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(More customer reviews)Ransom: A Novel retells -- with certain changes -- the story of Troy's king Priam hazarding across the battle lines into the enemy camp of the Achaean warrior, Achilles. He takes a cart of gold which he intends to pay in ransom for the body of his dead son, Hector, whom Achilles killed in retribution for the death, in battle, of Achilles' great friend, Patroclus.
This short novel opens with Achilles mourning Patroclus by the seaside where the Greeks and their ships have been beached for nine long years. In Part I he does the deed of vengeance and then drags the body behind his chariot, day after day. "All this, he tells himself, is for you, Patroclus." He wants to see Patroclus' ghost, who came before, but his comrade does not answer.
The focus then shifts to Priam. Unable to bear what is happening to Hector's body, he, with a little encoragement from the goddess Iris, declares to his family and court that he will dress as a common man and take a mule cart laden with treasure to Achilles as ransom for his son. Hecuba, his first among wives, cannot dissuade him from what would almost certainly be a suicide mission. When she asks what will save him, he replies: perhaps the gods.
At dusk, the wagon departs the safety of Troy, and for more than fifty pages, the journey of the next few hours takes center stage. Devoting so much space to this when the Priam/Achilles meeting to which it leads is covered in thirty-four pages suggests the author, David Malouf, believes the adage about it being the journey, not the destination, that matters. Driving mules called, significantly, Beauty and Shock, the carter is, instead of from Homer's actual king's herald, a common man - the only one among gods, kings, and great warriors. Malouf wants a character of his own in this retelling, and he wants to relate his own version of what happened between the time the cart left Troy and it arrived in the enemy's camp after dark. Besides nearly drowning in the fast river currents and meeting an odd guide of sorts, Priam expands his understanding of life in this interval, especially as the hay-wain driver tells about the loss of his own sons.
The shared bond of fatherhood may also be the key with Achilles when Priam is finally face to face with him. Achilles has a son whom he has not seen since before the war began, and surely he would want to be able to hold a proper funeral for him if he were to die? At the Greek camp, Malouf alters some of The Iliad (Penguin Classics) story, electing something more collaborative and conciliatory than the original.
Once finished, one may feel that RANSOM could have done more with Priam, Achilles, and other original characters from THE ILIAD. The meeting -- and some earlier areas of the book also -- seems cramped and incomplete, as though Malouf felt self-conscious about expanding on those points that are pegged but also not dwelled upon in THE ILIAD. And that's too bad because several times, the text almost cries out for additional insights. The author, however, felt more comfortable with his own creative paths. His stated reason for writing it: "But the primary interest is in storytelling itself -- why stories are told and why we need to hear them, how stories get changed in the telling -- and much of what it has to tell are 'untold tales' found only in the margins of earlier writers." Arguably, Malouf could have written another book about a cart driver and a king and left the Trojan War out of it.
The novel's language is often hauntingly picturesque and resonates emotionally and mystically. This, for instance: "The sea surface bellies and glistens, a lustrous silver-blue -- a membrane stretched to a fine transparency where once, for nine changes of the moon, he had hung curled in a dream of pre-existence and was rocked and comforted." Malouf is a master of lyrical prose.
RANSOM, in conclusion, is a fast-reading book that captivates with its language and provokes thought with its message and symbols, but falls a little short on shedding light on these two giants of Greek literature. Despite some opportunities for character building and story fleshing that were not taken, Malouf's supplement to Homer's great work is very worthwhile. It illustrates that looking into the blackness of the despair and shock of mourning and destiny can allow for a glimpse of the invisible, the eternal, and the beautiful.
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