Waiting for the Barbarians (27 page)

Priam, whose name, as Malouf reveals in an ingenious bit of flashback, could be taken as meaning “ransom”—as a young prince, he had been a prisoner of war, ultimately ransomed (
priatos
) as a favor to his sister—obeys this divine order, and travels to the Greek camp. His eventual return to Troy with Hector’s body (the point at which Malouf’s narrative ends) precipitates a great outpouring of lamentation on the part of the Trojans that, we are meant to feel, will serve not only as an appropriately cathartic ending but also as their own funeral lament, since Troy itself will soon fall. Thus the work that
begins with a man refusing to give up a body—Agamemnon won’t return the captive girl—ends with another man, Achilles, finally agreeing to give up a body that doesn’t belong to him, either. The epic travels a great arc from selfishness and ethical rigidity to a magnificent relenting.

The plot of
Ransom
is, for the most part, the plot of Homer’s Book 24: Malouf deftly covers Achilles’ grief-driven rage, the uncanny epiphany of the divine messenger Iris, which inspires Priam’s supplicatory embassy, the trip across the plain to the Greek camp with his herald (where the two old men are accosted by Hermes, who has been sent to protect them while they’re in enemy territory), the fraught meeting with Achilles and then the return home in a cart that has exchanged its treasures for a single body. The book’s only significant weakness is that Malouf, the novelist focusing on a single book of Homer, has to cover twenty-three books’ worth of exposition in a handful of rather breathless and unstylish pages. One great advantage of epic, of course, is the leisure provided by length.

On the surface, at least, these episodes constitute inventive paraphrases of Homer, embroidered with lovely imaginative details that often reanimate some familiar elements of the epic. Homer’s Hecuba, the mother of the dead Hector, famously and rather shockingly wishes that she could eat Achilles’ liver raw, if she only had the chance; Malouf’s Hecuba expresses pretty much the same wish, but with an additional, modern consideration. “I carried him,” she hisses at her husband, as the couple discuss Priam’s planned mission. “It is
my
flesh that is being tumbled on the stones out there.” And this is what Malouf does with the divine appearances that happen so often in Homer: “The air, as in the wake of some other, less physical disturbance, shimmers with a teasing iridescence,” muses a drowsy Priam, who in Malouf’s novel is a hieratic figure prone to divine visitations when he dozes. “The gods will materialise, jelly-like, out of
the radiant vacancy.” “Jelly-like” is a wonderful touch, giving this mythic scene a novel concreteness.

“Novel” is, indeed, the operative word here. Ultimately,
Ransom
’s tampering with the
Iliad
is the vehicle for a rich meditation on literary genre—on the difference between Homer’s form, the epic, with its encrustations of formulaic language, its strict codes of heroic behavior, and its fated ending, and Malouf’s own form, the novel. In
Ransom
, the stiff and glittering ceremonial life by which both Priam and Achilles, in their different ways, are constrained—the former by the trappings of a monarch, the latter by the codes of honor that govern the hero’s life and actions—becomes a kind of symbol for epic itself. Here is Malouf’s Priam thinking about his long life of ceremony:

This is the world of Homer’s poems, too, a world governed by conventions that, at the beginning of the novel, neither Priam, in his passive grief, nor Achilles, whose maniacal back-and-forthing before the city walls symbolizes his endless, fruitless rage, knows how to break out of. “This knot we are all tied in” is how Malouf’s Priam describes the impasse.

For Malouf, the solution to this epic problem is, in both senses of the word, the novel—a new way of thinking, and a new form for thinking it. In his retelling, Zeus’ messenger Iris doesn’t order Priam to go to Achilles; rather, she subtly suggests that Priam is free to act as he likes, that things are not foreordained but simply “the way they
are
. Not the way they must be, but the way they have turned out. In a world that is also subject to chance.” It is at this moment that Priam has the idea of going to Achilles not as a king but as a father, “to take on the lighter bond of being simply a man”; he suspects, correctly, that Achilles will be just as happy to “break free of the obligation of being always the hero.” In a marvelous aside, Priam wonders whether this relaxation of coded behavior may in fact be “the real gift” that he will be bringing to Achilles—the real ransom.

