37. RANSOM: GROUP WORK reports

Read pages 41 -49
1. What do we learn about Priam and his family
in this section?
Priam has two children
– Cassandra and Helenus – who have special powers. They are gifted, just like
Priam – able to converse with the gods.
QUOTE: “Only in Priam
has what is both a blessing and an awful responsibility remained close to the
source.”
Cassandra’s powers are
slowly sending her insane. Unlike Priam she doesn’t embrace her visions.
Priam has many wives,
but Hecuba is his favourite; she has a calming effect on Priam.
Priam: “His nature is
open at any moment to presences in the air around him that, when they settle
out and take a bodily form, have the names of gods.”
2. What is Priam’s state of mind?
At first, Priam is
calm, because he is talking with Hecuba. But as he speaks to Hecuba he becomes
more agitated.

3. How does Priam see his role as king? What
are its benefits and what are its obligations?
Priam believes that he
is “the physical embodiment of Troy”. The gods have CHOSEN him to be king, and
he sometimes feels that the task stretches him too far.
Priam feels that he is
like an actor, playing a part, a role. A king is obliged to act in particular
ways. Priam is required to think of “the king’s sacred body”. He feels that
Troy depends on him. If things were to go wrong, he would feel responsible.
QUOTE: p. 44
Priam knows of events …
“that his body is aware of as a dim foreboding long before the last in the
relay of messengers …”
Priam takes his role
as king very seriously. On several occasions he has travelled to all corners of
the kingdom to show himself and discover what he is truly representing.
4. . What
happens in his encounter with the goddess?
The goddess, Iris,
appears on the couch beside Priam. She has a calming presence.
QUOTE: The goddess explains to Priam that things are
..
“Not the way they must
be, but the way they have turned out. In a world that is also subject to
chance”
This opens up a new
thought to Priam, until now, as was the way at that time, he had believed till
then that the gods decide everything.
Priam is bewildered.
Perhaps he was dreaming; perhaps he has seen a vision. When he looks around,
the goddess isn’t there. Despite this,he believes that the idea came from the
goddess … “where lse could such a dangerous suggestion come, if not from an
immortal.” P. 46
5. Hecuba’s sleeping quarters
Read pages 49 -63
6. What has been the personal “cost” of the
war?
Hecuba lost seven sons
– seven sons she had carried within her and yielded up to the world. She felt a
deep connection to each of these lost children; to her mind, they were flesh of
her flesh. For Priam it was different; he hardly knew what he had ost – other
than knowing that they were his. Each time one of these men was killed, Troy
lost a fearless protector.
Achilles and the
soldiers on both the Greek and Trojan sides lost something too with every kill;
they lost a little more of their humanity. Through the war they became mindless
killing animals.
The people whose sons
or whose friends were killed in battle each lost a loved one – as Priam and
Hecuba had done, and as a result, ost control of their emotions, lost their
peace of mind and were left with only grief.
7. How does Priam describe his role in Troy?
Priam’s role in Troy
was to “stand still and be silent”. His role was to appear strong and
untouchable, so that in times of trouble his people could look to him as a
constant. He was a symbol of continuity, a comfort to his people. His role was
to appear god-like, so that the people of Troy could always feel that he would
protect them. Priam’s role was to be in control. He was a ceremonial figurehead
who allowed others be his arm, his fist, his breath. His role was to conceal
any sign of age or weakness, to appear invulnerable.
8. What is Priam’s account of his encounter
with the goddess?
Priam is bewildered by
his encounter with the goddess Iris – bewildered but in awe. He is uncertain
whether he had been dreaming, or whether he had had a vision.
9. What plan does he outline to Hecuba?
The plan to retrieve
Hector’s body from Achilles involves Priam going to Achilles in plain white
clothes, with none of the signs and trappings of kingship. He will go as an
ordinary man, in a simple mule cart drawn by donkeys – not in a magnificent
kingly carriage drawn by horses. He will
have an ordinary man – a simple mule driver – and will take gold and treasure
in the wagon. And he will humbly beg Achilles for Hector’s body.
10. How does she respond?
Hecuba is shocked when
Priam outlines his plan to her. She grows more and more disturbed as Priam’s
enthusiasm for his plan becomes more apparent. Hecuba is furious with Priam and
cannot believe Priam would suggest such a thing; then she becomes speechless.
Eventually she tries to persuade Priam to change his mind; she believes the
plan is suicidal, that Achilles is a jackal, an animal, who will cut Priam
down.
11. How does HE then respond to what Hecuba
says?
Much of the time Priam
feels unnerved around Hecuba. He explains how, when he was younger he was able
to fight. But he is beyond that now – he is too old to wear armour and go into
battle. He feels that he must do something else. He then recounts to Hecuba the
story of his past when, as a child, he needed rescuing.
12.
Read page 63 - 79
Priam re-tells his
story. What is it?
What was Priam’s
original name?
Podarces.
Podarces was the
youngest son of King Laomedon, king of Troy.
When Podarces was an
infact, Laomedon promised his daughter, Hersione, to the great warrior
Herakles. However, Laomedon broke his promise. In his anger, Herakles attacked
Troy, and killed all of Laomedon’s sons – except for Podarces, who was hidden
among the local common people, dressed in the garb of a commoner. When Herakles
too Hersione, he promised her one gift. Hersione went to the save market where
she located Podarces.
13. What happened to him?
The events had taken
place when Priam was a child, and when he was known as Podarces. Podarces was
of royal birth – the son of a king. Herakles had led a force of Greeks against
Podarces father.
Podarces was driven
out of the burning citadel along with all the other children. His parents had
disguised him as a common village child. They hoped that this would protect
him.
The children were
being guarded. Podarces felt out of place. All of the children were filthy and
rough skinned and covered in blood – like himself. Podarces was afraid of the
other children.
Podarces heard his
name being called. It was his sister, Hersione, who had found him. Podarces did
not want to be identified, because he feared that he would be murdered if the
guards knew he was of royal birth.
Hersione is
accompanied by Herakles; Herakles has promised Hersiona a gift. Hersione
chooses Podarces, her brother. Herakles laughs. He plays mind games with the
boy. But Herakles is a man of his word; he spares Podarces. But he re-names him
Priam – which means the ‘ransom’ or the ‘price paid”. This is to remind Priam
that his old self no longer exists – that is the price he must pay to be
allowed to survive.
Priam believes that
the gods allowed this to happen. He will never forget that day for the rest of
his life: the filth and the stench and the fear. From these events Priam
learned what it is to be treated as an object, a thing of no worth in itself.

14. What does the name PRIAM mean?
The name PRIAM was
given to him by Hercules (or Herakles) because Herakles owed Hersione a gift.
Herakles renamed him so that he would remember, for very day thereafter, that
in order to have a new life he had to pay a price. He was giving up his old
life and being reborn, brought back from the dead, with a new name. And the new
name was Priam: the word means – “the price paid”.
15. How does his childhood experience still
affect him?




16.
Pages 79 – 90
How do Priam’s
various sons and daughters respond to
his plan/ intention?
What arguments do
they use to try to dissuade Priam?
How does Priam
respond?

