36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"It is...a joke of the kind that the gods delight in, who joke darkly.", January 20, 2010
This review is from: Ransom: A Novel (Hardcover)
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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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THIS IS NOT A BOOK, February 12, 2010
This review is from: Ransom: A Novel (Hardcover)
RANSOM is not a book. It's a time machine. Give it the slightest chance, accept it on its own terms, and it will carry you back to King Priam's meeting with Achilles just as surely as Somax's simple mule cart in this story carried Priam himself to that same meeting. Each word is smoothly polished and carefully fitted into the beautifully structured whole, creating a story that is as well crafted as a poem and which will grip you just as tightly as if you were in the wooded hills of Greece sitting around and gazing into a late evening campfire listening to Malouf spin his magical yarn of Priam's trip to find and to meet Achilles -- a short two day trip that turns out to contain almost as many life-lessons both for Priam and indeed for all of us all as did Odysseus's ten year journey home to Ithaca after the war. Throughout the trip Somax unknowingly serves for Priam much the same humanizing function as did the Roman slaves who during parades stood immediately behind returning generals in their chariots continually whispering into their ears "Remember, thou art but a man". And in so doing Somax opens vital new vistas in Priam's old mind. Observing this process is especially compelling for those of us over a certain age who will feel close to King Priam as we ourselves ride forward toward our own destinies, making peace with many painful things as we go. This book is a gem.
Kenneth E. MacWilliams
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Book 24 reimagined, January 21, 2010
This review is from: Ransom: A Novel (Hardcover)
David Malouf's Ransom is a re-imagining of the events narrated in book 24 of Homer's Iliad. Achilles, mad with grief over the death of his friend Patroclus at Hector's hands, has slain Hector in turn. But contrary to convention, still savage in his unquenchable grief, Achilles daily abuses Hector's body, dragging it behind his chariot around the Greeks' camp, the insult further sorrow to Hector's parents and to the rest of the Trojans. Hector's father, Priam, the King of Troy, is visited by the goddess Iris, who bids him travel to the Greek camp and ransom his son's body. Priam does this, Achilles relents, and Priam returns home with the corpse, which the gods have preserved from decay and Achilles' degradations. Book 24 ends with Hector's funeral.
In Malouf's version the gods are not so clear in their intent. A divine vision gives Priam the glimmer of an idea, that, just perhaps, there is room for man to change his destiny through action, that the gods do not necessarily determine everything. From this spark is borne the idea of the ransom and Priam's journey to the Greek camp. The act is unprecedented. It is not done for a king to step outside his role as figurehead and act as mere man, a mortal father. Priam--apart from a day when he was six years old and seemed destined to a future as a slave--has lived his life in a royal bubble. In the real world he is an innocent, unused to the most mundane of experiences.
The most interesting thing that Malouf does with his story is to introduce a new character. In the Iliad Priam is accompanied on his trip to the Greek camp by his herald Idaeus. In Ransom Priam's companion is a simple carter, Somax, the owner of a pair of black mules and a wagon. For the purpose of the journey, because he is accustomed to being escorted by an Idaeus--though the man behind the name may change--Somax is given the herald's identity. It is Priam's experience passing time with this normal man, who, though respectful, has not been drenched in the royal conventions, that wakes Priam up to the realities of life lived outside the bubble.
Ransom is a short book, but it deserves a slow read. Malouf's syntax sometimes requires concentration; his language is very often beautiful:
"Achilles grunted, gave the sword another push. The whole weight of his body hung on the thrust. Weightless himself. All the force of his brute presence gone now into the blade as he urged it in. There was a still, extended moment when they were joined, he and Hector, by three hand-spans of tempered bronze."
It deserves mention too that the book itself, as physical object, is a beautiful thing, a small hardcover with Somax's black mule in shadows on the cover, and the texture of the dust jacket, somehow, like velvet. Much as I love reading on my Kindle, it can't match the experience of holding a book in this particular case.
-- Debra Hamel
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