Ransom

Written by David Malouf, Ransom is a lovely and engaging take on Homer’s The Iliad. Normally it’s not a book that I would really go for, in fact the only reason I read it was because I had to for uni. But now that I have read it, I have ended up rather enjoying it: it’s simplicity, it’s nuances, it’s physical and figurative multiple ransoms, and the journeys and transformations of its characters. 

From the walls of Troy, King Priam watches the body of his son Hector being dragged back and forth across the plains in front of the Greek camp by the feared Achilles. Driven mad by grief by the murder of his friend Patroclus at the hands of Hector, Achilles refuses to give the body up. But then King Priam has an inspired vision that sets him on a quest to retrieve Hector’s body and send it to the underworld as respect and ritual dictates: he dresses simply, abandoning his kingly garments, and travels in a mule-driven cart with the simple carter, Somax, to the Greek camp to appeal to Achilles not as a king, but as a man, mortal, and a father. 

What particularly struck me as being fascinating and special about this book was that it really conveyed and solidified the importance, now as well as historically, of stories and the narrative. The story is set against the backdrop of the Trojan War: a time that is famous for its incredible stories and myths about gods and extraordinary heroes. Malouf, through the vessels of his characters, simply and strongly voices the significance of the narrative, the story, making it a tangible thing that modern readers today take for granted and the mundane norm. For me, it revitalised the raw power of the story, even if the story was about nothing much in particular. 

The other thing that I really liked about this book was the way in which it’s written. The register is always in the third person: the view of the perceiver or spectator, and throughout the duration of the tale, it jumps about between tenses; a significant portion of the book is written in the past tense with the remainder of the story being written in the present tense. I found this to be a very interesting and engaging literary technique: I can’t quite determine in what way it affected the experience of reading the book, but it’s something that struck me as a little odd but fascinating. The book itself is very simply written, quite a lot of the time spelling key points of plot significance out for the reader. This, although not posing much of a reading challenge, definitely affects the way in which the reader reads the book. With these explanations scattered throughout the story, it causes you to look back to what it’s referring to and maybe see something there that you didn’t see before. In other words, this technique of drawing subtle attention to certain motifs and metaphors inspires and influences the reader to read the remainder of the book a little more critically and open-mindedly. It opens a few doors that were unlocked, but just needed a bit of an inward push. 

Filled with violence, chance, transformations of characters, war, and compassion, Ransom was an easy, but influential book that is albeit very easy to read, but inspires the reader to actually dissect it and read it. It’s very good.