He will bear the princely ransom that the dying Hector, terrified of being fed to the dogs, implored Achilles to accept (in a passage from Homer not treated by Malouf). After a vigil of eleven days – ‘like a man under instruction from his daemon or following the contours of a dream’ – Priam decides to extricate his son’s body from Achilles’ court before it can be subjected to more crazed defilements. Priam, always terrified of Achilles, ‘that hard, headlong man’ (Robert Fagles), resolves to act, prompted by Iris, Zeus’s messenger. Achilles, enraged and devastated by his loss, avenges his friend and lashes Hector’s handsome corpse to his chariot, dragging his head through the dust, in prose of an eloquence and suppleness that we might have thought extinct:įaster and faster he drove, up and down the walls of Troy, his hair loose and flying, gouts of sweat flung from his brow, as Hector’s corpse, raw now from head to foot and caked with dust, bounded and tumbled, and Priam, Hector’s father, and his mother Hecuba … and all the common people of Troy, who had flocked to every vantage point on the walls, looked on. Patroclus, tormented by Greek disunity and by Achilles’ quarrel with the generals, borrows his helmet and shield and is quickly dispatched by Hector, with none of the teeming slaughterdom of Book 16 of The Iliad.

But darkly, flesh to ghost.’Īfter this moody, suggestive prelude, war resumes. And the boy, his clear eyes still fixed on Achilles, takes it … They were mated. Achilles, ‘spellbound’, meets Patroclus’s gaze. Homer tells us little of this famous pact Malouf, likewise succinct, describes the instant attraction.

In this state of exhaustion and petulant stasis, Achilles – breaker of men, the raging son of Peleus – recalls his first glimpse of Patroclus when they were boys. The Trojan War, of something like 1200 BCE, is fast unravelling. In Ransom – like An Imaginary Life a kind of extended prose poem – Malouf draws on the closing books of The Iliad, the epic poem in 15,693 lines of hexameter verse, so named by Herodotus.

Ransom by david malouf