James Hynes is not well known in the UK – Sparrow is the 67-year-old American’s sixth novel but his first to be published internationally. It tells the story of a man who calls himself Jacob, writing in a library in Britain some time in the latter half of the fourth century AD. Jacob has been known by many names over the course of his life: Pusus (Little One), Mouse, Antinous. His secret name for himself is Sparrow. To many, he was known as cinaedus – the catamite. Jacob is, perhaps, the last Roman. He is “a weathered piece of driftwood discarded by a receding tide, the sole remaining resident of a deserted town in an abandoned province at the bleeding edge of a dying empire”.
We first meet Jacob in the town of Carthago Nova in Hispania. He’s initially under the kitchen table in a brothel called Helicon, watching the woman he thinks of as his mother, Focaria, cook and clean. The prostitutes, known as wolves, are named after the muses: Euterpe, Urania, Clio, Thalia and Melpomeni. For the first 50 pages of the book, Jacob doesn’t step outside the kitchen. He sees Audo, the brothel’s pimp, who bullies and hectors the girls; he grows particularly close to Euterpe, who becomes a second mother to him. We learn that Carthago Nova is a centre of the slave trade, and that Jacob himself was purchased in error, thought to be a girl.
The lens of the novel gradually widens: Jacob is sent out to run errands in a town that is full of threats. The Christians look down on him, other boys taunt him, Audo showers him with slaps and abuse. We learn that the brothel’s owner, a sinister nobleman, has other, darker plans for Jacob. Jacob witnesses a slave auction in which a young girl escapes and the seed of freedom is planted in his mind. All the time, we are aware of the future that awaits him, one in which his innocence will be violently stripped away.
Sparrow is a wonderful novel, but it’s also a visceral and brutal one. The coming of Christianity has brought shame and censure to the lives of the wolves, even though, as Jacob says, “the entire empire is a mosaic of rape and murder and bastardy and forced labour”. Like the very best of novelists engaging with the classical past – Natalie Haynes, Madeline Miller, Mary Renault – Hynes has found a way of making the events of almost 2,000 years ago feel as if they are happening right now, in front of our faces. That’s maybe because, in the sordid, sensual and secretive world he’s writing about, less has changed than we might think.
• Sparrow by James Hynes is published by Picador (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