17.
Read pages 90 – 107
Why is Priam angry at
the beginning of this section?
As king, Priam is used
to people doing exactly what he asks. In his vision, he pictured a “common mule
cart”, but is sons bring an ornate wagon – a fancy, crafted carriage fit for a
king, drawn by magnificent horses. Priam is furious.
What are our first
impressions of Somax?
Somax is described as
a stocky fellow, He is middle aged, a common man, with no education. He had a
reputation for being reliable, but was a heavy drinker who spent much time at
the pub. Somax loves his two mules –
Shock and Beauty.
How does Somax
respond to being in the court with the royal family?
Somax is amazed by
what he sees in the palace. He is amazed at how clean the people are, and how
white their skin is. He is afraid to speak, and is quite nervous. This is
evident in his many mannerisms – the way he rubs his nose and scratches his
head. Somax is presented as a humorous character.
Somax is also taken
aback by the way the members of the royal court speak – their high pitched,
rather effeminate voices.
Who is Idaeus?
On ceremonial
occasions, Priam is always accompanied by a herald: Idaeus. The herald’s job is
to speak on the king’s behalf: to deliver his speeches, to carry the royal
staff.
What are the names of
his mules?
Shock and Beauty are
the mules’ names. Beauty is a black mule with whom everyone falls in love.
At the end of this
section, what is the ‘atmosphere’?
There is
an atmosphere of uncertainty and apprehension. Somax is clearly uncomfortable
in the presence of the royal family. Priam speaks to Somax as he would to any
other subject; he is authoritative and distant.
The Royal
family members are worried by Priam’s decision. The commoners of Troy wonder
why Priam is leaving the city, and whether he will return. No one is quite sure
what is happening. When Priam outlines his plan, his family members are very
distressed.
Deiphobus
steps forward and confronts Priam. . Deiphobus argues that it would not be
right for Priam to go himself to retrieve the body. It would be an insult to
his royal image, and would be “putting his precious life at risk.”
Cassandra,
who is normally energetic and bubbly, stands before Priam in silence. She is plae and only half
attentive.

CHAPTERS 2 & 3 Pages
90-110
1.
Why does Priam insist on “an ordinary mule
cart, not this … carnival wagon.”?
Priam wants
to be seen as an ordinary man, not as a king. If he had gone to Achilles
dressed as a king, and with all of the trappings of a king, his plan could not
succeed. Because central to his plan was that he appear as an ordinary man – an
equal of all men.
2.
What does Somax notice about the people in the
palace?
He is
amazed at how clean and white they are. The arms, necks, faces of the women –
and the men – looked as though they had never seen sunlight. He also notices that they are tall, and their
voices are high-pitched.
3.
How do Priam and Somax regard each other at
first? What are their first impressions?
When they
first meet, Somax is very awkward. He doesn’t know what is expected, what is
appropriate. He did not know how to speak to a king.
4.
Why does Priam want to give Somax the name
Idaeus?
Whenever
Priam ventures out of the palace he is normally accompanied by a herald –
Idaeus – who speaks on his behalf.
5.
How does Somax feel about this?
Somax does
not like the idea of being called Idaeus. He is Somax. He knows who he is.
Somax is a name that suits him. Idaeus is a ‘palace’ name – not a name for the
likes of Somax, who is a commoner.
CHAPTER 3
1. Once the
journey begins, the relationship between Priam and Somax starts to change? How
does Somax treat Priam? P. 111- 120
At first,
Somax felt uncomfortable in the presence of a king. He doesn’t know how to
address Priam.He begins to feel more at ease with Priam, as they speak more and
more. In some ways, he feels a little superior to Priam; Priam is almost
childlike, and has no “street wisdom”. Somax treats Priam with great courtesy,
but almost as he would treat ha child.

Somax is
tactful at first. And cautious. As the journey proceeds, though, he comes to
treat Priam as he would any other ‘ordinary man’. Somax is not aware of the
protocols and expectations concerning the treatment of kinds and princes. Somax
does not wish to offend Priam, however, and is very considerate of his needs.
Somax becomes like a teacher to Priam.
2. Comment on
the two incidents: the fish and the cakes. What do they show us about each man?
Somax
suggests to Priam that he wet his feet in the stream in order to cool down.
Priam is surprised and amused at first, but is then delighted when the small
fish gather about his fet. He is like a young child, experiencing such things
for the first time. It is as though Somax is leading him – educating him in how
the world really is. Somax is showing Priam a new world, aworld very different
from the world Priam is used to. Somax also introduces Priam to the kinds of
experiences that occur in ‘normal families’.
3. Look
closely at Priam’s ‘musings’ (p.121 – 129)
o
What insights does he gain about himself – his
roles as king, as father, as a man?
o
What insights do WE gain about him?
Priam
realised that in his day-to-day life he did nothing for himself. People brought
him his food, dressed him, spoke on his behalf. Priam realised that there was
so much he DID NOT know – a whole other world of ‘the ordinary’.
Priam
lived his life as a figurehead, a symbol of a great city- state – Troy. But –
he now realised – he had been robbed of the simple pleasures and experiences in
life. Even when he went hunting, someone else killed the boar.
He
realised that his courtly life was a pretence.
When
Somax told stories of his children and his grand daughter, Priam realised how
different Somax’ life was – how much richer, how full of real emotion and love
Somax life was.

4. Somax
talks about his relationships with HIS children. What do we learn about Somax –
and what does Priam learn? What does Priam begin to realise? (p. 129-135)
WE learn
that Somax’s children are all dead. When they were living, they were important
to him. Priam learned about the closeness of an ordinary family, and begins to
realise that there was a great distance between himself and his own children.
This
distance has already been dramatically referred to when Hecuba spoke of the
closeness she felt to her children, who had been within her body.
5. In pp.
136-139, what do we discover about Priam?
Priam’s
relationships with his children was FORMAL and SYMBOLIC. He had many wives and
lovers, and many children – over 50 of them – so many he was unsure of exactly
how many there were. He had grieved the deaths of his sons – especially Hector
– but when he witnessed the depth of Somax’s grief over the deaths of his
children, Priam realised that he did not have the same powerful love for his
children that Somax had for his.
6. Compare
how Priam responded to the death of his beloved son Hector and Somax’s response
to the death of HIS son.
7. On p.142
Malouf says that Priam “was sorry they had to move on.” Why is this?
Priam had
come to really enjoy the place where they stopped. He enjoyed the simple
pleasures and the conversations with Somax.
8. How does
Somax react to the arrival of the stranger?
How does Priam react?(p. 143-4)
Somax was
alarmed. Both men were unconvinced by the story the stranger initially told.

9. What do we
notice about this stranger? What kind of personality does he have?
He talks
continuously, blustering like an over confident youth who likes to hear the
sound of his own voice. He appears arrogant and sure of himself.
10. Why is
Somax so furious? P. 148-52
Somax
distrusts the stranger who is now accompanying them. He is too confident, too
cocky for Somax’s liking. He is also angry because Beauty seems to like the
stranger. Somax is also aware that they are in enemy territory, and this
stranger could be luring them into a trap.
11. On p. 156,
we read that Somax “hid his astonishment with a narrow eyed glare”. What had
astonished him?
He was
astonished that the stranger KNEW that his daughter-in-law had a limp.
12. Who is
Hermes? What miracle does he bring about at the end of Chapter 3?
Hermes is
a god. He is a messenger. He also escorts souls to the Underworld, so that they
can cross the River Styx and join the dead.
The
miracle Hermes brings about is the removal of the heavy pole that bars the gate
into Achilles’ encampment.

35. Barry's Reflections on the opening pages of RANSOM

RANSOM –
the opening pages: a commentary

1. On storytelling
Most stories begin with clarity: we know the who and where and when within a
few lines. Fairy tales, for example, establish these things in the opening
sentences.
For example:
Once upon a time there was a boy and his name was Jack, and he lived with his mother.
Jack’s mother loved him dearly, and as a result, Jack was a bit of a mummy’s
boy. Now Jack and his mother were very poor, and one day, his mother decided
that they could no longer afford to keep the family cow…
“Jack,”
she said, “I want you to take the cow in to town, to the market, and sell her ,
for we don’t have enough money to buy food …Already we know who are the main characters
– Jack and his mother; we know when the story takes place – it’s in that
indeterminate “once upon a time” of fairy stories; and we know where – in a
house near a village.

IN the opening pages of Ransom, Malouf doesn’t disclose the name
central character. We know this character is crouching on a stony
beach, but where? And why? WE know the character is “listening for the voice” of his mother, and that he has some strange affinity with the sea. We know he is a fighter.

