It's Greek for me : I'd rather read the Iliad, but ...

The best part of David Malouf's "Ransom," his retelling of (mostly) book 24 of the Iliad, is the journey across the plains from walled Troy to the Grecian camp, in which a muleteer, Somax (?), transports King Priam and his wagonful of loot to ransom Hector's body. There are some beautiful, dreamlike passages in this section and Malouf establishes an intriguing bond between the two men - echoes of Quixote, of King Lear, of the excellent HBO series Rome, and of many buddy movies and novels in which a relation forms among so-called unequals. Malouf's end note acknowledges that the Somax character is entirely his invention - I wish he'd done more with this part of the book. The rest of the novel is, at least intermittently, extremely well written - Malouf is a very distinguished Australian writer and he creates a few scenes very rich in detail - he's at his best when he writes in full sentences, as with most of the scene of carousels in Achilles' tent, and he's weaker when he's jotting down sentence fragments and it feels as if he's making notes for a script or for a longer work. That said, the scenes in the Achilles' camp are very fine (especially Achilles' mistaking the arriving Priam for his own father), the closing section in which we see a bit of the ruins of Troy and we see Somax as an old man telling tales, are very good. It's just that, by the end, I've read a retelling of part of the Iliad and I wonder why? What's the point? What did it add? As noted, I wished Malouf had used this as a springboard to focus on what he truly did add to this classic and unfurled a whole novel from that strand.