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.
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.
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