Unlike David Shields, whose latest book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, accomplishes the increasingly difficult feat of being original, I love novels. I mentioned Shields' book in essays last month, as it is, among other things, a "manifesto" in defense of the lyric essay, the short story, poetry, and the blurred lines between fact & fiction, memoir and story. Traditional novels bore him with such "tired" traits as plot, character development and narrative. As his two hundred page book is a collection of quotes, aphorisms & pithy observations, I suspect his prejudice is the result of an attention deficit and says more about its author than the form he dismisses.
I just finished a 200-page novel last night (also referenced last month) that reaffirmed my faith in the genre. David Malouf's Ransom (Pantheon, 2009) is another contemporary adaptation of a Greek myth. Its crux is the famed meeting of King Priam and Achilles from Homer's Iliad, in which the aging Trojan king asks the Greek hero for the body of his son, Hector, whom Achilles killed and mutilated. "I clasp your knees, Achilles...think on your Father, Achilles" entreats Priam in Tippett's operatic version of the tale, and the unlikely scene of a bereft king kneeling before the mighty demigod has inspired adaptations since Homer's poem appeared (see April's posts for more on Achilles, Priam, & co).
Like many a reader, the first sentence of a novel for me is key. I am drawn to writing that is bold & audacious or poetic and evocative. Before I finished Ransom, I read a story by the sensational Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño, whose fiction can be poetic, but is more often outrageous. He died at the age of 50 in 2003, and produced a dizzying body of fiction in the last decade of his life, much of which is just appearing in english. The first paragraph of "The Return" (from another forthcoming collection) opens with this provocative couplet of observations:
"I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is a life (of a kind) after this life. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villaneuve is a necrophiliac" (from Harper's Magazine/April 2010, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews).
Malouf's novel is of the poetic variety, and while it is "just" 219 pages long, his style evokes the historical period and world that gave rise to the "epic." It is rare I buy a novel without reading that revealing opening paragraph. I took it on advice from a review by Daniel Mendelsohn in the New Yorker, and was not disappointed.
"The sea has many voices. The voice this man is listening for is the voice of his mother." So begins Malouf's tale that reimagines the worlds of Troy and Greece at the pivotal eye in the storm of the famed Trojan war.
The magic of that calm is conjured in prose of simple clarity, near the novel's end, as Priam prepares to return to Troy with the body of his son.
"Nine days for the Trojans to make a journey into the forests of Mount Ida and fell the pine logs for Hector's pyre. In the city, nine days of ceremonial mourning. On the tenth the burning of Hector's body. The eleventh for the raising of his burial mound. On the twelth the war would resume."
The details themselves enact the sense of ceremony they elegantly describe, reminding the modern reader of what has been lost. And as only great art can do, the specificity of the setting is transcended, and the reader feels the loss of noble ceremony that has accompanied the relentless march of technology and modern warfare. In that context, the next sentences cause us to question what "progress" really is.
"But it was the eleven days of peace that Priam had felt shining around them as they dipped their hands into the bowl and quietly talked.
Days of sorrow, but also of holiday from the din and dread of battle. A time for living."
Malouf relates in his "Afterword" how Ransom arose from his experiences as a child in Brisbane, the center of the Allies' Pacific Ocean operations in WWII. His novel is original in imagining and narrating stories that occupy only a few lines in Homer. From the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus, to Priam's childhood adventures (his name gives the book its title) to his journey from the gates of Troy to Achilles' camp and back, Malouf's new tell rings true to its source.
In one of my essays last month, I wrote about Carl Phillips' latest collection of poetry, Speak Low, and its through-line of Greek references. It is full of resonant images and observations, and repays rereading. Conjuring Achilles and Priam himself, Phillips writes
"...the Greeks described fate as a thing of substance, weighable
on a set of scales, pourable into steep urns--one for happiness,
another for woe--..."
A poet (and librettist--what a great chamber opera Ransom would make!) himself, Malouf's opening chapter, centered on the world of the short-lived hero Achilles, uses the ebb and flow of the sea as a motive.
"But the sea is not where it will end. It will end here on the beach in the treacherous shingle, or out there on the plain. That is fixed, inevitable. With the pious resignation of the old man he will never become, he has accepted this."
Writing like this packs a punch that does not weaken on repeated readings. The same could be said of great songs & symphonies, plays and operas, paintings & sculpture.
Phillips' couplet above evokes the nature of chance where fate is concerned, and in his poem as in the myths, the gods dole out the portions that fill the "steep urns." Malouf's book features a couple of attention-holders that, if not literally deus-ex-machina devices, are equally surprising and effective.
When first we meet Priam, he is brooding and grieving the loss of his son, Hector, slain by Achilles in revenge for Hector's killing of Patroclus, for whom Achilles had "wept without restraint."
When Priam calls his life--and fate--a mockery, the goddess Iris appears (unceremoniously sitting on a sofa) to correct him.
"Not a mockery, my friend, but the way things are. Not the way they must be, but the way they have turned out. In a world that is also subject to chance."
Yes, indeed. Score another point for the novel.
Another example of a particular setting resonating a more universal truth occurs when Priam leaves the safety of the walled city to begin his trek to the Greek camp. Accustomed to stoic and regal restraint, he is confronted with something other.
"Silence, not speech, was what was expressive. Power lay in containment. In keeping hidden, and therefore mysterious, one's true intent. A child might prattle, till it learned better...But out here, if you stopped to listen, everything prattled. It was a prattling world."
The heart of the book is the awkward, human encounter between the old king and the dashing hero. When Achilles first sees Priam, he believes the white-robed man to the be the ghost of his father, Peleus. Priam appeals to Achilles' own fatherhood in a moving episode wrought with tragic irony (after Priam's son, Paris kills Achilles, the latter's son Neoptolemus kills Priam).
Though describing Achilles, Malouf's imagery could enshroud any of Homer's tragic heroes as they face their end.
"Ice ribs him round with an iron grip. It is the coldness of that distant star that is the body's isolation in death."
Near the end of the novel, we share a fleeting moment of victory with Priam, as the stuff such immortal tales are made of unfolds in prose that is anything but prosaic:
"It is only a provisional triumph, of course; the gods are not to be trusted when they tilt the balance momentarily in your favour. And what sort of triumph is it to be bringing home the body of a son? But he has done something for which he will be remembered for as long as such stories are told. He has stepped into a space that was uninhabited and found a way to fill it."
That is why I read literature, listen to music, go to the theatre, and spend afternoons staring at art: to step into those spaces inhabited only by the creative imagination. That is more than reason enough.
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