Perhaps Malouf wants us to see this character as HE wants to present him. Perhaps Malouf thought that if we already knew the character’s name – Achilles – we (the readers) would then make the link with the legendary character and assume the two to be one.

2. Malouf’s underlying ideas/beliefs/world view

The notion that we human are made of dust goes back a long way. The Christian Bible’s account of the creation of human beings goes like this:
…the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Genesis, Ch 2

In chapter 3 it reads:
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. St James version

By the sweat of your brow will you have food to eat until you return to the ground from which you were made. For you were made from dust, and to dust you will return." Recent translation

The Christian burial service includes the phrase: “from dust we came and to dust we shall return”. So when Malouf writes, as he does, saying of Achilles that ‘earth is his element’, he is drawing on a long tradition. And he goes on to write: ‘One day, he knows, he will go back to it.”
So this insight into human origins and human nature is an ancient one.
The Greeks burial ceremonies included a form of cremation, with the
bodies of the dead burned on a funeral pyre – as happens with the corpse of
Patroclus, in Ransom.
But Malouf gives a very modern account of this understanding, one derived from atomic and sub atomic physics. Malouf says of Achilles:
… earth is his element. One day, he knows, he will go back to it. All the
grains that were miraculously called together at his birth to make just these
hands, these feet, these corded fore-arms, will separate and go their own ways
again. He is a child of the earth…”

This account of particles – grains – coming together and then dispersing is in accord with the way physicists describe the state of matter. Matter is in a constant state of flux.
Atoms and sub atomic particles are constantly on the move. With each breath inhaled,
with each morsels of food we eat, with each mouthful of fluid we are taking in
new particles; and with each breath exhaled, each sneeze, with each drop of
sweat or flake of skin, with each movement of our bowels, each time we urinate –
we are expelling particles from our body that were once part of the whole. It has been estimated that over a period of seven years, every particle that ever formed a part of us is expelled and replaced.
There’s an old ‘joke’ about a wood cutter who claims that he
has been using the same axe for the past 60 years. And in that time, he’s only replaced the handle eight times, and the blade of the axe four times!
And what happens to the expelled particles? They are carried in water, carried by the wind … they drift off into space, they travel to infinity and beyond.
And no matter how solid, how unchanging aspects of our bodies and our
environment may seem, the truth is that … all the grains that were miraculously called together … separate and go their own ways again. Combining and
dispersing, combining and dispersing.
Now, while this constant flux, this constant change, may shake our sense of the continuity and solidity of our selves, our world, our universe, Malouf speaks of it as a miracle: All the grains that were miraculously called together at his birth to make just these hands …


3. Malouf’s version of Achilles
The Achilles of ancient Greek legend is a
great warrior, a man who was almost invulnerable. His mother, Thetis, was a
water goddess and had sought to make her young son, Achilles, immortal by
dipping him in the River Styx, the river that runs through the Underworld, and
that separates the living from the land of the dead.

Achilles was a ferocious and powerful fighter,
and his strength and skill were legendary – so much so, that his presence on
the battlefield was enough to undermine the confidence of his enemies. He is an all-but invincible warrior with only one vulnerable spot.

Malouf’s Achilles, however, is a man ‘divided’.
There is his warrior ‘self’:
‘The man is a fighter, but when he is not fighting, he is a farmer, earth is his element'. The earth is his father’s home; it is his
masculine nature. We see this ‘side’ of Achilles in his ruthlessness, in his
enjoyment of ‘the hunt’ [even as a boy, he loves hunting hares and killing
them] and in his ferocity in battle.

But there is another aspect to Achilles
that Malouf explores:
“But for the whole of his life he has been drawn, in
his other nature, to his mother’s element. To what, in all its many forms,
as ocean, pool, stream, is shifting and insubstantial. To what accepts, in a moment
of stillness, the reflection of a face, a tree in leaf, but holds nothing, and
itself cannot be held.

In the Star Wars movies, George Lucas writes of the ‘dark side’ of the Force, and throughout the series of films Luke Skywalker is forced to face both sides of the Force.

Achilles has two natures:
The fighter/ farmer/ earth-bound / solid / firm element in his nature, that derives from his father; and the shifting/ insubstantial/ spiritual/ constantly
changing / water-like/ eel-like element that derives from his mother.

This split in Achilles is also evident in the way Malouf handles other aspects of the story. When the goddess Iris comes to Priam, it is not in an earth-bound
/ solid / certain form. She comes in a vision, a dream perhaps – she is shifting/ insubstantial/ constantly changing / water-like / uncertain. Priam’s experience is not a solid, incontrovertible encounter. It is a spiritual encounter, no more substantial than an image that is caught, briefly, on the surface of the water . She comes in a moment of stillness, the reflection of a face.

Now all of this sounds very airy-fairy, I know. But it is not without some ‘solid’ ground. For the last 130 years, at least, starting with William James [a leading American psychologist], psychologists have suggested that e don’t have a self, but rather, multiple selves. They suggest that the reason human beings are so unpredictable in their behaviour is that we are not singular but plural – that several ‘people’ reside within us.

34. Ransom Commentary: Tim Holland

If Classic FM published fiction, then Ransom is the kind of novel that would surely result. David Malouf's reworking of the climactic episode of the Iliad demonstrates that epics are no less susceptible than symphonies to being chopped up and repackaged in accessible, bite-size chunks. As slim and spare as Homer's great poem is immense, Ransom starts at the moment when Hector, noblest of the princes of Troy, has been slain at the hands of Achilles, deadliest and most god-like of the Greeks. Savage with grief for his beloved cousin, Patroclus, whom Hector had killed, Achilles vents his rage and misery on the Trojan prince's corpse. Dragging the body behind his chariot, so that it is left a mere "thing – bloody and unrecognisable", he refuses either to have it burned or to ransom it.
The scene is set for one of the most wrenching episodes in world literature: when Priam, Hector's father, travels to Achilles' camp, falls to his knees, and begs for the return of the corpse. "I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before," he says. "I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son."
No one, and certainly not a writer as talented as Malouf, can go far wrong with material like this. As in the Iliad, so in Ransom, the moment when Priam finally meets Achilles and states his mission brings a lump to the throat. Both the lyricism of his prose and the delicacy of his characterisation enable Malouf to avoid the risk of bathos that so often stalks novelists when they try to update epic. He also manages to avoid another tripwire with his treatment of the gods: the immortals, though they manifest themselves throughout the novel, tend to do so elliptically, appearing on the margins of Priam's vision, or else by revealing personal knowledge of a character that no mere mortal could be expected to know.
Why, then, despite its many qualities, does Ransom disappoint? The problem is that Malouf does not do enough with his source material. To be sure, there are some wonderful felicities of invention: a passage where Priam imagines what his life might have been as a slave, "with a smell on me that I had taken till then to be the smell of another order of beings", is powerfully unsettling; the character of the mule-loving carter who drives Priam to Achilles is a particularly well-drawn addition to Homer's roster; the foreshadowing of Priam's death at the hands of Achilles' son is indeed, as Malouf asserts, "a joke of the kind the gods delight in, who joke darkly".
Yet none of these virtues can quite outweigh the nagging feeling that anyone who wants to read about Priam's ransoming of his dead son would be much better off picking up Homer's own account. When, at the end of the Iliad, a tearful Helen hails Hector as the "dearest to me of all my husband's brothers" and salutes his "gentle temper", we are moved because we too, having read the 24 books of the poem, know precisely the quality of the man she is mourning. In Malouf's novel, Helen is a noticeable absentee and Hector himself little more than a cipher. As a result, nothing in the novel can compare for emotional impact with the poem's final line: "And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses."
To go head to head with a writer as great as Homer requires a very special brand of foolhardiness. Perhaps that is why the most effective novelisations of his poetry have tended to be those marked by a sense of either humility or exuberant brashness. The versions of the Iliad and Odyssey told for children, for instance, rarely pretend to be much more than a straightforward redrafting of the original story; contrariwise, a science-fiction novel such as Dan Simmons's Ilium, which translates the Trojan war to the improbable setting of 30th-century Mars, succeeds precisely by virtue of its full-throated audacity. As it is, Ransom falls between the two stools: neither true enough to Homer, nor sufficiently untrue to him either.

