The transcendental nature of the novel begins to emerge almost
immediately and is revealed in the words of Ovid when he says:
How can I give you any notion – you who know only landscapes
that have been shaped for centuries to the idea we all carry in our
souls of that ideal scene against which our lives should be played
out – of what Earth was in its original blackness, before we
brought to it the order of industry, the terraces, the fields,
orchards, pastures, the irrigated gardens of the world we are
making in our own image (Malouf, 1978:28).
Here Malouf is not only writing about the landscape in which the physical
body finds itself but also the landscape of the soul. Peter Bishop has commented
on the psychological, almost mystical quality of this particular work and classifies it
as an allegory of a psychological descent and of spiritual reconciliation (Bishop,
1982:421). I t is because of this that Malouf deliberately leaves vague and
ambiguous the exact nature and status of the Child. The prologue tells us that the
Child appeared at Sulmo only to Ovid:
The Child is always there. I am three or four years old. I t is late
summer. I t is spring. I am six. I am eight. The Child is always
the same age. We speak to one another, but in a tongue of our
own devising. My brother, who is a year older, does not see him,
even when he moves close between us. He is a wild boy (Malouf,
1978:9).
Here the Child seems like an imaginary being, a supernatural presence or
psychopomp, a projection of Ovid’s own psyche. However, later on at Tomis, the
Child is a real person who is seen by the Getae. This apparent inconsistency, the
reality of the Child as an external figure in time and place and as an imaginal,
psychic manifestation, provides the necessary ambiguity to give him archetypal
status: as an energy from the personal and collective unconscious manifested in the
world of matter.
The Child is both inside Ovid and outside him throughout the novel; is
simultaneously a real being in the external world and a projection of an inner and,
initially, unconscious part of Ovid. He is, in fact, from that same dream world and
carries the same message as the centaurs in the early part of the novel:
... suddenly ... out of the swirling sky, a horde of forms came
thundering towards me – men, yes, horses, yes, and I thought of
what I do not believe in and know belongs only to our world of
fables, which is where I found myself: ... the centaurs ... uttering
cries ...Let us into your world, they seemed to be saying. Let us
cross the river into your empire. Let us into your lives. Believe in
us. Believe (Malouf, 1978:23-24).