Read Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books for Free Online

version of real time, a version that mimics eternity. It takes forever for them to fall, and we hope for every moment of that forever that they will resist; then, when they have fallen, we hope they will get away with it. Our foreknowledge and our sympathies are completely at odds, just as God’s would have been (or ought to have been, if he was a good God). If this mixed reaction on our part doesn’t finally justify Him, it at any rate makes even His position more sympathetic.
    A different kind of courage—somewhat less crazy and ambitious, but nonetheless intense—must have been required for the Australian writer David Malouf to produce his marvelous short novel Ransom , based on an episode from the Iliad . For writers, Homer is almost as much of a god as God, and to tinker with his perfect stories requires hubris of a notable degree. James Joyce possessed that hubris in grandiose form, and we can feel it exercising its assertive presence all the way through Ulysses . But Ransom (which understands that it comes not only after the Iliad , but also after Ulysses and Moravia’s Contempt and all the other twentieth-century works based on Homer) is almost the opposite kind of work. It is small, and delicate, and intellectually modest. It does not trumpet its substantial intelligence at us.
    Ransom takes as its departure point the section of the Iliad in which King Priam goes forth from Troy to collect the body of his son Hector from Achilles, the Greek enemy who has slain him. Achilles has always been viewed as a great character, and centuries of writers, from Euripides to Shakespeare to the moderns, have built great roles around him. Priam has not; only Malouf has been alert enough to ferret out his inner life in this subtle way. What he does is to hinge the whole novel on the relationship between Priam and his cart driver, a man whose name the king can’t even remember (he repeatedly miscalls him by the name of his former driver), but on whom he comes to depend completely and, one might say, lovingly. Through the sensible, tender behavior of the cart driver—who, like Priam, is also a bereft father—we come to sympathize with the grief and fear and uncertainty of the otherwise inaccessible king.
    It does not matter, in reading Ransom , whether you already know the story from the Iliad or not. Either way, the novel will cast its spell over you, because what keeps you going is not the larger plot question (whether Priam will or will not get his son’s body back), but the step-by-step psychological moments that lead to that outcome. And “outcome” is too thin a word, in any case, for what happens to the characters, and to us, by the end of Malouf’s novel. The result is not everything; the process is part of the result. This is one of the key realizations that accrues to Priam in the course of his quest.
    The same realization, though achieved through very different methods, dawns on us as we read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall , which is itself a work about achieving results. Mantel is a master of using history to create fiction: she does so to great effect in her excellent novel about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety . But in contrast to that earlier book, which covers ground that is basically in the international public domain, this more recent novel deals with a passage of English history that is at once broadly familiar and completely obscure. Mantel focuses on the period from 1527 to 1535, when Henry VIII was figuring out how to dispose of his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and marry Anne Boleyn; in order to do so, he ended up breaking Catholicism’s hold on England and naming himself the head of the church.
    Everything you think you know about these events turns out to be inadequate to the discoveries made by this fictional work. By centering the narrative on Thomas Cromwell—a blacksmith’s son who rose to become one of the king’s most powerful advisors, and whose great-grandnephew