An epic tale from a king of storytellers

FICTION: Ransom, by David Malouf, Chatto, 224pp, £14

A GREAT PRINCE of Troy is slain by a powerful Greek warrior, one whose reputation for courage is matched only by his less attractive temper and habitual savagery. This most recent killing was intended to avenge that of a friend who was slaughtered while wearing the warrior’s famous helmet. But the avenger is not satisfied. The body of the dead prince, tied to a chariot, is dragged over the stony ground. This act of violation is repeated day after day before the eyes of the prince’s grieving parents. The father is a great king, now ancient, but still a king. He wants the body of his son to be returned for burial.

Homer's Iliadis one of world literature's great stories, a tale that transcends the original. In any given generation, only a minority have read Homer's majestic poem in translation, never mind the original. Yet somehow the story of Troy is one that endures; gods rage, warriors fight and men die. Australian writer David Malouf writes with the voice of a poet; his graceful fiction deals in truth and is always beautiful. He has taken Homer's epic and given it fresh life in Ransom, a haunting mood piece that centres on King Priam's sad quest, the retrieval of Hector's corpse. This is a book that will engage and inspire.

It is not the first time Malouf has looked to the classics. An Imaginary Life(1978), one of his finest works to date, is based on the exile of the poet Ovid, during which he meets a wild boy raised by wolves. Ancient Rome comes to life in this story of a friendship unfolding through Malouf's exquisite prose. An Imaginary Lifeis a special novel, a subtle work of art, haunting and thoughtful. Malouf has achieved similar perfection in Ransom. The heat of Troy, and the ongoing tension created by warring forces, ripple through a text dominated by contrasting emotions – rage and sorrow.

For all the violence of the episode, Patroclus, the boyhood companion of Achilles, a man with few friends, has been slain and Achilles, the runner, comes out of his sulk to embrace rage. His anger is vented in killing Hector, but not appeased. In order to achieve this he abuses Hector’s body. Achilles may have won this battle but mortality is also stalking him. Before he dies, Hector “on his knees in the dust” gazes up at his enemy. “And despite the death-wound he had received, in a spirit untouched by the old rancour, with an almost brotherly concern, he spoke to Achilles with the last of his breath: as men, both, for whom this moment was sacred; a meeting that from the beginning had been the clear goal of their lives and the final achievement of what they were. Man to man, but impersonally. So that Achilles, leaning close, felt a shiver go through him as he recognised the precise point where Hector’s own breath gave out and what replaced it was the voice of a god.”

It is a chill moment in a narrative of incidents that are each described and painted in words of such exactness that they live in the mind. It is a wonderful book – but then, Malouf is an accomplished artist, a storyteller who thinks as a poet. Before he dies – or perhaps he is already dead – Hector warns the doomed Achilles that he will not outlive him: “The days are few now that you have to walk on the earth . . . Already, away there in your father’s house in Phthia, they are preparing to mourn.”

Priam, the king of Troy, has lost many of his 50 sons, but no loss has hurt him as much as the death of Hector. The old man sets off to bargain with Achilles, and fills a cart with gold, a ransom to be traded for his son’s body. The king makes careful preparations for his mission: “No chariot, no horses, I will ride in the cart on the crossbench beside the driver.” He will bargain with Achilles as a father, not as a king.

Malouf works deep into the text; he moves beyond it. Priam’s sorrow is as much about honour as it is about grief. He wonders how closely he feels about his many sons. His companion on his mission is the humble old Somax, owner of two mules – one a beauty, fittingly named Beauty. Somax is also a father, but his children are all dead. His hopes rest on a granddaughter. They are tested on the journey when they are faced with fording a river. Somax had lost a son, but not the tough donkey Beauty, while attempting a similar crossing. The old men appear to be assisted by a youth who turns out to be none other than Hermes.

In his eloquent afterword, Malouf recalls first hearing what he calls “the Troy story” as a schoolboy, “one rainy Friday afternoon in 1943, when we were unable to go out into the playground . . .”. The young Malouf responded to the story in the context of what he was then living through, a world war with US troops continually arriving in Brisbane en route to join General MacArthur’s Pacific campaign. The story has remained in Malouf’s memory and his imagination has given it new energy, renewed daring. The meeting between Priam, whom Achilles at first thinks is his own aged father, is magnificent: possibly the finest sequence in a glorious book.

Priam the king, now only a father, informs Achilles of the harshest of truths: “you know, as I do, what we men are. We are mortals, not gods. We die. Death is in our nature. Without that fee paid in advance, the world does not come to us . . . And for that reason, if for no other, we should have pity for one another’s losses. For the sorrows that must come sooner or later to each one of us, in a world we enter only on mortal terms.” The king, speaking only as “a plain man white-haired and old” implores Achilles “to take the ransom I bring and give me back my son.”

Malouf has engaged with famous characters, figures from classic literature ever moving between myth and art, and has made them real. Ransomis a dignified performance. Here is fiction as art, epic re-imagined as a simple tale of a father fulfilling his duty. Serious questions are raised: honour, grief, retribution, mortality. In writing this novel Malouf is honouring a great work and also making it his own.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent ofThe Irish Times