Tom Holland's Millennium is published by Abacus.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/dec/19/david-malouf-ransom-book-review

33. RANSOM: A commentary by Robert Tulip

SOURCE: http://www.booktalk.org/post49374.html

Robert Tulip

The cover for Ransom, the new novel by David Malouf, shows a grey Trojan donkey. This enigmatic picture contains intense and deliberate depths of irony and symbolism, fitting for this modern retelling of final events in Homer's epic legend of the Trojan War. The donkey, chosen by King Priam in place of a warhorse as the preferred transport for his ransom, has the name Beauty, standing for another beauty who is never named in the story, and for another donkey from a later ransom story. Just so are myths mashed together to form contemporary meaning in the hands of the master. Malouf stands as an almost mythic figure in Australian literature, and his retelling of a central myth of Western civilization - the ransom of Hector from Achilles by Priam – has all sorts of mythic resonance for Australian identity as part of the story of the West. As winner of many literary awards, Malouf is nearing the end of his writing career, and this return to The Iliad represents perhaps his most telling and subtle effort to speak of the sources of his own identity. David is an old friend of my father, and I saw a lot of him when I was young. Just one anecdote – walking in the Lane Cover River Valley with David and dad I held forth on world peace. Standing on Whale Rock, David suggested I should speak at the Palm Sunday Peace Rally. Perhaps my eclectic worldview would have made my ideas too difficult for such an event, but I treasure this conversation with David, and others about poetry, the moon landing, the Catholic Church, Italy, Brisbane, teaching in England, and more. Through his books we are all able to enter our own dialogue with this master storyteller. I recalled this conversation on Whale Rock while reading Ransom. Achilles remembers his own childhood, when as a boy he had a natural gift to be one with nature, a child of earth drawn to his mother's element, the sea, feeling “eel-like, fluid, weightless”. Malouf uses this natural sense of earth and water to enframe the Greek world. Rather like Martin Heidegger, with his vision of the fourfold of earth and sky, man and Gods, Malouf presents a natural cosmology that is known in ordinary life but forgotten in the worlds of state. The natural child remains with Achilles only for a time, like the wild boy of Malouf's An Imaginary Life, who gave the gifts of living reality to the jaded cosmopolitan poet Ovid. Achilles must withdraw from his deep memory of identity with nature in order to become an implacable man of war. Here we see the story of the West, the type of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, forcing victory through rational fury. The king's ransom paid by old Priam for return of the dead body of his son, Prince Hector, champion of Troy, seeks almost to expiate the crime of humiliation inflicted by Achilles when he dragged Hector for nine days around the battlefield as revenge for killing his beloved Patroclus. Achilles may have put away his inner child, but even as a champion of war he is immature – moody, sulking and withdrawn from battle to his tent – but on return, exhibiting divine favour in the killing of Hector. Desecrating the body of his victim seems an impiety to the Gods, rubbing the noses of the Trojans in their looming catastrophe. Retelling stories from the Iliad is a central trope of Western culture. For example, W.B. Yeats, in his poem The Sorrow of Love, says “a girl arose that had red mournful lips and seemed the greatness of the world in tears, doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships and proud as Priam murdered with his peers.” Although neither Helen nor Odysseus are mentioned in Ransom, their brooding mythic presence hangs over the death of Hector. Malouf is stepping into this worthy high tradition by bringing The Iliad into psychological contact with modernity. The king's ransom bears the symbolic weight of the redemption of Western Civilization from its own demons. One wonders, as Priam sets out with Somax on the laden donkey cart, will Achilles accept this offering? Will he just kill Priam, leave Hector defiled, and visit Troy with conquering wrath? Or will Priam speak to his humanity and nobility, his sense that the triumph of revenge must be balanced by grief and ritual, allowing return of Hector's body? Will Achilles be like those Portuguese invaders of Goa, catapulting the heads of emissaries over the defending wall? Priam asks not for peace, just a holy truce while he redeems the body. Is even this too much to ask from his hopeless situation? Achilles is a nasty piece of work, the great Western hero a vengeful brute, exulting in triumphant destruction, unaware his Styxian protection leaves a fatal flaw. The childhood glimpses of a spiritual unity with nature are long forgotten and ignored in the demands of war. Achilles is as predictable as chance, having once displayed his power to ignore the Gods. How will he respond? Priam already knows of this new world of chance. As he first contemplated his grief over Hector, the Goddess Iris made the dangerous suggestion to him that the way things have turned out may be subject to chance, with its implication that not all human agency is fated by the Gods. As Priam considers this new rational outlook, presented by the Goddess of the Rainbow no less, he decides to risk his luck by venturing something new. With this decision, he stands as archetype for the bold creative dynamism of the empires of the West. In looking back to Homer, David Malouf looks for a Western identity. But the Greek mythos cannot stand alone. The pagan values of honour and revenge are filtered in his telling through the silent unspoken lens of the expiating sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, which in the old orthodox view is the ransom paid by God to the devil to atone for the sins of the world. Hector is a type of Christ, and Priam a type of God, making Achilles a type of Satan, to whose satisfaction the ransom is due. Hector suffers the humiliation of Christ, but as a mortal man he does not come back to life. Payment of ransom for Hector only slows the conquest, and is a last act of desperate nobility before the fall of Troy. The Christian ransom, by contrast, points to a victory of God in the world, whereas Priam is tragically doomed by fate. By mixing the myths in this way, Malouf implies the uncomfortable question of whether the sacrifice of Christ can possibly provide atonement, or if we live in a Greek universe where honour is the prelude to destruction. The Bible intrudes again in Malouf's Greek cosmology when Priam's attendants bring him a fine horse and chariot to take the redeeming gold to the Greek camp. In fury, Priam tells them he will go humbly, mounted on a donkey, echoing the triumphant paradox of the entry of Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday before his passion. But Priam is no messiah. He is an old man, almost like Lear but still with his dignity. On the way, cooling his toes in an icy stream, feeling the river water that never passes twice, Priam discovers that as king he has been separated by his court from nature. His humble journey to encounter the wrath of Achilles is also a rediscovery of nature. By the grace of Hermes, messenger of the Gods, Priam fords the stream with Somax and his donkeys Beauty and Shock, whose names are secret. They cross into a liminal threshold world on their way to the Greek camp. Malouf consciously and deliberately imagines a magic realism where the solemn libatory ancient world has its own reasons and purposes. Drinking from his own well, Malouf makes the mythology of this ur-text of western war his own. Entering the minds of Achilles and Priam, he summons the petulant violence of the Greek attack on Troy and the quiet dignity of its long defence, this legendary city at the origin of Rome and the True Britons through Aeneas. An umbilical link holds Malouf to this old violent story, looking for where The Iliad provides psychological foundations and reference points for modern attitudes. Priam's desperate ransom gamble is a shock to his wife and his court, and his use of the donkey a great mystery. Priam's ransom of Hector seems almost a futile gesture, a token of lost humanity before the storm of defeat. Whether Achilles will accept the offering stands as the sign of his humanity. Whether to choose the implacable path of total war or the recognition of common heritage with the foe? The Iliad is an archetypal Western tragedy, but its location within the frame of military statecraft excludes the subaltern world of ordinary life. And so Malouf tells of how Achilles finds himself excluded from the female world of ritual around grief. Achilles stands a rather thin archetype, befriended only by Aries, and perhaps the fickle Aphrodite. Somax the carter represents ordinary life. It seems Malouf cannot bear the aristocratic vision of pomp and protocol, and must humanise it by meshing the myth with the feeling for the ordinary symbolised by the mule Beauty, and her owner, who cannot quite accept the heraldic title of the King's Idaeus. One well imagines that when Somax tells the story to his grandchildren he will not be believed, but rather accounted one of those eclectic bards who steal ideas from everywhere to spice their tales. Retelling The Iliad seems almost a theft, an illicit repeating of a story already well known. Of course Malouf is not repeating or stealing, but rather making the story his own, as he has every right to. Ransom is a wonderful book, engaging the deep mythic archetypes at the heart of western identity. It opens the question of the psychological and historical lessons available from this iconic legend whose characters are like enfleshed and flawed Gods. In Australia, one imagines Aboriginal Priams, horrified by the desecrating acts of the invading settlers who arrived with Homer in hand and mind. An Aboriginal Priam seeking common humanity and dignity from the new desolate dispensation might find it by chance in a face-to-face encounter, where humanity can be hard to deny. But the remorseless destruction once set in motion cannot be stopped. The ransom of a Hector can provide only momentary respite before the flood. One wonders, can Achilles himself gain redemption by an admission of common mortality and empathy for his foe? Who is really being redeemed here? Could ransoming Hector's body save Achilles' soul?