Priam gets to sample his newfound freedom during his journey across the plain to the Greek camp, in a simple cart and with only one humble companion: an episode that is brief enough in Homer, but here opens out into a mini-
Odyssey
, in which the king, for the first and last time in his life, experiences the pleasures of an existence that didn’t become the focus of serious literature until the rise of the novel, more than two millennia after Homer: the life of ordinary people. Accompanied, in this version, not by his royal herald Idreus, as in Homer, but by a talkative carter named Somax (an appropriately concrete name:
soma
is the Greek word for body), Priam wiggles his hot toes in cold water, learns how pancakes are made (“The lightness comes from the way the cook flips them over. Very neat and quick you have to be,” Somax advises the king of Troy), and sees that the world “of ceremony, of high play” to which he has always belonged is merely “representational … and had nothing to do with the actual and immediate.” Only during his fateful, novelty-filled and novel journey does he realize that “out here,” in the real world—which is to say, in the new narrative space that Malouf’s novel invents—“everything was just itself.”

The pathos of Malouf’s novel, as in that one half-line of Homer’s
Iliad
, is that the possibility of a different ending, of a life filled with simple pleasures, is and must always be a fleeting one: the end of
Ransom
includes a terrifying flash-forward to the grotesque murder
of the aged Priam at the hands of Achilles’ young son, Neoptolemus, during the sack of Troy. But for the duration of this book Malouf’s Priam, like his creator, has done something truly novel. “He has stepped into a space that till now was uninhabited and found a way to fill it,” he thinks as he drives his son’s body home. “Look, he wants to shout, I am still here, but the
I
is different.” So is your sense of the possibilities of Homer’s story, once you’ve read Malouf. This is tampering at its very best.

The coda of
Ransom
informs you that Somax, long after the Trojan War is over, goes on telling the tale of Priam’s remarkable journey to anyone who will listen—becoming, that is, the first of many bards in a long line that leads to Homer. This preoccupation with how history becomes myth, how stories become epics, is a very Greek one, and lies at the heart of the other Homeric epic, which furnishes the material for Zachary Mason’s
The Lost Books of the Odyssey
.

The first adjective in the first line of the 12,109 that make up the
Odyssey
is
polytropos
, which means, in the context, “clever”—literally, “of many turns.” Both are apt modifiers for the poem’s hero, who is subject to many detours and is also notorious for his intellectual and verbal twistiness—he’s the preeminent talker, fibber, and plotter of Greek myth, the man who dreamed up the Trojan Horse and survived his decade-long journey home from Troy by employing an impressive and sometimes disturbing array of lies, disguises, traps, and tricks. If the
Iliad
, set during a war, keeps showing us men’s bodies, either in frenzied action or stilled by death, and anxiously wrestles with the values that compel those men to act and to die, the
Odyssey
, set in war’s aftermath, can be described as a poem about the mind—a celebration of the intellectual and verbal qualities that we might need to survive in a world uneasily settling back into the forgotten habits of peacetime.

One quality of mind that the
Odyssey
admires extravagantly is the ability to tell a good story. (Whether the story is true or false is a question that preoccupies this poem, which in different ways keeps worrying about what is, in the end, a philosophical question: just how you can know whether something is true—the tale told by a total stranger, the protests of a wife who claims to be faithful.) It’s sometimes easy to forget that nearly all the famous adventures we associate with Odysseus—the encounters with the Cyclops, the witch Calypso, Scylla and Charybdis, the Lotus-Eaters—are narrated not by the poem’s invisible narrator, the “I” who invokes the Muse in the first line, but by Odysseus himself, about himself. At a certain point in his voyage, he finds himself on an island inhabited by refined, pleasure-loving natives called the Phaeacians, and, one night over dinner, he tells them the story of his homecoming thus far. This takes up four entire books of Homer’s poem.

Another way of saying this is that much of the
Odyssey
is a kind of epic performance within the epic, a long flashback in which the poet and the hero are one and the same person. (It is no coincidence that both bards and archers—Odysseus is a renowned bowman, too—need a stringed instrument to perform.) This self-conscious interest in narrative gamesmanship and in the nature of storytelling gives Mason the modishly postmodern theme of his book, the preface of which tells us that the chapters that follow are translations of newly discovered sections of the Odysseus cycle: “forty-four concise variations on Odysseus’ story … where the familiar characters are arranged in new tableaux.”

