David Malouf’s Ransom

1.

In the annals of epic poetry there are few poems as vivid and majestic as Homer’s Iliad. From the first introduction of the Achaean armada, through the bone-shattering battle for Patroclus’ corpse, to the revenge of Achilles dyeing the Skamander red, Homer’s dramatization of the Trojan War remains true to its subject in both scale and momentum. Yet for all its larger than life spectacle, the scenes that move me in the poem are the ones that show the human story underneath. This is Homer’s larger theme: the way the ordinary actions of extraordinary men and women can take on consequences far beyond their reach, like the shadows cast by puppets in a dimly lit room. Little wonder that in a world grown increasingly cinematic it is these moments of quiet poetry that still call to us, still demand, and reward, our reflection.

The scene that haunts me in the Iliad comes right at the end. Hector is dead, his body held hostage by Achilles, denied a proper burial, ravaged by dogs. In comes Priam, alone, unarmed, not a grand king, but a desperate father, come to beg an honorable death for his son. And Achilles – angry, bitter, proud Achilles, Achilles whose spoilt recalcitrance has been the engine of the entire story – finds it in his heart to not only grant the old man’s wish, but to decree a period of truce while the Trojans bury their dead. It is a scene worthy of a Poussin painting, a scene where two figures, both surrounded by their own shadows, find in each other an answering glow.

It is a scene that echoes through story after story, poem after poem; a note heard in Shakespeare, as the victorious stand on the battlefield giving their dead enemies their due; and in Whitman, as he writes “that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost”. How fitting that war’s greatest epic should end not in triumph but in pity, that all the feats of arms, all the killing, should come down to this quiet conversation between two broken men.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

2.

Priam and Achilles.

King and warrior. Order and Chaos. Old and Young. The first citizen and the sacker of cities. Preserver and Destroyer. The immovable object. The irresistible force.

Here are the two poles that the war rotates on, their forces equal, opposed.

Yet for all their differences I am struck by the symmetry between these two men. Each man has emerged from the safety of disguise to don the mantle of greatness. Each man is the purest exemplar of his type. And neither man will survive the war; each will be cut down by the other’s son.

But it is more than that. They are relics in their own time, these two, bookends of an era about to be shelved. The future belongs to men of guile and cunning, to Aeneas sailing restlessly towards the future, to Odysseus beating endlessly back to the past. The age of bronze is almost over, and in the age of the silver-tongued there will be no place for plain-spoken men like these, men of honor, men of pride. It is the code they share between them that makes this last alliance possible; a truce that both will honor, because it is the honorable thing to do.

Priam and Achilles. Achilles and Priam. Two pans of a scale held momentarily in balance. Parentheses enclosing the still heart of the storm.

3.

I am not the only one fascinated by this meeting between Priam and Achilles. That meeting is also the focus of Ransom, David Malouf’s sublime new novel, which traces the events leading from Hector’s death to the ransoming of his body. It is a profound and lyrical book, one that delves deep into the hearts of these two men as they race towards their fateful meeting. A book that, like a man holding a diamond up to the light, brilliantly explores the unsung facets of the story, while remaining faithful to both the structure and the spirit of the ancient myth.

The story opens with Achilles, still brooding over the death of his beloved Patroclus, and his own subsequent killing of Hector. As Malouf tells it, Achilles is a man who has come out on the other side of revenge, only to find it does not comfort him, that grief cannot be overcome by force of arms. Consumed by his need to make amends for his friend’s death, Achilles commits outrage after outrage upon Hector’s body, trying to extract the satisfaction he seeks.

He was waiting for the rage to fill him that would be equal at last to the outrage he was committing. That would assuage his grief, and be so convincing to witnesses of this barbaric spectacle that he too might believe there was a living man at the centre of it, and that man himself.

What are these outrages but a cry for help? A lifetime of heroic deeds has not prepared Achilles for the challenge he now faces, the challenge of moving beyond the death of his friend. A challenge made harder by a code of machismo that makes any show of grief, other than violence against his enemies, a sign of weakness. Malouf gives us a perfect portrait of the parasitic nature of revenge, the way it clamps onto one’s heart and demands greater and greater cruelty, the way it breeds self-hatred, which breeds further violence, the way it deprives one of the very comfort it promises to provide.