32. Differences between The ILIAD and RANSOM

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Summary and Analysis
Ransom, the 2009 novel by Australian author David Malouf, retells the story of the Iliad from books 16 to 24. The story starts with Achilles mourning the death of Patroclus, friend and potential lover, Malouf hints. We then see the wrath of Achilles as he slays Hector and drags him behind his chariot day after day. This terrifying side of Achilles is amplified from original Iliad because we can see what Achilles is actually capable of when he finds a good enough reason to fight. Malouf tries to explain the psychology of Achilles, how does the man capable of anything take out his frustration? The narrative then shifts towards Priam. Priam cannot stand the disfiguration of his beloved son. Malouf explores this parallel of loss between Priam and Achilles that Homer in the original Iliad leaves the reader to discover for themselves. After a visit from Iris Priam then explains to Troy that he will make his way to the Greek camp with ransom treasure for Achilles, hoping to stop him from mistreating Hector’s body, to which Hecuba points out is a suicide mission. Priam goes on the journey, despite warnings from his wife. He eventually meets Achilles at his tent where the exchange is made. Priam appeals to Achilles own job as a father in trying to persuade him to allow Hector to return to Troy for a proper burial. The retelling ends with the proper burial of Hector within the walls of his home city.

Differences from the Iliad

It is clear that Malouf has taken several interesting liberties with the near-perfect text that Homer created. The most obvious liberty would be the inclusion of a new character, Somax. Somax is the cart diver who takes Priam to the meeting with Achilles. Somax is the most successfully developed character in the entire narrative. With characters like Priam and Achilles, Malouf takes liberties with their personality that are not entirely in succession with their perfect depictions in the Iliad. However, with Somax, Malouf manages to create a perfect character foil for Priam. Priam has lived in a very safe royal bubble for his entire life and is now forced to exit it to bury his son. Somax, who has by no means lived any life of luxury, unintentionally teaches Priam about the world outside of the palace: he is a personification of the ordinary. He is not the type of person that normally has anything to do with the royal family, but is enthused with the opportunity. It was an unreal experience to talk with Priam, just as it would have been unreal to witness Louis XIV in rural France as he was trying to escape. Although Malouf is not as successful developing Homer’s characters, he is incredibly successful creating his own characters in the world Homer imagined.

There are also a number of small, but interesting changes that Malouf is also successful with. He is trying to fill in the gaps to almost make more sense of the story. One might wonder, in the original Iliad, why Priam was not killed on the way to Achilles tent. Malouf responds by putting Priam in disguise. Another choice Malouf has made is the amount of time allotted to different parts of the book. There are about 50 pages devoted to Priam and Somax’s journey to visit Achilles filled with brilliant descriptions of landscape and interesting insight from Somax, but only about 30 pages devoted to the actual conversation between the Trojan King and the Greek Warrior. Malouf is suggesting that, more like the Odyssey than the Iliad, Ransom is much more about the journey than the end result.

31. An ESSAY on RANSOM: Conrad

Above: David Malouf, writer of the novel Ransom.

The commentary below is by Peter Conrad, writing for The Monthly, and Australian magazine that discusses current affairs, politics, the arts and Australian culture.

Troy Revisited
Homer’s "Iliad" & David Malouf’s "Ransom"
Peter Conrad
The proposition is as simple as the first verse of Genesis, and marginally more believable: in the beginning, Homer invented literature. He did so - if, that is, he was a single person - dualistically, in two poems that look ahead to different literary futures. The Iliad is our primordial epic, celebrating heroic violence and the glory of combat. The Odyssey, which begins when the war in Troy is over and follows its wily, wayward protagonist on his journey home to Ithaca, begets the alternative genre of romance, a form not end-stopped by death like the epic but open to accident and adventure, free to go on exploring indefinitely. Writers ever since have added footnotes to Homer, whether cynically summarising the Trojan War as a lecherous farce, like Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, or cramming Odysseus's decade-long tour of the Mediterranean into a single day in Dublin, as Joyce did in Ulysses.
Which of Homer's two narratives a writer chooses depends on the temper of the times. Romantic voyagers in the nineteenth century favoured The Odyssey. Goethe, visiting an aromatic garden in Sicily, said that for the first time the poem had become a "living truth" to him. As Robert Louis Stevenson crisscrossed the Pacific, he often remembered the idyllic stopovers of Odysseus on islands where seductive nymphs made him only too welcome. In Tennyson's ‘Ulysses' the hero vows to keep travelling forever, rejecting the anticlimactic banality of a landfall or a homecoming. Nikos Kazantzakis, in the superbly ambitious modern extension of The Odyssey that he began writing in 1924, uproots Odysseus from the domestic peace of Ithaca and sends him off to experience a world that lay beyond Homer's ken. He quits the uterine Mediterranean, tracks the Nile to its source, ventures further into Africa and continues southwards until he dies, in Antarctica. His journey is elasticised because, although his itinerary includes encounters with Christ and Buddha, his quest for revelation can only be completed in the afterlife.

By the time Kazantzakis completed his sequel to The Odyssey, in 1938, The Iliad had shown itself to be better suited to our imperilled, capsizing world. The twentieth century's wars were fought under the sign of Homer's epic. Rupert Brooke recited The Iliad on the troopship to Gallipoli, and ecstatically anticipated a death that would eternalise his name. Others questioned such suicidal valour. In the trenches, Wilfred Owen seemed to be wandering through the Homeric underworld, conversing with soldiers who were already dead. Simone Weil, as prophetic as Cassandra, foresaw the next global convulsion in an essay on The Iliad published in 1939: when the clanking horse trundles into the besieged city, Homer predicts an age of warfare conducted by lumbering machines, industrial monsters whose work would be the transformation of men into corpses.

Now David Malouf's meditation on one small episode from The Iliad in his novel Ransom gives the epic a renewed relevance. As Marlowe's Faustus conjures up Helen, whose abduction by Paris started the war, he marvels at the face that launched an armed fleet and "burned the topless towers of Ilium". Less than a decade ago we all saw a pair of topless towers on fire, and we remember them - as fantastical as the Trojan skyscrapers that were raised aloft, as Malouf recalls in Ransom, by the effortless sorcery of music - collapsing into ashen pits, tangled with spars of metal and studded with shards of bone. It is tempting to see Malouf's Troy, "a city of four square towers topped by untidy storks' nests", as the World Trade Center arrogantly multiplied. The twin tumuli in lower Manhattan lacked those rickety nests, but sprouted an equally untidy coiffure of communications masts.

