For hundreds of years writers have been looking for new meaning in the lives and literature of the classical period. Chaucer and Shakespeare recast ancient tales. Alexander Pope translated Homer, turning Homeric verse into heroic couplets and neat apothegms.
By David Malouf
224 pages. Pantheon Books. $24.
In the 20th century Marguerite Yourcenar wrote “Memoirs of Hadrian” and Robert Graves penned “I, Claudius” (both about Roman emperors). A. E. Housman, an English classics professor, drew on “The Greek Anthology” for his poems in “A Shropshire Lad.” Mary McCarthy translated from French Simone Weil’s brilliant philosophical essay, “The Iliad, or Poem of Force.” And playwrights like Jean Giraudoux (“Amphitryon 38,” “The Trojan War Will Not Take Place”) and Eugene O’Neill (“Mourning Becomes Electra”) found an inexhaustible source of inspiration in the classics, often updating them.
David Malouf’s “Ransom” reimagines the tragic story at the heart of “The Iliad.” Achilles mourns his childhood friend Patroclus after he is killed by Hector. Achilles takes his revenge by killing Hector in battle and desecrating his body.
The central action in Mr. Malouf’s novel occurs when Priam, Hector’s father and king of Troy, travels in a mule-drawn cart with half of the city’s treasure (the “ransom”) to plead for the return of Hector’s body so that it can be buried properly. Two instances of towering grief meet in the encounter.
The writing is vivid and often wonderfully detailed, especially in the nature descriptions: “On the flat roofs under awnings of woven rush, potted shrubs spread their heavy night odors, and cats, of the haughty small-skulled breed that are native to the region, prowl the parapets and yowl like tormented souls in their mating.” The sentences combine the fabled (“parapets”) with the homely ( “yowl”) to produce an elevated but convincing verisimilitude.
In the same way, Achilles’ semimythical horse Xanthus is evoked with its “satiny hide” and “the lightning quiver of muscle under the almost transparent skin” and “leathery soft lip.” That lip guarantees it is a real horse.
On page after page the prose is specific and noble, an unusual mix since nobility usually depends on generalities, and the specific usually deflates grandeur. But sometimes not often! the diction becomes stiff. After Achilles and Patroclus meet as youngsters, Mr. Malouf writes of Achilles, “From this moment on he could conceive of nothing in the life he must live that Patroclus would not share in and approve.”
There must be a more natural and relaxed way to express that thought. But such flaws in tone are rare, and the language and scenes in this novel are seldom awkward and never anachronistic.
Mr. Malouf has a philosophical turn of mind, and some of his analysis (as opposed to his vocabulary) does strike me as anachronistic, much too modern for the period. The centerpiece of the entire novel takes place when Priam, accompanied by a hired cart driver, stops toward evening to cool his feet in a stream and to talk with the humble driver about the children they each have lost.
The simple humanity of the driver, as old as Priam, is what strikes the king, he who has always conceived of his royal role and even his life as symbolic and abstract. The meditation on role versus reality, on essence versus existence, on the static and symbolic versus the living and particular begins to dominate the text, almost as if Homer were being rewritten by Roland Barthes.
Until this dark outing, Priam has never really noticed the inhabitants of the world around him: “They were not in the royal sphere. Being unnecessary to royal observance or feeling, they were in the background, and his attention was always fixed on what was central. Himself. The official activity that was his part in any event or scene, the formal pose that it was his duty to maintain and make shine.”
Now this sounds, to my ears at least, more like a lit-crit unpacking of a novel than an actual piece of fiction. This sort of thing goes on for pages.
It seems for a moment that the story will come back to earth when Priam and the old carter discuss the deaths of their children. Certainly the driver speaks very feelingly of the loss of his beloved son, but then Priam takes over and we’re lost again in the cobwebs of ratiocination: “The truth was that none of his sons was in that sense particular. Their relationship to him was formal and symbolic, part of the dreamlike play before the gods and in the world’s eye that is both the splendor and the ordeal of kingship.”
Oddly enough these thoughts remind me of the dialogue in the Jean Genet plays “The Blacks” or “The Balcony,” in which the figures who are impersonating the Queen or the Judge or the General obsess about their role and their essence, though Genet is less systematic and much less predictable and, fortunately, more eloquent.
Mr. Malouf has written many earlier novels, including another excursion into the classical period, “An Imaginary Life,” about the exiled Ovid of the “Tristia.” In that novel there is also a strong philosophical urge, but it is more tempered by reality. Ovid, living among barbarians on the edge of the Black Sea, comes under the spell of a magical child who transforms the overcivilized Latin poet into a creature of the woods.
Mr. Malouf is an Australian writer and perhaps his fascination with the wisdom of “barbarians” comes out of his interest in the Aborigines of his country; Mr. Malouf’s masterpiece, “Remembering Babylon,” is about a 19th-century white adolescent sailor who falls overboard and spends years living among the Aborigines. He nearly forgets English and adopts the culture of the tribe he lives with.
“Ransom” is a similarly serious, often beautiful examination of the contrast between the simple sincerity of the carter and the strangely abstract existence of the king. It is dignified and thought-provoking but it doesn’t seem to me to be exactly a work of art, to be fully realized and embodied in the lives of its characters. It is more a metaphysical inquest than episodes from messy, contingent experience.