Review of Ransom, by David Malouf

Ransom focuses on the moment in the Iliad when King Priam retrieves his son Hector’s body from Achilles. In twenty years of teaching that part of the epic, I never survived a class without having to wipe away tears. For me, it is the single most revealing moment in literature about what it means to be human. Nothing tops it. To choose that moment for a book’s primary subject! —audacious and, it turns out, wise.

As far as plot or story goes, it’s as simple a book as could be. A grieving father ignores the legitimate concerns of his aged wife and remaining sons and insists on going on a mad journey into the heart of the Greek camp to beseech the killer of his many sons, and most particularly his dearest son Hector, to give back Hector’s body, even though Achilles has shown nothing but a burning desire to wreak his continuing revenge on the corpse by dragging it daily behind his chariot. Hector, after all, had killed his friend Patroclus, the man who was as necessary to Achilles’s well-being as breath or water. In a moment of transformation, Achilles agrees, and Priam returns with the body. That’s the story, unchanged from Homer. But that’s not the book, or not more than the structure upon which he suspends the essentials; the insights and epiphanies of his telling rise like the smell of fresh bread coming from the oven: earthy, embracing, bracing, and beautiful.

Malouf captures both physical place and inner worlds with extraordinary precision and grace—sometimes all in the same group of spare words. For example, in the opening pages Malouf portrays the complex being that is Achilles, part mortal, part son of the sea goddess Thetis:

“As a child he had his own names for the sea. He would repeat them over and over under his breath as a way of calling to her till the syllables shone and became her presence. In the brimming moonlight of his sleeping chamber, at midday in his father’s garden, among oakwoods when summer gales bullied and the full swing of afternoon came crashing, he felt himself caught up and tenderly enfolded as her low voice whispered on his skin.”

“When summer gales bullied”—that sort of word choice, unexpected and perfect, is a reflection that Malouf is not only an award winning novelist, but also a first rate poet.

It is to Priam that Malouf brings the most startling understandings. In building his version of Priam, he borrows from a mythological tradition outside Homer about Priam’s early life—a near miss with slavery—and he gives Priam a most unlikely companion on his crazy journey, a rough workman, a carter who sits in the marketplace each day with his mules and wagon for hire. He portrays Priam struggling to understand what being a father, a husband, a man means. Malouf’s Priam tugs off the restraining mantel of kingship to discover the simple joys of being human, partly with the help of his humble companion. This is fascinating to me since it is from Priam’s visit that Achilles finds his way back to the human race. I had never imagined a Priam who, for different reasons than Achilles, is also struggling to find his humanity. Malouf has often written about what the inner world of being a man is, and this book continues that theme. The subtlety of his findings on this subject are hard to analyze—the atmospheric, osmotic understanding has to grow into you from Malouf’s words.

I’m not sure how this book would feel to someone who has never read the Iliad. I honestly can’t say if it would be as rich an experience, though I’d love to hear from anyone who reads Ransom but hasn’t experienced the ancient epic. Given the depth of Malouf’s ideas about male feelings, I think it’d be a great read. But for all you lovers of Homer, I am certain this is a book you’ll savor.