Review of Circe by Madeline Miller

In Miller’s writing, the gods are defective. In her novel, Song of Achilles, the gods don’t understand love. That joyful, painful privilege is a human specialty. In Circe, Miller once again examines the gap between human and divine and finds the divine wanting, perhaps even more so than in her first novel. Heartless, power-greedy, manipulative, conniving—the gods do not shine. This attitude has its roots in Homer, of course, but Miller gets us up close and intimate with a divine life that calls the gods’ bluff of superiority. Circe, a minor divinity herself, lives far enough outside of the usual haunts of the gods that over a long, challenging life she gains perspective and understanding about her fellow immortals. She finds ways, mostly painful, to transcend from the divine to the human—a lovely, ironic twist on our usual expectations. Miller digs in deep with this ancient theme—what is the meaning to life if it’s eternal? Answer—not much, but asking that is a great way to get at the meaning of mortal existence where the answer Miller explores is rich and nuanced enough to be hard to put into summary. Bravo for that.

Circe didn’t always admire mortals. At her first glimpse, she thinks “They look weak as mushroom gills.” And that striking simile—who has ever thought to compare a group of mortal heroes to the underside of a mushroom?—brings me to one of the book’s other great strengths. Lyrical, vivid descriptive language. Miller has gone to elaborate lengths to bring this world of gods, imaginary things and actual historical Bronze Age details to life. Occasionally, her language feels contrived and we hear the author working hard, but far more often it blends beautifully into the action and draws us in.

Miller makes clear the distance between the gods and mortals—just in case we’re tempted to underestimate the danger posed by these powerful divinities (a fatal mistake for humans). Early on she places Minos, King of Crete, a demi-god but still mortal, next to his bride-to-be, a full goddess and Circe’s sister. Minos “towered over his advisers…his chest broad as the deck of a ship…Yet when he placed his hand upon my sister’s delicate arm, suddenly he looked like a tree in winter, bare and shriveled-small.” Even the smallest of the gods dwarf any human, but only in power and arrogance, not in capacities to feel and adapt to hardship.

Much later, after her complicity with the human condition has expanded, Circe watches young, mortal Ariadne dance, and Miller’s graceful language brings out her central theme: “I watched her dance, arms curving like wings, her strong young legs in love with their own motion. This was how mortals found fame, I thought. Through practice and diligence, tending their skills like gardens until they glowed beneath the sun. But the gods are born of ichor and nectar, their excellences already bursting from their fingertips. So they find their fame by proving what they can mar: destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters. All that smoke and savor rising so delicately from our altars. It leaves only ash behind.”

Her growing awareness of the depths of the human condition bring her closer to that uniquely human skill, love. Of a dear human (not Odysseus yet—he comes later) she says, “I had no right to claim him, I knew it. 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.” Miller captures in this gorgeous image that ineffable notion, loving another. She uses poetic cadence to enrich her meaning.  When we do meet Odysseus, Miller’s language gives him to us with precision, the exhausted, war-weary traveler, “His face in the yellow light was like an old shield, battered and lined.” And later, “Odysseus, I thought. The spiral shell. Always another curve out of sight.”

There’s another idea threading through that seems especially appropriate these days, in the midst of #MeToo movement. The gods treat Circe, and others, with the arrogant self-absorption and dismissal that is often present in the worst of human male treatment of women. In Miller’s take, the gods have a divinely amplified version of this failing that allows her to make her point with crisp pointedness. Helios, Circe’s sun god father, in his obsidian halls “believed that the world’s natural order was to please him.” He’s a study in bad fathering and of judgment lead astray because of stupid assumptions about everything female. One of the key turns of the book’s development involves rape and revenge for rape. Circe even takes the epic poets to fault as part of the larger portrayal of men’s attitude toward women. Circe recollects hearing, years after Odysseus has left, a sung version of her meeting with him, “the proud witch undone before the hero’s sword.” The poet’s song didn’t match the reality she knows. “Humbling women seems to be a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.” (Take that Homer. I wrote a whole novel to give Briseis her side of the tale, so I don’t disagree with Miller on this.)

When most of us think of Circe, we associate her with Odysseus, but he isn’t the main event in this novel. He is very important, but he doesn’t suck the air out of the story. Miller takes hints from the uglier moments at the end of the Odyssey, the post-Homeric tradition of Odysseus’ death and her own imaginative portrayal and gives us a new interpretation of this usually admired man. He hasn’t lost his strengths, but he’s showing the wear and tear of all that violence, trickery, loss and betrayal. Miller’s Odysseus makes sense, but you may want to wash him out of your memory if you’ve always loved the hero. I especially enjoyed the way Miller gives us one Odysseus first and then, gradually, forces us to see more and other aspects of him. Odysseus has worked his famous charm on Circe as much as she has charmed his men into pigs. She has to experience much before she sees all of the man as he really was. And she’ll need help from some unexpected quarters. If you’re going to understand a man, talk to his family.

Miller’s Circe spellbinds with gorgeous language, compelling characters and new takes on Greek mythology and Homer. She is both respectful of ancient tradition and captivating in her relevance to contemporary concerns.

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