Circe (2018)
By Madeline Miller
Little, Brown, and
Company, 400 pages.
★★★★
Madeline Miller knows how to retell a good story when she
hears one. Perhaps some of you have read her 2011 novel The Song of Achilles, which she adapted from The lliad. This time she turns to The Odyssey, but instead of focusing on the end of the Trojan War
and the travails of Odysseus, she turns her attention to Circe.
There is much to imagine when it comes to Circe. Depending
upon which ancient writer you consult, she's a goddess, a nymph, a seductress,
a sorcerer, or some combination of these. Maybe she bore Odysseus one son. Or
was it three? Or five? Miller makes Telegonus an only child and presents Circe
as a misunderstood witch. She's not exactly Glinda—she does, after all, turn
obnoxious sailors into pigs—but her victims usually deserve it, and she's far
nicer than Cersei from Game of Thrones,
a character inspired by Circe.
Miller depicts Circe as a victim of corrupt and sexist
gods, which isn't so hard to do if you know anything at all about Greek
mythology. Miller makes another choice when it comes to Circe's lineage. All
the sources agree that her father was Helios, the Titan sun god, but some say
her mother was Hecate, the goddess of magic; others hold that her mother was a naiad named Perse. Miller opts for Perse, as sea nymphs are minor nature
spirits. This allows Miller to present Circe as less powerful than her brothers
Perses or Aeetes, and she's certainly nicer than her sister Pasiphaë, the Queen
of Crete and wife of Minos, of Minotaur infamy. In short, Circe is more of a
demigoddesses, which means she has to resort to guile and magic that she
discovers on her own rather than from a spellbinding mother.
Sometimes it doesn't pay to be a good child, even of a god.
Miller emerges as too trusting for her own good. Her fascination for the humans in general and the sailor
Glaucos in particular led her to help transform the latter into a god. Glaucos spurns her and takes
up with Scylla. In a pique, Circe turns Scylla into a hideous sea monster and
that kind of power is what really gets her into trouble. Circe dabbles in pharmakeia; that is, magic: spells,
potions, and the use of herbs. Even the gods fear magic. Miller makes Circe
into a pawn in the struggle between the Titans—the original gods—and the
Olympians who overthrew their dominance. Helios opts to keep the peace with Zeus by
exiling Circe, his own daughter, to the island of Aiaia, where her power will
be contained—as in, maybe for all eternity.
Circe is unpredictable, but Miller shows her as gaining
enough wisdom and power as to be drawn into friendships and clashes with such
ancient figures as Jason, Daedalus, Minos, and Odysseus. She's also something
of a thoroughly modern witch in that she occasionally takes mortal and immortal
lovers. She and Hermes have a several centuries-long thing going, even though
Circe thinks him a pompous ass and knows he's most likely to come calling when
an Olympian plot is brewing. As she should, she fears Athena; as she shouldn't,
she doesn't trust her. In a sense, Miller shows us the maturation of a witch.
Hers is a tale of transformation, dawning self-awareness, and stratagem on a
cosmic scale. Miller even probes how a demigoddess might find meaning in
womanhood and motherhood. I suspect we are also to infer a unique feminist
reading of Circe and, by extension, number her among the victims of male domination—albeit
that which comes down from on high.
I found Circe a
fascinating tale, and a well-crafted balance between personal invention and
reading between the lines of Homer. By making Circe the narrator and seeing the
long passage of time through her eyes, Miller shifts the focus from the heroic
tales of men and makes those seem banal. It is rather ironic, after all, that
so much of how we think of The Iliad
and The Odyssey comes out as romanticized sanguinary war tales. My own reading of Homer is that we are supposed to
think upon the Trojan Wars and their aftermath as tragedy, vanity, and hubris.
If you want to give it a Judaeo-Christian spin, Homer casts severe doubt on both
the glories of war and the existence of freewill. But you need not go such
depths to appreciate this novel. If I might, Madeline Miller's Circe beguiles on its own terms.
Rob Weir
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