Yet indelible as Malouf’s portrait of Achilles is, it pales before his depiction of Priam. The great insight of Malouf’s book is to recognize the unprecedented nature of Priam’s actions. For a king of Priam’s stature to venture out in public without his proper retinue is unheard of, for him to go unarmed to the enemy camp unthinkable. When they hear of his intention, Priam’s wife and courtiers are horrified. Throw himself upon the mercy of that killer Achilles? What is Priam thinking?

What is Priam thinking? He is thinking, Malouf tells us, about a time from his childhood; a time when, in the aftermath of an earlier sack of Troy, he was forced to duck and hide with the other orphans, pretending to be one of them to escape Hercules’ doom. From that evil fate he was rescued by his sister, who begged the boy’s life as the price for giving herself to Hercules, a boon that Hercules, in a moment of whimsy, was pleased to grant. Having endured that holocaust (vividly described in Ransom), Priam retains the instincts of a survivor, and the knowledge that a brute warrior may grant in largesse what he would not deign to surrender under attack. And the memory of that day, long repressed, has taught him that we are all, king and peasant alike, fragile creatures, our very lives hanging upon wagers of chance.

‘It seems to me,’ he says, almost dreamily, ‘that there might be another way of naming what we call fortune and attribute to the will, or the whim, of the gods. Which offers a kind of opening. The opportunity to act for ourselves. To try something that might force events into a different course.’

That intuition, so long held in check, is what enables Priam to conceive of his new and daring plan. Because if the gods are not gods, then a king may be a man. Priam’s decision to go to Achilles thus becomes a kind of existential awakening, a decision to act “not in a ceremonial way, as my symbolic self, but stripped of all glittering distractions and disguises, as I am.” Priam chooses to rewrite history rather than enact it, and in doing so he breaks not only from the practices of his court, but from the very logic of the Greek dramatic tradition. Priam as statesman, Priam as a thinker far beyond the normative boundaries of his age, is Malouf’s finest creation, and the character that powers the rest of the book.

His decision made, Priam sets off to find Achilles, accompanied only by a carter named Somax, who serves both as chorus and touchstone. As the journey to the Achaean camp unfolds, the two men develop an unlikely bond, their semi-comic interactions serving to deepen our sense of Priam’s new found connection to his own humanity. Charming as it, though, this section seems mostly a reprieve from the gravity of the rest, a drawing of breath before the confrontation to follow.

And so, the meeting. Priam arrives at Achilles’ camp, aided by Hermes, and finds Achilles at dinner, watching his men eat as he, all appetite lost, sits a little apart. Priam announces himself to the warrior, expects to be struck down, but the blow never comes. Instead, the two men talk, and as he listens to Priam, “Achilles feels immobilized, outside of time”, the noise of his men only a few feet away no longer audible.

Which is as it must be. For if Priam has to renounce his kingship to speak with Achilles, then Achilles must forsake his role as warrior to hear him. Only thus can the two truly meet, as fathers, as men, as human beings. And it is here that Malouf’s great achievement in Ransom is fully revealed, because in showing us a side of each man that we had never before considered, Malouf has laid the groundwork of a meeting that is not that of a suppliant and a benefactor, as it is usually depicted, but a coming together of equals. No longer is Priam the pitiful kneeling figure we expected, but a strangely dominant presence, whose suit to Achilles is less a plea and more a piece of advice, the words of an older, more experienced man telling a younger, more hot-headed one how to act. Priam succeeds not because he makes Achilles think of himself as a father and a son, and not because he has great riches to offer; he succeeds because unbeknownst to him he is offering Achilles what Achilles has been seeking all along: a way out of the purgatory of his grief.

The entire scene, from beginning to end, is a dramatic triumph. A triumph not only because it reimagines a familiar scene in a way that is both entirely novel and utterly convincing, as well as being vividly portrayed (two men talking in the shadows while the unheeding soldiers grunt away at the table). A triumph because it is a scene played between two characters who both understand each other imperfectly, but the clarity of Malouf’s depiction allows us to see the scene unfold from both their viewpoints, as well as from a third, more holistic perspective of our own. And a triumph because in the coming together of the spontaneous actions of men playing parts they have barely imagined, let alone prepared for, Malouf constructs a scene that feels both timeless and inevitable.

And so the deal is struck, the body of Hector exchanged, and the two men part in a new dawn, the words on their lips turning to prophecy:

Achilles, at Priam’s side, rests his hand a moment on the support of the canopy.

‘Call on me, Priam’, he says lightly, ‘when the walls of Troy are falling around you, and I will come to your aid.’

