Ransom
By David Malouf, Chatto & Windus, Rs 899

“Sing, Goddess, of the anger of Achilleus, son of Peleus,” invokes the poet of the Iliad. But Achilles in David Malouf’s novel is numb with grief. He flogs the slain Hector’s body, “waiting for the rage to fill him”. In Ransom, Malouf will not sing of wrath, he will not sing of valour in battle or the might of kings and heroes. After Hector is killed, Priam, King of Troy, visits Achilles in the Argive camp, and asks for the body of his son in return for a ransom. A request that is to be made “man to man”. It is this intimate human exchange that Malouf is concerned with. This raw pulse of experience that is revealed when king and hero are melted down to mere men.

In his rendition of an epic moment, Malouf re-imagines the heroic self. The very idea of “ransom”, or the price paid in return for a man’s life, measures one in material terms. The great King Priam, whose name means “the price paid”, offers Achilles all the wealth of his kingdom. In a vision that Priam has, the glow of gold under a shroud turns into the glow of Hector’s body. In the body of a hero “restored and ransomed”, the sublime is reduced to the physical. There is, however, another gift that Priam offers Achilles — the chance to “break free of the obligation of being always the hero ... To take on the lighter bond of being simply a man”.

For Priam and Achilles, imprisoned in their public identities, the liberty of being just a man is dangerously novel. As king and warrior enmeshed in a web of political and social relations, they have to preserve the image of invincibility. They must possess those qualities of courage and nobility that the Romans would later define as virtus, or virtue that is essentially played out in the public sphere. Yet Achilles is a doomed and vulnerable man, racked with guilt over the death of his friend, Patroclus. Priam, who was almost sold as a slave when he was a child, has never been able to shake off the reek of the lowly, although he has fulfilled the duties of a king. For him, to approach Achilles “just as I am” takes a kind of courage different from the valour of battle.

The self that emerges, shorn of ceremonial grandeur, is strangely fluid. It has a quality of permeability that renders Priam and Achilles open to ‘divine’ influences; at times the gods might almost be extensions of the mortal mind. It also makes both of them susceptible to the power of storytelling. Perhaps in a reference to the oral tradition of epics, the novel has instances of Priam and Achilles being profoundly affected by stories that are told them. The imaginative influence of these stories is so great that the listener might almost be standing within them, he might almost be the characters — until his sense of self is displaced altogether. For with epics, stories are not just narrated; they are powerfully evoked.

Maybe Malouf hopes that this power of suggestion that is wielded by stories will extend not just to the characters in his novel but to his readers as well. He tells his story with a vital immediacy, picking out details in his lucent prose. The sharp edges of experience are made to gleam with a peculiar intensity. Malouf treats of lofty characters and situations. He also reclaims the epic for the countless ‘low characters’ that convention ignores, like Somax the carter and his dead sons, or the soldiers of the Argive camp, whose “hard-bitten features” resemble Achilles’s own. If at times he borders on the overly sentimental, the emotional impact of the story remains undiminished. For Malouf’s readers share with his lead characters that most powerful thing — the knowledge of mortality.