Wolfgang Petersen's film Troy, made a couple of years after September 11, was the first re-examination of Homer in the light of that foul day. In Petersen's account, the Trojan War is the result of Agamemnon's imperial swaggering; the cuckoldry of Helen's husband, Menelaus, is a pretext, like the phoney vial of anthrax that Colin Powell showed off at the United Nations. Troy is shocked, awed and incinerated according to plan, but Petersen's Greeks win little worth boasting of. Even Homer declined to be their loyal apologist: he allowed the home team no monopoly of virtue, and compassionately honoured the enemy's casualties. Malouf, too, is sagely impartial. He tells his chosen segment of the story from the viewpoint of the doomed Trojan king Priam, while taking care to explain the motives of the belligerent Greeks. Achilles kills the Trojan prince Hector to avenge the killing of his lover, Patroclus. He then mutilates Hector's body by dragging it around the walls of the besieged city; the ransom in the novel's title is the hoard of treasure Priam presents to Achilles in the hope of buying back his son's mistreated corpse. Although Priam is the tragic hero, Malouf, in a deft play on words, vindicates or validates the grief of Achilles, who is "waiting for the rage to fill him that would be equal at last to the outrage he was committing". Behind every outrage, whether it's the degradation of a single body or the destruction of two populous towers, lies a rage that needs to be acted out. We do well to remember the grievances of those with homemade bombs in their backpacks.

Homer, like Shakespeare, will always be our contemporary, but is he also our compatriot? Peter Porter provisionally attached Australia to classical Greece in a poem about reading a copy of Hesiod's Works and Days - both a manual of husbandry and a primer of poetic craft - that he picked up at a village fete in England. The ancient book, translated by George Chapman, whose version of Homer introduced Keats to "realms of gold", made Porter realise that "Australians are Boeotians", a humdrum, hard-bitten rural people. The analogy is actually a colonialist insult: metropolitan Athens, scorning the provinces, regarded Boeotia as the homeland of stupidity, so Porter's phrase hints at the way that the British might once have hoity-toitily sniffed at Australians. Norman Lindsay may have wanted to see Australians as Greeks, happily licentious pagans, but it would be truer and timelier to say that we are Trojans, the levelled victims of a conquest that is cultural, not military. The casting of Petersen's film proves the point. Achilles is American, and Hector is Australian. On one side, Brad Pitt, with his febrile war dances, his psychotic tantrums and his fanatically sculpted buttocks, represents power at its most rabid and self-righteous; on the other, unequally matched, is the soft-voiced, doe-eyed Eric Bana, wistfully resigned to defeat. To imagine the two actors swapping roles is like concocting a scenario in which Canberra issues orders to Washington, DC, and John Howard, his battle chariot in overdrive, utters war whoops while trampling George W Bush.

Ransom is too subtle to belabour such correspondences. Earlier narratives by Malouf stretch between southern and northern hemispheres, straining to connect polar opposites. Fly Away Peter and The Great World deal with the disorientation of Australians compelled to fight in a European war; one of the stories in Antipodes describes a journey in the opposite direction, as a soprano triumphantly subjugates Europe before returning to retire in the unoperatic Australian suburbs. The new novel has no need to make defensive claims about Australia's membership of the great, distant world, and my pricked ears could find only one possible allusion to national origins. Surveying his camp, Achilles feels a sense of fraternity with the soldiers he leads, farmers who speak, as he does, a harsh dialect "full of insults that are also backhanded terms of affection". Has Brad Pitt been dubbed with the matily mocking native accent of Eric Bana?

If so, the local joke is incidental. Ransom is a philosophical meditation on Homer's fatalistic universe, not a political allegory. Priam's decision to humble himself by appealing to Achilles interests Malouf as a moral novelty, a thought that no man has ever previously allowed himself to think. In Petersen's film, when Peter O'Toole, as Priam, slips into Brad Pitt's tent to make his lachrymose, quavery-toned plea, the transaction is a simpler matter. Enemies, O'Toole says, must have "respect" for each other: this is a buzzword of our politically correct age, noisily spelt out by the stomping anthem popularised by Aretha Franklin. Pitt does some scowling to semaphore indecision, and then automatically relents. Malouf's reading of the case is more pondered and profound. He sees Priam's initiative - which alarms his wife, Hecuba, and scandalises his courtiers - as a gratuitous action, a thrillingly reckless attempt to locate "a kind of opening" in the closed and foredoomed society of the epic. That opening is an aperture that leads from the ancient world to the modern, from an earth on which human beings live and die at the whim of ill-tempered Olympian deities to our freer but chancier moral territory, where everything is contingent and fates are unpredictably accidental.
Priam objects in principle to the notion that our stories are written in advance by the gods. He might be objecting on Malouf's behalf to the predestining power of myth, which makes our lives mere recapitulations of some previous event and turns every mother-dominated son into Oedipus or every father-fixated daughter into Electra. Malouf himself breaks that transfixing spell when he reinterprets the Homeric story; in the same way, he made Ovid, whom he calls "the poet of ‘the changes'", undergo a wrenching moral metamorphosis in An Imaginary Life. Hecuba warns Priam against the metaphysical offence involved in this revisionism: "Imagine what it would lead to, what would be permitted. The randomness, the violence. Imagine the panic it would spread." She is prematurely paraphrasing Dostoevsky, who pointed out in The Brothers Karamazov that if God does not exist - or if, as in Ransom, the gods are denied judicial rights - then everything is permitted. Walter Benjamin seconded this admonition in an essay that obliquely reflects on the appropriation of Greek culture by the Nazis, who had their own spurious reasons for adopting its worship of human autonomy and of the trained, athletic, combat-ready body. Benjamin noticed a difference that was elided by Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1936 Berlin Olympiad. In Homer's poems, he argued, man remained under the control of the gods, who disciplined human beings by playing capricious tricks on them; by the 1930s, man had become his own god, refusing to recognise any higher power. Glancing ahead, that implies a way of understanding September 11. When the towers fell, as Jean Baudrillard portentously announced, God executed himself in public.

Malouf's Priam ignores these auguries. The risk he takes pays off, and it does so because the vacuum of relativity and contagious terror predicted by Hecuba and Ivan Karamazov turns out to be filled with a new moral authority, which grounds men, binds them to one another and even restrains the homicidal fury of Achilles. This covenant is human nature, and the sense of our interchangeability that comes with it. Petersen's Achilles, in the film's most touching moment, sobs over the corpse of Hector and addresses him as "my brother", but only because they will soon be united in death. Malouf's Achilles is disarmed for a different reason. He mistakes the frail Priam for his own father, Peleus, and falls to his knees weeping. "Overcome with tenderness", he cannot go on behaving inhumanely.

Before long the implacable myth resumes its dictation: after the brief armistice for Hector's funeral games, we are given a visionary preview of an end that even Malouf cannot alter - the death of Achilles; the arrival of his son, Neoptolemus, to avenge him; the messy slaughter of Priam; the long-delayed toppling of the four topless towers. But the opening Malouf makes in the story suffices to question the values of the epic, which enabled poets to glorify violence by extolling "arms and the man", and to propose an alternative function for literature. Dispensing with the privileges of royalty and riding to the Greek camp in a rude cart drawn by mules, Priam refuses to be the self-deifying man condemned by Walter Benjamin. In his plea to Achilles, he goes on to discredit Homer's supercilious gods, who belittle mankind when they look down from above. Immortals, he tells Achilles, cannot understand what humans feel. Men alone know they are certain to die, and that knowledge should predispose them to sympathise with one another, to make common cause in their grief. Priam has devised a new rationale for tragedy, which is no longer - as the Greeks thought - a lament for the demise of a great man; instead, it commiserates with the sorrows of all men. He has also guessed at the empathetic purpose of literature, which allows us to inhabit the minds and bodies of people unlike ourselves, experiencing their joys and sharing their woes. As a youth, Priam himself was ransomed from slavery. Though he escaped the drudgery and misery of bondage, he can imagine how it would feel. "That life, too, I have lived," he says. Novelists specialise in such self-multiplication, which is their humanising gift to us all.

