29. RANSOM THEMES: BECOMING HUMAN

Ransom is intimately concerned with the particulars of human nature, just as
Homer’s original poem can be considered the first profound statement in western
literature of what it means to be human and mortal, to suffer and to seek redemption.
Malouf examines his character’s lives with attention to the minute aspects of their
individual nature. The pre-modern setting of the novel allows the writer to focus
almost exclusively on what exactly it is that constitutes the essential elements of the
human condition; what are the fundamental issues confronting us as a species?
Ransom is a story about human violence, unfathomable grief, inconsolable loss and
the equally powerful emotions that stir acts of vengeance. The rage of Achilles, so
central to the dramatic structure of the Iliad, is portrayed by Malouf as an expression
of the most deeply instinctive, primal emotions, unmediated by cultural or social
codes, an innate human response in its most raw, animal state.
The depths of Achilles’ rage, his refusal to be consoled after the death of Patroclus is
mirrored in the pain felt by Priam — the sense of loss that he experiences is no less
intense, motivating what he sees as the entirely novel idea that he can throw off the
trappings of royal custom and approach Achilles as a man to ask for the body of his
son. Priam’s vision may come complete with immortal apparitions but it is
fundamentally defined by its emphasis on the condition of human mortality; the facts
of loss and death, the severing of life and the need to act freely in the face of a
contingent and indifferent universe. Yet unlike Achilles, Priam is not able to
spontaneously summon such primal drives of rage and vengeance that enable him
to, at the very least, externalise his grief and suffering, to create a spectacle of his
grief that will terrorise his enemies. In Ransom Malouf demonstrates something of
the timeless quality of the Homeric narrative in the way he makes the human itself so
central to his own narrative. The death of Hector is rendered, like so much in the
novel, in a relatively low-key manner, but the nature of Achilles’ desecration of his
body is given an unflinching attention to detail. It is telling that in Malouf’s adaptation
of the epic poem he should have chosen this episode from the more than twenty
books of the Iliad. The allegorical resonance of the episode is explicit — Achilles and
Priam face each other across the body of the murdered Hector, killer and father
staring into each other literally and metaphorically over the human form, the one
committed to its own seemingly mad project of desecration and revenge, the other to
a redemptive retrieval of the body.
Malouf’s novel clearly articulates the profound symbolism at the heart of Homer’s
poem: that war strips away all the cultural ornamentation with which we surround
ourselves and lays bare the human body in its most naked state. The body of Hector
in both the Iliad and in Ransom becomes the allegorical site for this contest of
human emotions and will. What it means to be human is the drama that is staged
over Hector’s corpse; the body of the fallen Prince becomes the terrain in which the
narrative explores the terrible forces in our nature that might cause us to lose our
humanity. In the space between Achilles and Priam is staged the dispute that gives
voice to the seemingly irreconcilable split in human nature, between violence and
compassion, vengeance and mercy, the contradictory forces that lie at the heart of
human civilisation. The classical drama that is played out in the pages of Ransom is
the timeless conflict of the warring self locked in struggle with its competing drives
and the demands of being in the world. The nature of this conflict is portrayed by
Malouf as the very definition of the human condition.