The Iliad is virtually the ‘locus classicus’ of all accounts of the experience of war; its
brutality, violence, irrationality, but also its mythic dimensions of heroism and
transcendent acts of courage and compassion. Both polarities are present in
Homer’s poem and have established the available literary discourse for exploring the
experience of war across millennia. There is not however any detectable
sentimentality in Homer’s account and this is respected in Malouf’s version of the
episodes he has selected for novelistic adaptation. The cruelty of war provides the
constant environment of the novel. Malouf concentrates on the combined tragedy in
the Iliad that conjures the wastefulness and the irrationality of war, and the twinned
deaths of Patroclus and Hector. Their deaths are presented not as acts of noble
sacrifice, but as the inevitable consequence of such a vast scale of violence that will
envelope even the most noble of individuals. It is even possible to read their deaths
as inevitable because of their virtues as men, yet Malouf describes them as
irreducibly violent and as a waste of human life and vitality.
Written at a time of seemingly endless military violence in distant lands, can Ransom
be read as an anti-war novel? As already noted, Malouf gives an unambiguous
account of how his fascination with the Iliad stemmed from its connection in his
imagination with real world events, with historical crisis at different moments in the
course of his own life, from the Second World War, to the Vietnam War to the current
so-called ‘War on Terror’. What essential comment then does Malouf’s novel make
on the experience and reality of war? Firstly, it needs to be repeated that Ransom
appears, at least to this reader, as strongly motivated by Malouf’s belief that it is the
responsibility, the artistic responsibility of storytellers to confront the most
challenging subject available to them. Such was the challenge storytellers such as
Homer set for themselves, and so for writers today the challenge remains whether to
cede the field of representation to other styles of commentary that make definitive
claims for their versions of the truth of such fundamental human events as war and
the myriad episodes of human drama that it creates through its terrible, often
unimaginable destructiveness:
‘Later, with the fog-trails thinning and weak sunlight warm on their back, they pass
the remains of a village — the charred stumps of an olive grove and a dozen smokeblackened
roofless huts. Half a dozen ragged infants, big eyed and pot bellied come
out to stare at them. One, a little girl of three or four, holds out her hand as if
begging, but makes no effort to approach’. (p.206)
This landscape of war is uncannily familiar to the modern reader with its images of
pot-bellied children, the universally recognisable orphans of conflicts from Vietnam
and Sierra Leone to Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya. Details such as these
make it clear that Malouf intends his fable of ancient conflict to allegorically comment
on the universal suffering of all victims of war and the power struggles that generate
its irrational waste and destruction. Indifference to human suffering is shown to be
the cruel trait that defines men, not the gods; as evidenced by Agamemnon’s
deliberate slight of Achilles, causing him to withdraw his forces from battle which
results in the increasing slaughter of Agamemnon’s own men and the prolongation of
the war. In both Homer’s work and Malouf’s version, it is men who make war and
men who set the conditions for its unimaginable waste and suffering.
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