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?
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