Hi everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I will review Circe by Madeline Miller. At a later date, I will also review The Song of Achilles, by the same author. Like all my reviews, this one too has spoilers.
Circe by Madeline Miller was first published on April 10th, 2018, and it has become a critically acclaimed novel since then, winning, for example, the 2018 Book of the Year Award allotted by the Book of the Month subscription book box service and the 2019 Book of the Year Award for Adult Fiction in the Indies Choice Book Awards of that year. It was also selected as Book of the Year by media outlets such as Buzzfeed, Refinery29, The Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Time Magazine, Washington Post, among others. Additionally, it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019, which the author had previously won for her debut novel The Song of Achilles in 2012. Moreover, the book received an exorbitant number of reviews praising it for its lyrical writing style, for making Greek mythology (more specifically, Homer’s The Iliad, with The Song of Achilles, and The Odyssey, with Circe) more accessible to modern readers, for giving a feminist voice to one of the most enigmatic and intriguing figures of both Greek mythology and Western literature but who, at the same time, has been a victim of a narrative told by men, for giving her both a complex and sympathetic nature that has made modern readers identify with her more easily, despite having been born a goddess, in her various roles as witch, mother, wife, and lover…
Truth be told, it’s an impressive list of accolades. And I was a little hesitant to buy the book and read it when I first started seeing it everywhere. Both The Iliad and The Odyssey are books that I read in college, and to this day, The Iliad is my favorite book of all time. It is the book that made me fall in love with reading. So, needless to say, I’m an avid reader of Greek mythology. Books like Bulfinch’s Mythology, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton, both Mythos and Heroes by Stephen Fry as well as Troy, countless copies of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, Helen of Troy by Margaret George, the recently released A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes (see my review here), The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker (see my review here) and of course both The Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeline Miller are all on my bookshelves. My reluctance to buy Circe when I was still debating whether to get it or not, however, was due to the fact that I didn’t know if it would live up to the hype. Nonetheless, I was still willing to give it a chance.
“Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”
And I really liked it. In The Odyssey, Circe only appears in one book (chapter) of the poem. However, that was enough for her to leave her mark both in Greek mythology and Western literature even though she would also become one of the most misunderstood deities of the Greek pantheon because of her role as a sorceress and the image of a witch that transforms sailors into pigs that she gains just to force/convince Odysseus to stay with her and become her lover. But like most women in history and, in this case, mythology, there is more to Circe’s art of witchcraft and her ability to metamorphosize humans into pigs. Unfortunately, none of that is explained in Homer’s epic poem. Thus, she has been severely maligned by history and those that wrote it; like most women, she has not been given a chance to tell her own story. And that is what Madeline Miller has set out to do, and, boy, what a voice she has given her!
In Miller’s book, Circe is the daughter of the Titan Helios and the nymph Perse. But from a very early age, Circe knows that she is a pariah in her father’s house (palace) and is not wanted. She is deemed strange and different from all the other gods and goddesses, both Titans and Olympians alike. This, however, makes her dangerous to others and she is never fully accepted by those around her. Thus Madeline Miller puts forth the theme of the novel: that of a woman struggling to find a place for herself in a man’s (or gods’) world (something that many modern women can relate to) and, by extension, a longing of homecoming—a theme borrowed from The Odyssey, which chronicles Odysseus’ journey back home after the fall of Troy. Circe’s own journey and search for a home, a place where she can both belong to and be herself, however, begins ironically when she meets another Titan, her uncle Prometheus, who has been punished by Zeus for having given the gift of fire to mortals. And it is during this encounter that Circe first hears about mortals and can’t help but compare them to the gods and goddesses she has known all of her life. It is from this encounter with her uncle also that humans will thereafter be forever linked to Circe’s life, Odysseus chief among them.
“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
The first mortal Circe meets is Glaucos, whom she irrevocably falls in love with. Her love for him is such that she does everything in her power to turn him into a god, and she achieves this with the help of some flowers and herbs. She is, however, the first of her kind to ever accomplish this feat. And because nymphs have never been known to do this, no matter how much they’ve wanted to transform the objects of their affections into immortals, we know now that Circe is not a nymph despite having been born from one because she was able to transform Glaucos into a god.
Glaucos, however, changes completely once he is immortal and spurns Circe for her nemesis Scylla. And out of spite and jealousy, Circe transforms her into a six-headed monster. Circe, however, regrets her actions almost immediately and confesses her crime to her father. Helios, on the other hand, doesn’t believe her but when she shows him how she did it, she is deemed a danger to the gods and is exiled to Aiaia.
Aiaia, however, turns out to be the home Circe has always yearned for… and it is here that she hones the art of her witchcraft both by taming the animals of the island, for example, and making them into her companions and by tending her garden. But however beautiful her new home is, Circe is still lonely. And to abate the feeling, she welcomes both gods and mortals to her island, among them the messenger god Hermes, Daedalus, Jason and Medea, and Odysseus, who arrives at her doorstep to ask her to change his crew back into humans after she transforms them into pigs for trying to steal from her.
“Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
All of these “visitors” to Circe’s island and her interactions with them, however, are important for her own transformation from a goddess to a mortal, a decision she makes at the end of the novel in order to both live and die during her husband’s lifetime. What is interesting about this is that her own transformation is both the complete opposite of how the novel began, where she transforms Glaucos into a god, and is the culmination of her own powers and gift, the gift of transformation, thus bringing the novel to a full circle. That was very well done. I gave this novel an A New Favorite rating.