Malouf fills in some of these gaps for us. If your main medium is the spoken word, as Homer's tale would have been literally retold, you have to concentrate on the action to keep your listeners enthralled. Malouf, like Atwood, takes some of the events and characters of the source, and creates new stories, filling in the personal thought processes and stories of Homer's characters in a thoroughly modern way. Of course, Malouf is not the first great writer to be inspired by Homer - writers from Shakespeare through to, more recently, Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, have gone down this route before.

I couldn't help but wonder how many of today's primary school children think that Homer is just a yellow, donut-eating, cartoon character, while Greece's greatest contribution to culture is Stavros Flatley. In it, Malouf relates that he first heard the story of the siege Troy in primary school and was mesmerised by Homer's tale. The book concludes with an Afterword - a note on sources and the inspiration for the book. It is an exquisitely written piece managing to be both deeply moving as well as a great piece of story telling. Malouf tells the story in sparse, yet lyrical and poetic fashion suggesting the personal stories behind the epic themes that Homer related. Taking his theme from a small part of Homer's Iliad, Malouf tells the story of the king of Troy, Priam's grief-stricken voyage into the Greek camp to ransom Troy's wealth for the body of his fallen son, Hector, killed by the equally grief-stricken Achilles whose great friend Hector had killed in battle before Achilles took his cruel revenge. Summary: Revisiting The Iliad, Malouf uses lyrical, spare prose to tell the story of Priam's efforts to ransom the body of his dead son from Achilles, showing the power of storytelling and an exquisite depiction of grief, rage and revenge and of the human condition.

Ransom by david malouf