Ransom (2009) is a novel by Australian author David Malouf. It retells the story of the Iliad from books 22 to 24.
Source: Ransom (Malouf novel) – Wikipedia)
David Malouf’s retells the ending of Homer’s The Iliad with his novel, Ransom. With the death of Patroclus and Hector, we are faced with unfulfilled grief. Achilles drives up and down the walls of Troy dragging Hector’s body. Eventually, Priam decides to set out to ransom Hector’s body to properly mourn his passing.
What stands out for me, is the world we are enveloped in. Shedding all pomp and majesty, Priam travels with a carter from the market. Through their journey, Priam is presented with a different perspective of the world:
Of course these things were not new in themselves. The water, the fish, the flocks of snub-tailed swifts had always been here, engaged in their own lives and the small activities that were proper to them, pursuing their own busy ends. But till now he had had no occasion to take notice of them. They were not in the royal sphere. Being unnecessary to royal observance or feeling, they were in the background, and his attention was fixed always on what was central. Himself. The official activity that was his part in any event or scene, the formal pose it was his duty to maintain and make shine.
A world where ‘everything prattled’:
Silence, not speech, was what was expressive. Power lay in containment. In keeping hidden, and therefore mysterious, one’s true intent. A child might prattle, till it learned better. Or women in the seclusion of their own apartments.
But out here, if you stopped to listen, everything prattled. It was a prattling world. Leaves as they tumbled in the breeze. Water as it went hopping over the stones and turned back on itself and hopped again. Cicadas that created such a long racketing shrillness, then suddenly cut out, so that you found yourself aware once again of silence.
Malouf touches on these moments in his afterword, in which he reflects upon the untold tales that are teased out through such re-tellings:
It re-enters the world of the Iliad to recount the story of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector, and, in a very different version from the original, Priam’s journey to the Greek camp. But its 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.
As with so many of David Malouf’s books, I often find them lingering long afterwards. Here I think I sit with Peter Rose:
So often, paired or alone, his characters slip away from the centre, ‘relegated to the region of silence’. The effect, in Malouf’s superb prose, is usually transformative.
Source: Peter Rose reviews ‘Ransom’ by David Malouf by Peter Rose
Rather than Tom Holland:
If Classic FM published fiction, then Ransom is the kind of novel that would surely result. David Malouf’s reworking of the climactic episode of the Iliad demonstrates that epics are no less susceptible than symphonies to being chopped up and repackaged in accessible, bite-size chunks.
Source: Ransom by David Malouf | Book review by Tom Holland