An Imaginary Life by David Malouf

We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives on to what we must finally become. We have only to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirit works in us to make it actual. This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis. Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree. We only have to find the spring and release it.

An Imaginary Life is the story of Ovid, the Roman poet of the Metamorphoses, who was exiled to the Black Sea by Augustus for being a little too cheeky with his writing. As Malouf points out in his afterword, not much is known about his life there, which makes it a fertile opportunity for the imagination. (This is, perhaps, one meaning of the title.) What Malouf imagines is that Ovid, despondent to find himself among rustics who do not speak his language, struggles to reconcile himself to his fate, until, when on a hunting trip, he discovers a feral boy in the woods. The locals know all about the boy, and Ovid convinces them to capture him and bring them into the town, where he forms a connection with the boy, teaching him the rudiments of speech. Later, when sickness strikes the village, the boy is blamed by superstitious elements, and Ovid and the boy run away, even further into exile.

I think An Imaginary Life is a pretty bad title for a book that ought to be titled something along the lines of Metamorphoses. As in the passage above, Malouf often writes beautifully on the topic of metamorphosis and transformation. There is the metamorphosis of Ovid into the new person he has become at the edge of the Empire. There is the metamorphosis of the boy, who resembles something like the halfway point of Ovid's characters, stuck between human and beast. But for all that, I was surprised how little An Imaginary Life was interested in making literary connections to the work of Ovid. The fanciful "feral boy" story might have belonged to anyone, and feels a little grafted on to the story of the great poet. But maybe that's the kind of critique that looks for the book that isn't there rather than the one that is. The book that is here is often lovely, elegiac, though I found it a little slow and at times bordering on mawkish. It's a genre of book that I really love--here I'm thinking of John Williams' Augustus, Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, Robert Graves' I, Claudius--but compared to those, this one felt very forgettable.