It is their moment of parting.

‘And if, when I call, you are already among the shades?’

Achilles feels a chill pass through him. It is cold out here.

‘Then alas for you, Priam, I will not come.’

It is, Achilles knows, a joke of the kind the gods delight in, who joke darkly.

The two men will never meet again.

4.

Ransom.

What, in the end, is the price paid, and by whom?

That is not an easy question to answer. In war, it never is.

What seems certain is that the nominal payment, that store of precious objects from the coffers of Troy, is beside the point.

Priam, explaining his plan to Hecuba says,

“The chance to break free of the obligation of being always the hero, as I am expected always to be the king. To take on the lighter bond of being simply a man. Perhaps that is the real gift I have to bring him. Perhaps that is the ransom.”

Is that it then? Is Priam paying for his son’s body by offering his son’s killer a way out of his torment? Not forgiveness, perhaps, but closure, understanding?

Or perhaps Priam himself is the ransom. Priam: the price paid. A debt of life decades old, that must be repaid by risking now what was once granted. Perhaps it is Priam’s vulnerability that is the price of Achilles’ largesse? For what more can a warrior ask, than to see his enemy humbled before him, forced to seek his mercy?

Or perhaps it is the other way around. Perhaps in placing himself at Achilles’ mercy it is Priam who has taken Achilles hostage, and Hector’s corpse is the ransom to be paid. Because mighty as Achilles is, surely he is helpless before Priam’s helplessness. Honor and glory over safety and life is Achilles’ great choice, and having made that choice, having donned his new armor and reentered the battle, how can Achilles bring himself to kill an unarmed old man?

And what of Hector’s body? What are these maimed remains but a payment for Patroclus’ death? Achilles’ failed attempt to ransom himself from the clutches of his own guilt, his own shame, with an offering of his enemy’s dishonor.

And is that guilt not grounded in a price unpaid? In the wounded honor of Achilles, holding the fate of the war hostage for the sake of a serving girl? And the war itself a kind of ransom, the price unwittingly agreed on by Helen’s suitors, all those years ago.

Ransom. The endless cycle of attack and response, of revenge and blood-debt, that we call History.

And perhaps, that, more than anything else, is the true ransom. A chance for these two men, both hostages to History from the day of their birth, to break, for one moment, their deterministic chains. A chance to be more than an imperial figurehead on the one hand, and an efficient killing machine on the other. A chance at a legacy greater than their fate. Speaking to his court, Priam says,

“I cannot stop what may be about to occur. That I leave, as I must, to the gods. If the last thing that happens to me is to be hunted down in the heart of my citadel, and dragged out by the feet, and shamelessly stripped and humiliated, so be it. But I do not want that to be the one sad image of me that endures in the minds of men. The image I mean to leave is a living one. Of something so new and unheard of that when men speak my name it will stand forever as proof of what I was. An act, in these terrible days, that even an old man can perform, that only an old man dare perform, of whom nothing can be expected now of noise and youthful swagger.”

Ransom. A chance to be human at the price of the war.

5.

Marianne Moore writes, “These things are important not because some high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them, but because they are useful.”

That, of course, is myth’s purpose: to provide a framework for the human condition, a way to think about who we are and what our actions mean.

Reading Ransom, it’s hard not to see the parallels to the world we live in. A world where fatalistic young men perpetrate acts of savage bloodshed in a frustrated attempt to find satisfaction for wrongs real or imagined; young men trapped in an endless cycle of violence and pride. A world where we are so convinced of the fundamental malice of our enemies, that we cannot bear to see things from their point of view, can barely bring ourselves to regard them as human. Where we are unwilling to consider even the possibility of dialogue, seeing it as a sign of weakness, or worse, of betrayal. A world where old men sit in their skyscrapers and their minarets full of noise and swagger, while young men kill each other in the streets, and innocents die in the crossfire.

Achilles and Priam. Priam and Achilles. A parentheses. A space protected. Peace.

In a world consumed by conflict, it is worth remembering these two heroes: the great statesman and the consummate soldier. Two people living in the heart of a great war who managed to reach beyond the blind exchange of words and weapons, beyond hatred and vengeance, beyond themselves. Who brokered, however temporarily, a truce between their sides. Two men who became greater than themselves by first becoming human, and being willing to recognize the human in the other. The courage and compassion of that choice, so eloquently portrayed, is Malouf’s timely message in Ransom. It is a legacy we would do well not to forget.