Ransom

"I’m a great admirer of Malouf, and I always feel that here in the States he is not significantly appreciated as a significant writer. He wrote a wonderful book called An Imaginary Life about Ovid in exile, which is a beautiful imagining of classical antiquity. And in Ransom he hit the jackpot. Like the ancient authors, looking to pry apart a space in the existing body of myths, he finds a moment in The Iliad to open up a bubble for this slight but very strong novel. It comes at the very end when Priam, the king of Troy, makes his passage in secret across the plain into the Greek camp, in order to bargain with Achilles to get the body of his son Hector back, whom Achilles has slain. Malouf takes the episode of Priam’s trip to the Greek camp – which is dispensed with very briefly in Homer – and uses it to create his own novelisation of the archaic king becoming a different person. He does this by providing a wagon driver, Somax, who in Homer would be a royal herald accompanying the King but in the novel is a lower-class figure. Priam starts chatting to him, as people do when they take long trips together, and in these conversations Priam learns about real life in a way in which kings never get to do in archaic epics, because they only deal with other kings. By the end, Priam is transformed by Somax, who tells him how to make pancakes and other mundane, quotidian things. Priam learns that he doesn’t have to be the figure that he is in Homer, so to speak. I think that’s really terrific, and very moving. “People aren’t different now, they just have better gadgets.” The novel itself, like the best adaptations of the classics, is an occasion to reflect both on the genre and on genre in general. In Homer, the trick to ransom the body of Hector is instigated by Iris, the messenger of the gods. There’s a wonderful moment in the novel, when Iris doesn’t set it down as an absolute order – she approaches Priam and says, maybe you could do this but it’s up to you to innovate. Of course, the word “novel” itself means something that is new. So the novel is an occasion to look at something that is already there and make it new. It’s about climbing outside of the epic genre and seeing what other possibilities there are. One thing he plays with are fabulous details of stuff that you take for granted in Homer. In Homer the gods are always appearing to mortals, and Malouf, being a very good novelist, tries to imagine what that looks like. Let me find the actual line. He says there is an iridescent shimmer in the air and the gods “materialise, jelly-like, out of the radiant vacancy”. I think that’s fabulous – a very James Cameron effect as the gods materialise. It’s hard for modern audiences in a way that was less difficult once upon a time. But if you look carefully at Homer, everything that happens is also a function of the personality of the characters. The gods are facilitators or enablers, but the seed of the actions is already present in the characters. I always ask my students: Does anything in The Odyssey happen that wouldn’t have happened if the gods hadn’t been present? Actually, with a few notable exceptions, no – apart from an occasional beauty makeover for Odysseus at crucial moments, that is. Odysseus makes things happen, because of the kind of person that he is. So I don’t think we should let ourselves off the hook so easily. “I always ask my students: Does anything in The Odyssey happen that wouldn’t have happened if the gods hadn’t been present?” The gods also represent the way things have to be – the element of chance, of accident. We still say that “things had to happen” a certain way. The gods are projections of that feeling, if you don’t want to think about them as gods, which is hard for us to do in a secular era. We are all descendants of fate, and that quality of fated eventuality is part of what the gods represent in Greek literature. The gadgets have changed but the large questions remain. As I get older, I increasingly think The Iliad is one of the first works to wrestle with the existential problem: If you’re going to die, what do you want the space between now and when you’re going to die look like? Does it matter? Does anyone care? On what value system do you base your actions? That’s what The Iliad is really about – a guy confronted by the possibility that the entire structure of his values is not being honoured. So why fight? And that is a question about war that never goes away, either as an individual or a nation."