Time past and time present
Francis King
THE LAST WORLD by Christoph Ransmayr
Chatto & Windus, £12.95, pp. 202
From the first two or three pages of this novel, describing the gruelling 17-day voyage of Maximus Messalinus Cotta from Rome to Tomi, the Black Sea 'city of iron' in which his fellow poet and friend, Ovid, has recently died in exile, one might infer that its author is a present-day, male, German Mary Renault or Marguerite Yourcenar. But it is soon apparent that his purpose is wholly different from theirs: not to recreate the past, but to subject it to fabulous, sometimes monstrous mutations in order to achieve a new understanding of the present and even of the future.
Many classical scholars would agree that Ovid's finest work is his Metamorphoses once described by Maurice Bowra as 'a Baedecker to Classical mythology and legend'. As in the stories of Midas, chang- ing everything he touches to gold, of Jupiter assuming a variety of human and animal disguises, of Arachne transformed into a spider, Actaeon into a stag and the sisters Procne and Philomela into birds, Ovid's work is full of magical transmuta- tions. In the centuries that followed its appearance, the Metamorphoses itself underwent similar transmutations, at the hands of authors ranging from Shakespeare ('Venus and Adonis') to Shaw (Pygmalion), from Swift (`Baucis and Philemon') to Swinburne (Atalanta in Calydon), and from Chaucer (The Manci- ple's Tale) to Shelley (`Arethusa').
In this novel both Ovid's life and some of the stories of his Metamorphoses are simi- larly transmuted. In part, this is the world of Augustus and Nero, in which to reach Tomi from Rome it is necessary to travel in a small boat at the mercy of every gale, in which illumination is provided by candles or lamps, and in which letters must for weeks on end await a courier. But it is also the modern world of snipers, of fleeing the draft, of bureaucrats, police files and com- mando units. Ovid's Cyparis, beloved of Apollo, here becomes a travelling film projectionist; and in a melodrama which he projects on to the white-washed wall of the local slaughter-house the chief characters are Alcyone and Ceyx. Proserpina, a man- crazy slut constantly dreaming of a glamor- ous life in Rome, 'is betrothed to Thies (Dis), a Frieslander who acts as the gravedigger of Tomi, the inhabitants of which have nicknamed him 'Moneybags'. Ransmayr's Pythagoras is servant to his Ovid; but like the real-life Pythagoras, he too believes that souls transmigrate and that (as it is put in the Metamorphoses), `All things are always changing, but no- thing dies . . . Nothing is permanent in all the world. All things are fluent. . .
The precise reason for the real-life Ovid's banishment to Tomi has never been established. Was it because his name was connected with that of Julia, the Emperor's profligate daughter? Or was it because of some political intrigue into which he was sucked? In Ransmayr's version, it is cer- tainly a challenge to Augustus's totalitarian regime (here presented as though it were a Roman prototype of Hitler's, Mussolini's or Stalin's) which causes Ovid, so much admired by his fellow intellectuals and so much loved by the public at large, to suffer a fate so dire. Obliged to make a speech before the Emperor, at the opening of a stadium, he omits the usual litany of greetings, culminating in one, more obse- quious than all the others, to the Master of the World himself, and instead begins, tout court, 'Citizens of Rome'. Augustus him- self is asleep; but the insult stirs into frenzied movement the whole 'open-eared, many-voiced and infinitely fine-tuned apparatus of the state'. In no time at all the poet has ceased to be that state's pampered lapdog, and instead has become its gadfly, to be swatted as speedily and efficiently as possible.
As he now recreates Ovid's fabulous world and now creates a fabulous world of his own, Ransmayr shows two opposing processes at work: petrifaction and liquefaction. Just as in the Metamorphoses Laos, hurled by Hercules into the Euboean Sea, becomes 'all stone and hardness' and Arethusa, fleeing Alpheus, becomes a fountain, so the countryside about 'the city of iron' now becomes iron-hard and now threatens totally to dissolve in an unremit- ting downpour of rain. Some of Rans- mayr's most haunting passages are about the stone cairns raised by the servant Pythagoras as mohuments to his master's writings; and the most haunting passage of all is a description of the doomsday flood which Ducalion and Pyrra miraculously survive, to repopulate the earth by casting behind them stones which then turn into women and men.
As the people of the Metamorphoses merge into their images as seen in the weirdly distorting mirror of Ransmayr's imagination, and as reality merges into dream, one becomes simultaneously aware both of the superb qualities and of the irritating limitations of his book. Page after page, in John Woods' lustrous translation, yields up some memorable evocation of the bleakness of exile, of the capriciousness of tyranny, and of the transience of art, love and time itself. What is lacking is precisely what is so often lacking in our dreams: a sense of wholeness, completeness, over- arching purpose. But if this is not the great novel which both its blurb and some German critics claim is to be, it is certainly a fine one.
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