In An Imaginary Life Malouf's Ovid surmises that man, endlessly metamorphosing, will one day turn into god. This is not the outcome envisaged in Ransom, although the novel does make a startling leap ahead from classical humanism to Christian miracle when Hector's butchered body is given back to Priam with all its wounds inexplicably healed, pristine in a linen shroud - a glimpse of the forthcoming Resurrection, or simply the novelist's exercise of his rights as a magic realist? The ransom Priam lays before Achilles is also a kind of redemption, the cancelling of a debt; although Malouf has no patience with Homer's cynical gods, he might approve of a God who, like a novelist, loves the world. Even so, Ransom is not a born-again book (or at least I hope not). Its religion is literature, and the only immortality it accredits is that of stories like Homer's, which are revived whenever they are retold.
Malouf may, however, be acknowledging the literary consequences of Christianity, which put an end to the classical cult of heroism, equalised all men, and insisted on the beauty of the humble, the ordinary, the scruffily real. Priam's conversion is completed with the help of the hired carter who drives him to the encounter with Achilles: as in Shakespeare, a king absorbs the wisdom of a fool, or of a lowly servant. When they pause to rest, eat and cool their feet in a stream, the carter tells Priam that they're both "children of nature ... Of the earth, as well as of the gods". A gravedigger reveals the same truth to Hamlet - and in doing so dispenses him from having to mourn for Priam, whose killing is acted out in the speech the prince earlier asks the player to recite. Now Hamlet perceives that "the fall of a sparrow" matters as much or as little as that of a king. Ransom extends this democratic reverence for all live, dying things to the stables. Achilles has a pair of prize horses, noble beasts whose "satiny hide" and "almost transparent skin" is described with lyrical finesse. But Malouf is even fonder of the carter's two mules, one of which is a sleek, flirtatious creature aptly named Beauty, and he chooses to end his retelling of the story with her.

During the interlude at the stream, fish tickle Priam's toes, midges swarm on his sweat-puddled skin, cicadas shrill and falling leaves spiral through the air. Priam half-hears the carter prattling and reflects that ours is "a prattling world", a buzzing sensorium of diffuse, distracting incidents. It is a revolutionary perception, comparable to Virginia Woolf's account of experience as a blitz of atoms in her essay ‘Modern Fiction'. Epics want to tell the greatest story of all: the fall of Troy, the fall of man. But in Malouf's Troy, as in any modern city, neighbours go to war "over the most trivial affronts". Novels are content with trivia, and know how to find meaning in circumstantial minutiae or stray reminiscences. Hecuba recalls that the infant Troilus was slow to walk, and reminds Priam that she was in labour with Hector for 18 hours. An epic would discount these details, which predate the heroic adulthood of her sons; for a novelist, such anecdotal prattle tells the most confidential and emotionally endearing tales.

Priam bravely chooses to do "something impossible. Something new", and emphasises that his overture to the enemy is "novel, unthinkable". There is a literary manifesto in Malouf's varying of the repeated adjective. In the eighteenth century the novel counted as a new form because it had the courage to secede from classical rules. More was at stake than technical innovation: the novel brought about a moral renovation when it looked away from the rampages of ruffians like Achilles and instead investigated the quiet lives of those who, like Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, rest in "unvisited tombs". The Iliad concludes with Hector's grandiose funeral ceremonies, which last for ten days. But near the end of Ransom, Achilles is taken aback to find himself thinking "unheroic thoughts" about the sanitary preparations for those rites, taken care of by laundresses and washerwomen who compel him to leave before they go to work on Hector's body. Only a novel can penetrate this private, secret world, from which a hero who performs his brutish deeds of valour in the public arena is debarred.

Although Homer invented literature, that was only a beginning. He left later writers with the obligation to reinvent it, adjusting it to new realities. In Ransom, the all-seeing and modestly all-knowing Malouf has done exactly that.

30. RANSOM: KEY QUOTES

‘He was waiting for the rage to fill him that would be equal at last to the
outrage he was committing. That would assuage his grief, and be so
convincing to the witnesses of this barbaric spectacle that he too might
believe there was a living man at the centre of it, and that man himself.’ (p.27)

Malouf suggests the divided nature of Achilles’ character here, his tremendous inner
conflict following the death of Patroclus, who is in some ways described as his ‘other
half’. The idea of an inconsolable grief that leads to barbaric acts is clearly portrayed,
as is the idea of war as a type of spectacle. The question of identity is posed,
whether or not Achilles himself can see a real man as responsible for such an
atrocity. This anticipates much of the suspense and tension as the reader speculates
about what type of reception Priam will receive from a man capable of such
barbarism.

‘What Priam is speaking of is a dream. Dreams are subtle, shifting, they are
meant to be read, not taken literally. Hidden away in what they appear to
present are signs that must be seized on by a mind that can see past mere
actualities to what hovers luminously beyond.’ (p.55)

The nature of dreams and visions is at the heart of Ransom, expressing the deep
yearnings and struggles of the characters, a connection that exists between both
Priam and Achilles. Priam’s dream/vision represents a way of penetrating what
appears to be the impenetrable reality of events such as war. The sense of a deeper
reality in human affairs, what was previously referred to as Priam’s discovery of the
role of chance in human affairs, is also suggested here.

‘I had experienced something I could never forget. What it means for your
breath to be in another’s mouth, to be one of those who have no story that will
ever be told.’ (p.75)

Priam recounts the unforgettable trauma of his own earlier experience of war and the
sack of Troy in which he was taken prisoner, disguised as a slave. Priam reflects on
the nature of having his identity stripped from him and being plunged into the
anonymous world of those whose stories will never be told. This experience clearly
marks Priam as an individual with a heightened sense of the need to have a clear
narrative of identity, to have that identity placed in a chronicle that can be told,
understood, recognised. This passage laments the absence of narrative
commemoration for the masses of people who never receive the recognition of
heroes or kings.

‘ “But the truth is, we don’t just lie down and die, do we sir? We go on. For all
our losses. But I’d’ve been walking around, strong as I am, with a broken
heart.” ’ (pp.131–132)

Somax expresses in uncanny fashion a philosophy of life that almost exactly mirrors
the ethic of persistence that is driving Priam to the camp of Achilles. The expression
of human endurance in the face of immense suffering becomes one of the novel’s
principal concerns. Somax articulates many of the central issues that Priam himself
embodies, but in a colloquial style. In this, he signals the legendary storyteller he is
later to become.


‘Look, he wants to shout, I am still here, but the I is different. I come as a man
of sorrow bringing the body of my son for burial, but I come also as a hero of
the deed that till now was never attempted.’ (p.209)

Priam’s triumph is described here, his transformation from a king back into a man,
with all the sense of achievement that an individual is capable of. This image is not
one of diminishment; on the contrary Priam voices this change from a king into ‘a
man of sorrow’ as the fulfilment of his vision of ‘bringing the body of his son for
burial’. What may seem an apparently simple act, burying a son, the reader of
course knows has taken on epic proportions which paradoxically have only been
made possible by Priam returning his self to the status of a mortal, ordinary being. All
the themes of transformation, identity, loss, chance and ordinary heroism are
suggested here.

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.

