Circe by Madeline Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. ” From the start of Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), the first witch in western culture reveals how different she is from her myriad immortal Titan and Olympian relatives: while they are cruel, callous, egotistical, and powerful, she is kind, sympathetic, self-effacing, and (she believes) weak. She gives illicit nectar to Prometheus to ease his terrible punishment and sickens to imagine mortal astronomers who’ll be killed when their sun-based calculations go awry because her father, Helios, Titan god of the sun, delays his passage across the sky for his amusement. She doesn’t fight back when scorned by her mother Perse or mocked by her elder siblings Perses and Pasiphae. She doesn’t complain when her beloved brother, Aeetes, abandons her to found his sadistic magic kingdom in Colchis. Although early on she learns from her parents that mortals (“like savage bags of rotten flesh”) are shaped like the gods “but only as the worm is shaped like the whale,” she comes to be fascinated by their drooping, scarred, and wrinkled flesh and ephemeral lives. Her voice even sounds human, to the disgust of her family. Circe, it develops, has her own will and inner strength, as evidenced by her transformations of mortal Glaucos and nymph Scylla, which end up causing her to be exiled to the idyllic and uninhabited island of Aiaia. She has been on her island for about the last three hundred of her first thousand years of life when Odysseus and his ship with 48 men happen by. The Odysseus part of the novel is what anyone who’s read The Odyssey will be looking forward to, but such is Miller’s imagination and research and writing that although the encounter between the two is compelling, what comes before and after is much more fascinating and moving: how Circe comes to be a witch, how she teaches herself her art on Aiaia, how she comes to be Hermes’ occasional lover, how she tries to help deliver the Minotaur, how she first discovers what men are capable of, how she deals with Jason and Medea, and how she lives after Odysseus leaves her island. Miller is good at writing convincing and complex motivations for mythological characters, like Pasiphae’s reason for getting pregnant by a sacred bull and Odysseus’s reason for staying longer than necessary on Aiaia. I was especially impressed by the entire last part of the novel featuring Telegonus, Telemachus, Penelope, and Circe. The personalities and motivations of the four and their relationships and interactions are suspenseful and poignant. Miller works many Greek myths into her story, including the war between the Titans and the Olympians, the origin of Scylla, the birth and death of the Minotaur, the theft of the Golden Fleece, the siege and fall of Troy, and the adventures of Odysseus. Even though Circe was not a major player in most of the myths, she is a witness to some of them and a listener to accounts of others of them. Miller gives just enough details so as to fill in people new to the Greek myths without boring people familiar with them. Miller is really good at writing appropriate and original similes, like “Frail she was, but crafty, with a mind like a spike-toothed eel,” or “Athena snapped each word like a dove’s neck,” or “I pressed his face into my mind as seals are pressed into wax so I could carry it with me.” She’s good at depicting the outwardly sublime but inwardly petty nature of gods and, despite all the children they engender, their essential sterility. One of the best parts of Miller’s novel is its celebration of our humble, painful, and brief mortal lives. “My flesh reaches for the earth. That is where it belongs.” And “Gods are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging.” In all this, there are graphic, brutal scenes of torture, rape, birth, and metamorphosis. And much of the novel is emotionally painful. But there is also wisdom, like “Perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own thoughts.” Since the ancient Greeks until now, western writers and artists have mostly depicted Circe as a sexy witch who tempts and destroys men. As Miller says in A Conversation with Madeline Miller after the novel, “the unfortunate truth is that sexism, misogyny, and our culture’s distrust of powerful women are timeless.” But though she writes Circe from a 21st century feminist context, she does it without being simplistic or overbearing. Although amoral and abusive male characters appear in the book (including Aeetes and Helios and men who deserve to be turned into pigs despite Circe saying, “The truth is, men make terrible pigs”), there are also decent men (e.g., Daedalus, Telemachus, and Telegonus), as well as amoral and abusive female characters (e.g., Perse, Medea, and Athena). Finally, Miller’s Circe is a strong, creative, and compassionate goddess/witch/woman capable of making terrible mistakes but also of taking responsibility for and learning from them. Circe is an inspiring female and human figure. The audiobook reader Perdida Weeks is fine, with a pleasant British voice/accent, but she almost over-dramatizes intense moments, which couples with Miller’s highly wrought intense scenes, so together they sometimes almost make the audiobook too much of a good thing. After reading Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe, I’ve been impressed by her ability to take supporting characters and imagine their backgrounds and lives so as to make compelling main characters of them and to cast new light on their mythological settings. I am looking forward to reading whatever she writes next. However, I also hope that next time she will find new ways to make us root for her protagonists other than by inserting them into families who don’t love them or by making them the only sympathetic and kind people in their settings or by making them such obvious underdogs or by making them first-person narrators. View all my reviews
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