Circe by Madelline Miller
Madeline Miller follows up her prize-winning debut, Song of Achilles, with another dazzling Greek myth retelling that explores femininity and self-determinism through the lesser known figure of Circe the nymph.
Towards the end of Circe, the titular nymph is questioned by her son about her life that has spanned some thousand years. The teenaged Telegonus can hardly hide his astonishment upon discovering that his low-key mother, whom he has lived alone with for 16 uneventful years on the secluded island of Aeaea, is related to illustrious gods, mighty Titans and legendary heroes. "'Mother! You must tell me everything,'" he pleads.
Yet far from being flattered, Circe is enraged: "My past was not some game, some adventure tale. It was the ugly wrack that storms left rotten on the shore." It is a curious and somewhat unfair admission that exposes the mindset of this goddess. Despite the historic moments she was witness to and participated in, including being present for the punishment of Prometheus and daring to be the only one of the pantheon to offer the wounded Titan a merciful drink to ease his pain, Circe has no pride in her story. But make no mistake. Her tales are of equal stock to those other gods would eagerly rhapsodise over.
Circe's self-deprecation stems from a lifetime of being used, abused and belittled by gods and mortals alike. From birth, she is quick to realise that regardless of her heritage, she is little more than an inconsequence. Her mother, the nymph Perse, wrinkles her nose at her newborn daughter's sex. Pasiphaë, her glory-seeking sister, treats her as a constant object of derision. And in her adolescence, her sun god father Helios declares his daughter to be "the worst of my children, faded and broken, whom I cannot pay a husband to take."
Rejected, Circe finds solace in sorcery. She learns the power of herbs and potions and begins to use her newfangled witchcraft to self-serving advantage. She gifts her first love, the fisherman Glaucus, with divinity and turns a rival to her beau's affections into a grotesque six-headed sea monster. But these impressive feats do not garner Circe any prestige. Her own father dismisses her magic as instances of fate that she had no active hand in invoking.
Circe soon begins to understand that her marginality is less to do with the fact that she is a nymph, "least of the lesser goddesses," than that she is a woman. This becomes especially apparent when exiled on Aeaea, Circe offers drowning sailors refuge in her home. Time and again these guests turn on their solitary hostess. Even displaying her divinity makes no difference: "I was alone and a woman, that was all that mattered." Her solution is to turn these lustful, debauched men into swine.
Much of Circe is an exploration into what it means to be female in a world of men and monsters. While it is tenuous to compare an author's latest novel to previous work, it does feel as if Miller is consciously inverting her prize-winning debut The Song of Achilles. The pool of inspiration may be the same – primarily Homer's epics – but whereas Achilles was very much a book about mortal men coming to grips with their masculinity, Circe is about a divine woman trying to consolidate her myriad feminine identities as daughter, sister, lover, mother, witch, and goddess.
Even the narrative frames in each take on quasi-gendered forms. In Achilles the story arc is as steady and as unwavering as the trajectory of the sun. From the start the reader knows more or less where the tale will set. In Circe there's a fluidity to plot and narrative that is similar to the tides that surround the nymph's adopted home island. There are pockets of self-contained episodes. Characters also come and go, never to appear again. Those well-versed in Greek myth will particularly delight in cameos from Jason of Argonauts fame, Minos and his namesake Minotaur, and Daedalus, father of that cautionary figure Icarus.
By the end of her transformative tale, Circe comes to realise that she has far more control and power over her destiny than she was initially led to believe. Graceful and majestic in equal measures, Circe will dazzle readers both new and returning to Miller's singular reworkings of Greek myths.