Ancient Greece brought to life

Ransom by David Malouf. Photo / Supplied

David Malouf's other short novel of the classical world, An Imaginary Life, came out more than 20 years ago. It's an account of Ovid in exile that climbs to a remarkable visionary sequence of love and letting-go on the steppes of Western Asia.

Now comes this wonderful meditation from the middle of the Trojan War. Nine years of siege have passed. The hulls of 1000 Greek ships drawn up on the shore have bleached white. Patroclus has died in Achilles' armour, and in raging retribution, Achilles has killed Hector and desecrated his body by dragging it through the dust behind his chariot.

Inside Troy, King Priam yearns to recover his son's remains. He decides on a course of action that is "something impossible. Something new", something that means a seismic shift in concepts of pride, valour, pity. What Priam does becomes a study of sacrifice and courage, the wonder of things made natural, the way, above all, "to do what is most human". Off in the future, horror and destruction wait, but the book ends with reconciliation. Malouf's narrative glows with heraldic moments.

A pair of knucklebones rise to hang in the air during a children's game, and become one of the threads which will decide the fate of Achilles. Swifts circle by bushes near the River Scamander, as a king prepares to do something never done before. At the same time, Malouf's response to the physical world is specific, sensuous, compelling.

Characters are vivid and immediate: the long old bones of Priam; Achilles' "whole terrible machinery"; the pretty ways of a little grand-daughter - or a favourite mule. Almost every object and action is an emblem, with no straining or artificiality on the author's part. The unpretentious precision of Malouf's prose makes a totally satisfying, totally remarkable job of conveying the thoughts and words of a far-off, far-up world. His writing moves with the cadences of sea, breeze, the cycles of earth and flares of war.

There are a couple of moments of verbosity - do we need quite so much home-baked wisdom? But this is a marvellous evocation of the end of friendship, rage and shame, along with the possibility of atonement and forgiveness.

Ransom
By David Malouf (Random House $36.99)

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer. An Hour with David Malouf: Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre, today at 10am.