Review: Circe

Circe by Madeline Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Circe we meet in The Odyssey is a witch with the capacity to transform men into swine. There’s more to her, but that’s the main point.

In this book, Madeline Miller transforms that nugget of a story, making Circe not merely an antagonist defined largely through her relationship to Ulysses, but a character in full.

What’s more, Miller works that transformation by imagining Circe as someone who is perpetually transforming herself. The first line (and I paraphrase) declares that they didn’t know what to call Circe when she was born. She was too high a goddess to be a mere nymph, but she was too diminished from her father Helios to be a full blown divinity.

That is, she is always in between other possibilities. She is never quite a daughter since her parents lose interest in her. She is rarely a sister, since sister and one brother want nothing to do with her and she is more of a pseudo-mother to her other brother. And it isn’t clear whether she is a divinity who can wreak transformations or she is a witch who knows how to harness the power of pharmacy to her ends.

The deep beauty of this novel (in contrast to the surface beauty of Miller’s fine writing) is the way it shows us a character who only gradually emerges into what she understands as a “true self.” Once she becomes, more or less, an adult, she makes the terrible mistake of transforming the beautiful nymph Scylla into a monster who kills countless sailors. She carries that guilt for most of an eternity, even as she is sentenced to remain on the island where Ulysses eventually finds her.

I feel compelled to warn of a [SPOILER ALERT:] but it’s also true that nothing here is terribly surprising. We watch as Circe slowly discovers her compulsion to love mortals, something we see in the way she early on succors Prometheus (that great early Titan whose love of humans brought us the gift of fire but cost him never-ending torment) and then through her love for Daedalus, Ulysses, and, in the very end, Telemachus. She becomes a lover, a lover-protector, and finally a full-blown wife. And, most movingly, she becomes a mortal woman, one who understands that the wages of death is love, one who – come at last to understand that she belongs by the side of Telemachus – trades her divinity for the chance fully to be part of a human love.

To end where I began, then, this is Miller transforming a classical myth into something that is also very much contemporary. In the case of her fine Song of Achilles, she took the ancient Iliad and made it comment on our contemporary life by putting the unapologetically gay Patroclus as our narrator. Here, in this even stronger work, she’s taken the Odyssey and transformed it into a story not about how the gods shape the fate of mortals, but about how we are all the product of the world we transform for ourselves. That’s certainly relevant in a moment when we are all called to be aware of how human activity has reshaped our global climate, but it’s relevant in larger ways of self-understanding too.

Telemachus, as Miller tells it, is given the choice to succeed his father, to be a man who will live forever in legend as a king and a warrior. Instead, he rejects Athena and declares he is happy to live a quiet life. He cares nothing for glory, only for the chance to live a decent life. In Miller’s version, his desire meets the fully transformed Circe, and theirs becomes a love affair of which we have no great song. Instead, we get only a fleeting glimpse of a character who, having known the greatest powers of the universe, elects to share her life with a man who wants only simplicity.

Miller is visiting my campus next week, and I am glad to confirm that I remain a big fan. I look forward to her talk, and I hope she has a third novel coming our way before too long.


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