The starting point for Ransmayr’s powerful and poetic novel is the Roman poet Ovid’s exile in distant Tomi on the Black Sea, where he spent the last nine years of his life. When a rumour of Ovid’s death reaches Rome, one of his admirers, Cotta, sets out for the Black Sea with the hope of bringing back definite news of the poet and copies of any works Ovid, who burnt his manuscripts on banishment, might have written in his exile, in particular his Metamorphoses. Cotta does not find Ovid, nor his books, but uncovers more and more traces of his presence: in the stories told by Echo, in the quotations Pythagoras writes on scraps of cloth, and in the landscape itself.

Tomi is a town of iron-founders, recalling Ovid’s description, at the beginning of his Metamorphoses, of the fourth age of mankind, the age of ‘hard iron’ in which ‘all manner of crime broke out; modesty, truth and loyalty fled’, all of which, of course, provides ample material for the storyteller. Hideous crimes certainly abound in the iron-town, which is a derelict habitation for a degraded humanity. It is permeated with the rust of decay, and its inhabitants all come from elsewhere and have ended up there like so much flotsam and jetsam on the shores of time. They are morose and unresponsive, until they briefly erupt in the grotesque orgy of carnival.

All the people Cotta meets or hears about in this town ‘at the end of the world’ are variants of figures from the myths and legends Ovid used in his book: the village prostitute, who has been so brutalised she simply repeats the words of those talking to her, is called Echo; Arachne is a deaf-mute weaver; Tereus, the butcher, has raped his sister-in-law; Fama is a gossip who runs the local store. (At the end of the book is a repertory of characters, reminding the reader of Ovid’s version of the legends.) Their stories are interwoven and told by different voices, by Cotta, by Echo, by Fama; and everywhere is change, in the landscape, in the climate, in the people, ‘nothing retains its own shape’: The Last World is a metamorphosis of the Metamorphoses.

Ransmayr’s ‘last world’ is a hauntingly strange amalgam of legend, Roman history, and our modern world: in Tomi people change into stones and animals, and Ovid is banished by Augustus from Rome for a speech delivered through a microphone. The Last World is not a retelling of classical legends, nor a historical reconstruction of Ovid’s exile, nor a modernised version of either; the two are combined, with a few modest anachronisms, to create a timeless poetic world through which Ransmayr deals with themes of universal and contemporary interest, in particular the mind-set produced by an absolute dictatorship, and the threat of ecological disaster.

The power of the book resides in Ransmayr’s power of description, especially in his vision of the decrepit, decaying town with inhabitants that are at the same time ordinary and yet strange. Equally vivid is the evocation of the shifting landscape, the instability of which contributes to the sense of a disintegrating world. At the end, growth and luxuriance overwhelm the world of man and even the narrator seems about to metamorphose into a plant. Finally literature is overtaken by reality; Ovid is perpetuated not in his works, but in the new mountain which now rises majestically above the town: Olympus.

‘Wolves, Cotta said, turning now to the woman in black. Who are you? And getting no answer, asked Lycaon, Who is she?

Now the kneeling woman laid a hand flat to her mouth, as if to try to stop herself from speaking. Flakes of skin fell like snow over her chest. She stared at Cotta and repeated, Who are you? then stretched her hand toward the ropemaker and asked him in Cotta’s tone of voice, Who is she?

Confused and embarrassed, feeling he was the victim of a word game these two were playing for the hundredth time, Cotta fled into helpless chatter. Does she work for you? he asked Lycaon, who did not look at him. What’s her name? And then he introduced himself to the woman as he would to a simpleton, pointing to his chest and saying, Cotta.

Cotta, the woman in black repeated, refusing to take her eyes from him, does she work for you? What’s her name?

Echo, the ropemaker said at last, her name is Echo. She cleans my house.

House, Echo whispered, bending deep over the pattern of tracks again, my house.’ p58-59