Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man] The existence of this inclination to aggression, which we can detect in ourselves and justly assume to be present in others, is the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbour…

— Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Josh, or Josiah, is a 20-year-old lower-class youth, working “on the stalls” at an amusement arcade in what reads like Brighton. An innocent, he latches on to Mortimer, an older and seemingly wiser man with whom he works, forming an odd and sometimes queer friendship with him. When Mortimer speaks of sex and class and the revolution and the bourgeoisie, the naive Josiah—who often asks “What’s your terms?” to get Mortimer’s use of vocabulary correct—begins to take on this man’s beliefs as his own.

Simon is a forty-something-year old neurotic effete: over-educated and under-socialized. Living on the grounds of his widowed sister Audrey’s massive estate, he has acclimated to life by burrowing underground, creating what he terms his “hide.” Some of Unsworth’s most stunning descriptions in this book of landscape and distance can be found in Simon’s sections, and, admittedly, it’s unclear just how skillfully Simon has constructed his hideaway or if it’s just merely a series of bushes and fences. From here, he moves about the estate, surveilling and watching neighbors and also the social gatherings of his sister’s theatre group—distanced, remote, but judgmental: “Why should I always be on the outside of everything, appreciating my exclusion with an aesthetic ache?”

When Audrey realizes that the estate needs a gardener, Josiah answers the call, and the lower-class gardener’s presence—bringing more to the fore the same-class but servant-like Marion, Audrey’s late-husband’s cousin—begins to complicate everyone’s lives. While Simon is innocent in his voyeurism and underground burrowing, insofar as he never acts on his desires, this is then juxtaposed with Josiah’s less-educated and much more youthful innocence: the wide-eyed, believe-all-you-tell-me sort that takes words at face value, an innocence that longs to explore. Both of these get tested and pitted against one another in a theatrical and truly psychoanalytical way; indeed, while immersed in this, my first Unsworth, I read somewhere that this was an early, minor work of his. I can only imagine how his insights into human nature have grown with his subsequent books.

Much of Unsworth’s strength in this book is how slowly the creepy and evil aspects of human nature begin to become apparent—and this is even long after the first chapter, when we witness Simon observing the neighboring woman (virtually naked) do her chores in a heat wave from the security of his hide:

I do not know her name. She has brought me often, and especially on windy days when I am vouchsafed incidental revelations, to the threshold of intense pleasure, and on occasion I have been enabled, kneeling in my little corner here, with the complicity of the laburnum… to cross the threshold. I have never been nearer to her than I am now, I do not desire any closer proximity.

Lust, covert queerness, hero worship, sibling rivalry, and an ever-growing sense of the strange and the downright eerie… The Hide grows steadily just as it ping-pongs back and forth between the two men narrating, keeping a running volley of counterpoint on very different voices' commentaries on social class, generational gaps, and displaced (or repressed) desires. A true commentary on, as Unsworth puts it, “how inscrutable we human creatures are, what a mystery inheres in every follicle.”

Highly recommended for fans of interior and gradually unsettling prose. ( )

TIghtly controlled menace infused with exquisite language, deeply original characters, and a brilliantly imagined plot. This novel--about observation and voyeurism, about interior and exterior selves--is efficient, amusing, provocative, and finally horrifying. ( )