User talk:Ottre

Malouf starts where Homer begins: the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, the death in battle of Achilles’s friend Patroclus, the slaying of Hector and Achilles’s wrathful abuse of the Trojan prince’s corpse. In Troy, a plan begins to form in King Priam’s mind, prompted perhaps by a god. He will cross the Greek lines, bearing Troy’s treasure, to beg Achilles for Hector’s mangled remains. The frail monarch sets out on the perilous journey, confronts Achilles and softens the warrior’s heart. He returns with Hector’s body; the funeral rites begin.

Like many other versions of the ancient legend, Ransom recounts merely an episode in the war between Greeks and Trojans. There is almost nothing here about the cause of the conflict. Nor is there a mention of the wooden horse. The destruction of the city is glimpsed in one feverishly fleeting vision. Instead, Malouf’s tale focuses on more intimate issues.

At its centre stands the relationship between fathers and their children: fathers grieving for their s ons, s ons yearning for their fathers. When Achilles sees the ageing figure of Priam, he thinks for a moment that it is his father, Peleus, approaching him. Priam, for his part, remembers his own early days when his name was Podarces; the death of his father at the hands of Heracles; and how he was saved, after which he assumed his new name with its overtones of one who has been ransomed. Achilles knows that his son, Neoptolemus, whom he has not seen for many years, will avenge his own imminent death.

These themes come together in Malouf’s single embellishment of the old tale. When Priam resolves to set out for the Greek camp, dressed humbly in white, leaving behind him both the trappings of royalty and the herald who had always spoken in his name, he chooses a creaking carter’s wagon, drawn by two mules, to convey him and the city’s treasure.

Malouf calls the carter Somax. As the two pause on the bank of the Scamander, the stream separating Greeks and Trojans, Priam discovers that his royal dignity, the essential aloofness of a king, is gradually replaced by something he can hardly name but we recognise as human feelings. He learns that the carter has also lost his sons. He hears about Somax’s daughter-inlaw and the wonderful griddle cakes she makes. Eventually, against all his training if not instincts, he accepts one of the cakes Somax offers him and drinks a little wine. And so a bond emerges between the two grieving men. The carter gently breaks down the monarch’s reserve and takes on the role of a guide, a protector and even (in a limited way) of a friend.

These pages of Ransom are nothing short of magical. Malouf’s prose is delicate, marvellously alert to the natural world and endowed with a quality that has one name only: wisdom. There is something Shakespearean about this section: not the Shakespeare of the great speeches but those quiet moments – like the conversation about the past in Justice Shallow’s orchard – when time stands still and the nature of life is mysteriously disclosed.

Then Malouf pulls off a mighty coup-de-theatre. A foppish, perfumed youth, his hair all golden ringlets, approaches the two men. They are puzzled and suspicious but the realisation comes to them that this is no Greek scout or trickster but the great god Hermes, who has descended to conduct them safely to the enemy’s stronghold. It is a magnificent moment in a luminous, heart-rending but always exhilarating fable.

"The primary interest of Ransom," Malouf writes in the Afterword, in which he remembers Miss Finlay, "is in storytelling itself... and much of what it has to tell are ‘untold tales’ found only in the margins of earlier writers." It needs also to be said that this untold tale, snuggling into the spaces left by the likes of Homer and Euripides, Virgil and Shakespeare, is told with outstanding skill and sensitivity.