratuitous swearing. Despite that, the characters’ emotions and the (admittedly all-too brief) slices of ancient Rome are well realised. The writing style is good and Paver’s descriptions put you in many a scene.

And there’s a satisfying end.