Malouf's Ransom: Why do I have two copies, both annotated by me???

David Malouf is an Australian writer and much loved here. His writing is pure poetry, which was his original medium. Every line is beautiful. In 'Ransom' he reimagines a part of the Illiad, where Achilles is dragging the corpse of Hector around under the walls of Troy where King Priam and his family watch in horror. The novel begins with the line 'the sea has many voices', a reminder that there is more than one way to see these ancient stories of heroes and kings.

"He was waiting for the rage to fill him that would be equal at last to the outrage he was committing.... that he might believe there was a living man at the centre of it, and that man himself"

Malouf reshapes the myth for modern times and asks what it means to be human. It's a story of transformation and change at a deeply personal level, where both Achilles and Priam are stuck in these roles of great responsibility and weight with no way forward. Achilles, of course, is acting like a brute and the only way Priam sees to break this terrible cycle is to go down and beg the Greek barbarian for his son's body and, by giving Achilles the opportunity to act like a human being, gives him something far more valuable than a ransom of gold.

"He had grieved, but silently, never betraying to others what he felt"

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The novel opens with Achilles by the sea, thinking about his mother. Whilst he was pulled from her and brought into the world of men at a young age, he still mourns for her but 'silently' - it is not for men to openly show their feelings. He is set into the hardened self of a warrior, a man of action and violence, ending up on the beach fighting the Trojans for nine long years. He is away from his son Neoptolemus, who will sadly grow up without him and become in many ways like his father and eventually be responsible for killing Priam. In this way Malouf touches on the absence of fathers and the roles that men play, and how it damages them. In the passage here he cannot express what 'he felt', so consequently, when he loses his best friend Patroclus, he has no way of dealing with this incredible grief and rage that boils up inside of him. When Patroclus dies wearing his armour (Hector, Priam's son, thought it was Achilles), Achilles is inconsolable. It has like he has watched his own death out there in the hot sun.

"He had entered the rough world of men"

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How else can Achilles act in this moment? He has none of the emotional tools that can help guide him through this terrible loss. He recalls the moment he and Patroclus met as boys, and felt 'mated' to this other boy. Whilst Hecuba, Priam's wife, describes him as an animal, a 'jackal', Malouf asks us to empathise and understand Achille's actions as well as feel incredible admiration for Priam who dares to enter the Greek camp to ask for his son's body.

Priam too is bound in his role as a figurehead for Troy, a symbol of the city. He knows he may well be made of 'stone or wood', but in himself, feels changed and knows that who he is as a man is very different to who he is as a King. He dreams - or has a vision, where the Goddess Isis inspires him to do this unheard of thing - that he goes to Achilles dressed as a plain man and:

'as an ordinary man, a father, and offer him a ransom, and in the sight of the gods, who surely must look on in pity on me, beg him humbly, on my knees if that is what it comes to, to give me back the body of my son.'

What is so ADMIRABLE about this is that he knows that they are all tied up in this terrible war and terrible brutality, but that he can change things by attempting something unheard of and new:

'the thing that is needed to cut the knot we are all tied in is something that has never before been done or thought of. Something impossible. Something new'.

He knows he can give Achilles a chance to break free of the 'obligation of always being the hero, as I am always expected to be the King' and to 'take on the lighter role of being a man'. He knows that the only way to restore any kind of humanity is to give Achilles the chance to behave like a man rather than a warrior and vengeful killer - the Greek needs a way out just as he himself does:

'Lest the honour of all men be trampled in the dust'

I love this line so much - it's a reminder that above all else, humanity must be upheld, despite circumstance, tradition, or any other goings on that make people behave in terrible ways.

So he does - Priam steps down from being king and journeys to the most fierce of all the warriors. Malouf renders this journey beautiful in and of itself, and I'd love to talk about this too, as the King dabbles his feet in the stream and talks to his driver about life and loss and experiences a little of what it must be like to be a true father rather than an absent one. It's through this imagining of what it could be like to be a father, through the evocative power of his driver's stories, that enable him to form the words to speak to Achilles, man to man rather than King to Warrior:

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And so Achilles is given a way out - an honourable way to behave that restores him to his humanity and allows him to move forward. He allows Hector to be returned to Troy and in doing so, comes to terms with his own mortality too.

He feels a sense of peace as he contemplates his own passage from the world just as Hector's is marked, being 'turned this way and that in the hands of woman'. They are 'unheroic thoughts' as he contemplates birth and death, but they give him a lightness. He knows that the body of Hector is 'a mirror of his own', both part in a long war that is coming to an end, both men who are bound by fate and circumstances. No longer is he affronted by Hector, killer of his beloved Patroclus. He feels as if this obligation to be the hero has fallen away from him.

Priam too feels light, a man 'remade'. He muses that he is 'still here, but the I is different'. He returns to Troy, looking up at the golden city with a kind of joy, though he knows that the future and the fall of Troy are inevitable.

Every word of this book is absolutely shining beauty for me. Malouf has a way of really making us feel and rather than talking about heroes, he is talking about the things that make us human. He questions notions of masculinity and the roles that men must play, absent fathers, and fate and chance. The whole novel is a celebration too of the power of story. I still cry when I read about Priam begging Achilles for his boy, and Achilles being released from this awful burden of grief from which he can see no way out.

I do realise I've babbled on about a load of quotes but there is so many beautiful ones in this book that I can't choose!!

What's your favourite quote in your favourite book, or one of them?

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