Thirty years later, in a poem called ‘Episode from an Early War’, still haunted by the characters in Miss Finlay’s story, I tried to bring the two parts of my experience together:
Sometimes, looking back, I find myself, a bookish
nine-
year-old, still gazing down
through the wartime criss-cross shock-
proof glass of my suburban primary school.
Blueflint gravel
ripples in my head, the schoolyard throbs. And
all the players
of rip-shirt rough-and-tumble
wargames stop, look on in stunned surprise:
Hector, hero of Troy,
raw-bloody-boned is dragged across the scene
and pissed on and defiled,
while myrmidons of black flies crust his wounds
and the angelic
blunt-faced ones, the lords of mutilation,
haul off and watch.
Thirty years later again, Ransom is a return to that unfinished story; to my discovery, once in 1943, once again in 1972, that
… the war, our war,
was reaclass="underline" highways of ash
where ghostly millions rise out of their shoes and
go barefoot
nowhere …
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.
The story of how Patroclus came to be the friend and companion of Achilles occupies only half a dozen lines in the Iliad; the bare facts of how a small survivor of war, Podarces, came to be Priam (‘the ransomed one’ or ‘the price paid’), King of Troy, an equally brief passage, referring to the exploits of Hercules, in The Library, a history of mythology sometimes attributed, falsely it seems, to Apollodorus (born c. 180 BC). How a simple carter, Somax, for one day became the Trojan herald Idaeus, and Priam’s companion on his journey to the Greek camp, appears for the first time in the pages of this book.
My thanks to Alison Samuel at Chatto & Windus in London, to Meredith Curnow and Julian Welch at Knopf, Sydney, and yet again to Chris Edwards, whose encouragement, and keen eye and ear, have been essential to Ransom from its earliest completed draft.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Malouf is the author of, among other works, Dream Stuff, Remembering Babylon, An Imaginary Life, and The Conversations at Curlow Creek. Honors he has received include the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Australia-Asia Literary Award, the Prix Femina Étranger, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He lives in Australia.