So, for example, the first such tableau (“A Sad Revelation”) consists of a three-page-long variation on the epic’s famous ending: here Odysseus returns home to a Penelope who waited only twelve years, instead of the canonical twenty, before marrying a man who has been courting her. The moment the hero understands what has happened,
he tells himself that “this is not Penelope … this is not Ithaca—what he sees before him is a vengeful illusion.” Odysseus turns and “flees the tormenting shadows,” presumably en route to further wandering. Many of these tiny chapters riff Tennyson’s famous idea that Odysseus’ long-awaited homecoming and, afterward, life back home end up boring the hero; many, if not most, have the gnomic, abbreviated feel of this one. If Homer’s
Odyssey
is expansive, Mason’s odysseys are studies in compression, but brevity brings many of them close to triviality: too often the sections end with inconclusive teases (“Also not recorded is whether Odysseus had poisoned the ring or whether he had found the word and it sufficed”) or with riddles to which, you suspect, the author himself doesn’t have an answer.

Some chapters, however, are extremely inventive and suggestive—“clever” in a good way. “Record of a Game” imagines that the
Iliad
is a text that began as a chess primer:

A terrific little chapter called “The Book of Winter” similarly thinks both inside and outside the
Odyssey
’s narrative: here, an amnesiac living in a hut at the frozen edges of the world realizes, after reading a book that turns out to be the
Odyssey
(“I wonder what the book was meant to tell me. The allegorical possibilities are many …”), that he is Odysseus—an Odysseus who has managed to pull off his greatest trick yet. For in order to escape the wrath of Poseidon (whose harassment is the reason for Odysseus’ long wanderings), he has forgotten
who he is and become “no one.” As readers of the
Odyssey
know, No One is the false name Odysseus assumes in order to trick the Cyclops: when the Cyclops’s neighbors come to help after Odysseus has blinded him, he keeps saying “No One has attacked me,” at which point they go away. One way of saying “no one” in classical Greek—
outis
—sounds enough like “Odysseus” to constitute a kind of pun; another way,
mê tis
, is a precise homophone of
mêtis
, the word for intellectual resourcefulness. During his long anonymous homecoming Odysseus has indeed been “no one”—just as he has also always been “the resourceful one.”

But these sustained, really ingenious variations on Homeric themes are too few and far between; for the most part,
The Lost Books of the Odyssey
leaves you unsatisfied, like a meal of hors d’oeuvres. As you go through the book, it occurs to you that Mason thinks he’s doing what Malouf has managed to do—opening a space in the original epic and finding something new to say. The newness that interests him has to do with what academics call “narrativity.” One chapter, entitled “Fragment,” consists of a single paragraph:

The author’s suggestion that the
Odyssey
itself is just one reflecting surface in a giant literary hall of mirrors has won the book extravagant praise; it feels like such a contemporary conceit, something out of Borges or Calvino.

The problem is that the narrative conjuring tricks that Mason
attempts pale, in both scale and complexity, beside the ones that Homer mastered three millennia ago. The
Odyssey
constantly toys with the possibility that it is just one of a number of alternative epics: at one point, a bard at a feast starts singing a kind of parallel
Iliad
, in which Achilles quarrels not with Agamemnon but with Odysseus. (Some scholars, moreover, have wondered whether the song the Sirens sing is not, in fact, the
Iliad
.) Even more dizzyingly—and troublingly—Homer’s poem makes you wonder whether there’s any more reason for us to “believe” the stories that Odysseus tells his Phaeacian audience (about the Cyclops, the Lotus-Eaters, and so on) than there is to believe certain other long yarns that he spins. Once he’s back in Ithaca, for instance, he poses as a Cretan and tells three notoriously elaborate autobiographical stories, all of which contain elements from what we think of as his “real” life. It’s at this point that you start to wonder what words like “real” and “true” mean in a work that is itself a fiction.