28. RANSOM THEMES: The TRANSFORMATION of the SELF

Ransom explores the idea that personal transformation is an almost inevitable
aspect of the human condition. The vision in which Priam sees himself ‘dressed in a
plain white robe without ornament. No jewelled amulet at his breast’ is a vision of
himself reduced to his essential humanity with no symbolic interdictions in the form
of his noble status to come between himself and the world, specifically between
himself and Achilles. To enact this change is in some sense to challenge the will of
the gods who had decreed Priam’s fate from the moment he was originally ransomed
as a child. Priam sees his entire life as a mockery, ‘and all that lies between, the
extravagant pageant of his days as Priam, King of Troy, a mockery as they had all
along intended’. In this moment of despair Priam experiences a divine visitation from
the goddess Iris who assures him: ‘Not a mockery, my friend, but the way things are.
Not the way they must be, but the way they have turned out. In a world that is also
subject to chance’. (p.46)

This notion of chance is significant in the novel’s examination of the individual
capacity for transformation. For Priam, human life has always appeared subject to
the will or whims of the gods, a fore-ordained pattern in which individuals merely
constitute the motifs of this larger design. The visionary discovery or revelation that
chance plays a significant part in human affairs is a moment of profound personal
liberation for Priam as he is able to envision a role for himself that transgresses the
boundaries he had always believed were immutable for him. Priam articulates a new
conception of human possibility through this discovery: ‘I believe’, he says, ‘that the
thing that is needed to cut this knot we are all tied in is something that has never
before been done or thought of. Something impossible. Something new’. (p.58)

Priam expresses this belief in terms that also ironically signal the modern narrative
form that will inherit the legacy of the oral tradition and translate it into something
new for an audience of readers when he says, ‘The fact that it has never been done,
that is novel, unthinkable — except that I have thought of it — is just what makes me
believe it should be attempted. It is possible because it is not possible’. (p.59)

Priam’s vision becomes something of an allegory for the birth of the modern novel
with its emphasis on individual experience and character psychology, the classical
novelistic themes of chance, contingency, the striving of the protagonist and the
examination of the problematic self. Malouf discovers in the classical tradition of the
Homeric epic the first cultural stirrings of the impulses that would eventually lead to
the conception of the modern novel as the dominant narrative form of a
post-classical age.

27. RANSOM THEMES: The ABYSS of WAR

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.

26. RANSOM THEMES: FATHERS & SONS

Ransom is a novel that is structured around a series of relationships that explore the
experiences of fathers and sons: Priam and Hector; Peleus and Achilles; Achilles
and Neoptolemus; Somax and his sons. Ransom explores the bonds and the
dislocations that exist between father and son, and the sometimes terrible legacy of
guilt and pain that this relationship may represent. When Priam listens to the tragic
story of how Somax lost both his adult sons he is forced to admit to himself that
although ‘he too knew what it was to lose a son. He had lost so many in these last
months and years’, he was also compelled to wonder ‘if the phrase he had taken up
so easily, that he knew what it was to lose a son, really did mean the same for him
as it did for the driver. Whether what he had felt for the loss of Gorgythion ... and
Dorryclus and Isus and Troilus and the rest, was in any way comparable to what this
man had felt for a boy who was, after all, neither a prince nor a warrior, just a villager
like so many more’. (p.136)
Priam is forced to concede that in his role as a father he was acting in an equally
symbolic manner to his role as king. Of the loss of so many sons ‘he had no memory
of any one of them’ and when considering the intimate acts and gestures of
fatherhood that Somax recalls in such poignant detail, Priam must conclude: ‘ …
such an act of violent intimacy was hardly within his comprehension’. (p.138) Priam
understands that he has been a captive of ‘royal custom’, ‘the habit of averting his
gaze, always, from the unnecessary and particular’, but that it is precisely ‘the
unnecessary and particular’ that constitutes the very texture of human relationships,
particularly those most intimate relationships such that between a parent and child.
While his wife, Hecuba, can recall the beat of her unborn child’s foot beneath her
heart, Priam is left contemplating the absence of feeling, even the absence of
memory itself.
For Achilles this sense of dislocation is both physical and geographic, the temporal
dislocation created by the war, and also a more frightening vision of his son’s
paternal inheritance. Achilles envisions the death of Priam at the hands of his son:
‘Achilles feels the breath of a hot sword in the air. Sees, as through a momentary
opening in eternity, the old man Priam go sprawling. Hears the armed Fury, in a
burning glance across his shoulder, shout into the dark: “There, father! There,
Achilles! You are avenged!” ’. (p.186)
This apocalyptic vision of his son, Neoptolemus, avenging his death at the hands of
Priam’s own son Paris, causes Achilles to sit ‘soul-struck’ in an ‘annihilating
revelation’ of the unending cycle of violence that has been created between the
fathers and sons of this murderously intimate war. Malouf captures the quality of
murderous tribalism that the war has produced, a war that sets the sons against their
father’s enemies and ensures the vengeful response from the murdered man’s own
son. Through this allegory of familial conflict and violence Malouf uncovers the
essential irrationality of war. Both Achilles and Priam will be killed by the other’s
sons, a fate that will not be averted even after this moment of mercy and recognition
that has been achieved by Priam’s petition for the body of Hector.

25. RANSOM: Hermes

In a novel that is otherwise resolutely committed to portraying the ancient world with
attention to the minute particulars of ordinary experience, Malouf allows the reader a
glimpse into the fantastical realm of the divine with the appearance of the god
Hermes, ‘the celestial joker-messenger, thief, trickster, escort of souls to the
underworld’, who is sent to accompany Priam into the camp of Achilles. Hermes is
depicted as an insolent youth who taunts Somax and provides them both with a
foretaste of their own mortality: ‘I see you are amazed’, the god said...Well, that is
understandable, and proper too. What I told you is true, I was sent. Though not by
Achilles... Sent, yes, but not for the usual reasons, nothing of that sort is intended.
Not on this occasion. The next time you see me will be a different story. But you’ll
know me then won’t you, old fellow?’. (p.159) While the character of Hermes
introduces something of a comedic interlude before the intense drama of Priam’s
confrontation with Achilles, he does also suggest the presence of divine forces in
human life, forces beyond our usual powers of perception or understanding.

24. RANSOM: Somax/Ideaus

In a novel centrally concerned with the capacity for personal transformation the
humble figure of the carter Somax acquires special importance as he becomes in the
course of the novel the King’s herald Idaeus, yet never relinquishes his essential
humanity. Plucked from the Trojan marketplace precisely because of his humble
character and appearance, demanded by Priam after the unsuitable arrangements
originally made by his family, Somax embodies Priam’s vision of unadorned
simplicity and authenticity. Somax is given the qualities of a vernacular character,
chosen for his unremarkable identity; he is an expression of the ‘popular’, of common
or colloquial human nature, especially as these qualities are expressed in his own
language. The appearance of Somax in the narrative is the reassertion of the
popular imagination in an epic chronicle of conflict and struggle. He is, in some ways,
a character who embodies the oral tradition from which Homer’s poem emerged; the
timeless practice of storytelling before an immediate audience, the unmediated
relationship between speaker and listener.
Malouf is interested in Ransom in examining how such a common exterior can
disguise or dissemble the inner complexity of feeling that Somax gives expression to
in his stories of family life, that while in complete contrast to the epic tragedy of
Priam’s own family history, still emit the tragic dimensions of all human loss, pain
and grief. It is telling that Somax reveals this complexity of character through story
and the act of narrative. As the journey unfolds it becomes apparent that Somax is
gradually transformed into the role of the royal herald Idaeus through what he
reveals of his own nobility of spirit. Such inner nobility is predicated on the abundant
qualities that complicate his initial function as simply Priam’s driver. Somax performs
his duties not only as a humble driver and servant of the King, but increasingly as a
man who has suffered experiences not entirely unlike those of his more illustrious
travelling companion, the profound losses of a grieving father. The stories Somax
recounts of the deaths of his two sons are in response to what he recognises is the
severe psychological abjection that Priam suffers. These chronicles of anonymous
pain and grief share nothing of the epic quality of Hector’s death, but they serve to
remind Priam of the universal aspects of the human condition — loss, regret, anger,
grief — and forge a common understanding between the men, who are otherwise
separated by the unbridgeable gulf of social rank.
Somax should not be understood by the reader as some sentimental portrait of
plebeian devotion, the stereotypical figure of the honest labourer. He is variously
described as a drunkard, a liar, a man not to be fully trusted, a man of unusual traits
such as his love of his donkey Beauty. By the end of the novel Somax has been
transformed still further, until he has become the archetypal figure of the storyteller,
100 years old and having acquired a wealth of stories and expert in the art of oral
narration. Somax is the very embodiment of the ancient poet, the precursor to
Homer: a custodian of collective memory and formative experience, recounting
stories that constitute the imagined community of a culture and a people.