He is a stranger among his suspicious hosts, and he is deprived of his language, his poetry and his raison d’être. Was his exploration of the themes of intellectual isolation, conformity and the bleakness of some cultures influenced by his ten-year sojourn in Europe and return to Australia in 1968?įor Malouf’s Ovid is irrevocably changed by his new environment. I can’t help wondering if Malouf himself had felt this way early in his career. The peasants who live on this barren island are preoccupied with survival and not much more, and the early chapters of the book show us Ovid’s anguished longing for intellectual companionship and a shared delight in words. In this re-imagining, Malouf takes us to the bleak and barbaric island of Tomis where the greatest deprivation for the poet is that no one speaks his language. In Malouf’s novel, as in reality, Ovid paid a heavy price for his temerity.
Yet it is out of these flimsy facts that David Malouf has fashioned an intriguing life-in-exile for Ovid in his second novel, An Imaginary Life ( 1978). It turns out that what I remember about him is about all there is to know, probably because Augustus was as good at turning his foes into ‘non-persons’ as Soviet dictators do.
He liked The Good Life, and most of its lesser vices, and he enjoyed being provocative for the fun of it. This was not least because he was a bit of a ‘lad’, full of joie de vivre and a taste for ladies not necessarily available for romance, even in free-and-easy Rome. He was exiled to a remote island called Tomis because he offended the Emperor Augustus, and was utterly miserable there. I discovered the Roman poet Ovid when I was at university and enjoyed reading his Amores and Metamorphoses very much – but I was much too young to appreciate him properly. All I really remember is that the Amores was rather raunchy and that Ovid wrote once too often about matters too sensitive for him to be permitted to continue.
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