15. RANSOM: Section 5

The final section of the novel describes Priam’s return to Troy and the successful
completion of his mission, though there is nothing triumphal about this moment. In
the closing pages Malouf evokes a vision of the fall of the city, the destruction of its
culture and the dispersal of its people. In the most violent scene in the novel, the
death of Priam at the clumsy hands of Neoptolemus is portrayed as the ultimate
instance of the ugly horror of war, its brutalising logic and destructive inevitability.
Malouf provides brief images of the fall of a great city and the enslavement of its
people, a vision of Troy itself through the portents of its final transformation: ‘Off in
the distance, the hills towards Troy are just beginning to develop shadows on their
sides: their crests are already touched with gold’. (p.207)

This theme of transformation is continued in the final section with the character of
Priam; who through transforming back into an ordinary man, a father of a murdered
son, has also become a figure of legend, the protagonist of future narratives that will
recount his journey to the camp of the Greeks and his courage in facing the fearful
Achilles to ask for the slain body of his son: ‘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 has transformed himself from a king into a man and hence into a hero of mythic stature through story. Priam returns to Troy and feels his homecoming now as a state of ‘exultant well being’. This state is short lived in the novel as the focus immediately shifts to Achilles’ vision of the son’s murder of Priam, a symbolic act of patricide in which Achilles
experiences the eternal shame of its violence and absence of dignity: ‘And for him
the misery of this moment will last forever; that is the hard fact he must live with.
However the story is told and elaborated, the raw shame of it will be with now till his
last breathe’. (p.214) The central human importance of story becomes the novel’s
final image with the figure of Somax under the misshapen sycamore recounting the
stories of the fall of Troy and that image prefiguring the central role of all storytellers in human culture, of Homer himself and epic poems such as the Iliad.