I remember exactly the moment in my life when I read
Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. By Jove was being formed, I was going through a pretty rough patch three years into a five year relationship, and as I undertook my MRes I was becoming increasingly immersed in classical literature in a scholarly way. Miller’s book left a lasting impression on me – not least in its implicit directive to see old stories from new perspectives, an idea that remains at the core of By Jove’s mission. Miller’s representation of Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship as not only sexual but overtly romantic seemed revolutionary to me at the time, dovetailing with my increasing awareness of the layers and layers of critical obfuscation that have frustrated such a reading in the near and distant past.
So you can imagine that I was pretty excited to read Miller’s next book, Circe. If The Song of Achilles is her Iliad, this is her Odyssey – as in that first novel, she takes one character from Homer’s extensive cast and uses their perspective to re-tread familiar epic terrain. Here it is the eponymous goddess and witch that in Homer is the first supernatural woman in the story to ensnare Odysseus on her island for an extended period of time, delaying his return home to Ithaca but eventually offering him crucial help. And like The Song of Achilles, Miller uses this new perspective to go beyond the Homeric and explore related mythological characters and narratives. The difference here is that Circe’s immortality and divine heritage – she’s the daughter of the sun god, Helios – allows Miller to deliver a story encompassing thousands of years, featuring a series of famous and lesser known gods, mortals, and monsters along the way. The result is a compelling arc for the central character that is full of emotional punch.
While The Song of Achilles was impressive for its bold take on its characters and world, the writing itself was sometimes a little frustrating, occasionally resorting to cliché and in places teetering on the edge of sounding like a slightly staid translation of Homer rather than modern prose. I was hugely pleased to see that Miller’s style has developed in a way that retains what was so vibrant about her poetically-infused prose in her first novel while moving away from cliché and cod-Homeric idiom. The book is replete with beautifully evocative imagery; I would often re-read a passage multiple times to soak up the richness of it. The world Miller has created in Circe – thanks again to the prevalence of divine characters and otherworldly settings – captures something of the vivid imaginative potential of Greek myth that hooked me as a child.
Miller’s development as a writer is apt, because Circe is in many ways a book about maturity and coming to wisdom where The Song of Achilles centred on youthful vigour. In the latter, mortal characters struggled with the peril of their mortality, and the immortal characters that hung around the narrative’s edge were remote mysteries. In Circe, Miller meditates on the opposite – the lead character is unable to die and must come to terms with the vast relentlessness of time. Miller and her heroine observe the brevity of human life with fascination, envy, horror and concern. This becomes particularly poignant in the chapters that follow Circe giving birth to the mortal Telegonus. It struck me as a poetic inversion of the relationship between Achilles and Thetis in The Song of Achilles – fraught with similar anxieties but told now from the perspective of the immortal mother rather than the vulnerable son.
Against the lush backdrop of Miller’s mythological world, this meditative quality might have become self-indulgent – or worse, plain dull. Instead it becomes one of its virtues. There are numerous episodes that ward off the danger of narrative monotony, and Circe’s reflections ebb and flow in response, moving herself forward even as she reconsiders her past. Thus the novel begins to think about what makes a life meaningful – fulfilling the wishes of our forebears and our culture, personal accomplishment, or loving others despite the precariousness of that condition and of their life itself. Imagining Circe as a goddess deprived of the power inherent in the rest of her family – a figure who, despite the prestige of her lineage, must learn to work to attain a new and different kind of strength – offers a reflection on the distinctions and interactions between power and privilege. Miller also goes to great lengths to encourage us to reconsider what we know of Odysseus – perhaps the most odious character in The Song of Achilles and not exactly a paragon of virtuous behaviour in Homer, either – and in the process asks us to confront the complexity of a human life, to grapple with what it means for those involved in it and who are around to reflect on it.
This reminds me of a further contextual frame for Miller’s new book: I read Circe shortly after encountering Emily Wilson’s excellent new translation of the Odyssey. Wilson’s is the first ever published English-language translation of the poem by a woman. Her rendering of Homer’s opening invocation to the muses reads: “tell me about a complicated man”. As Wilson has engagingly demonstrated on her twitter account, many of her decisions in translating the text – including that use of the word “complicated” to describe the poem’s central character – contend with what has become a scholarly tradition of ‘accepted’ English renderings of multifaceted Greek meanings. Part of this tradition, Wilson highlights, was a repeated tendency to introduce misogynist language into the English text where it simply does not exist in Greek. Both Wilson’s and Miller’s engagement with the Odyssey seem to me to have a similar effect: clearing away the cobwebs of what we think we know about these works of literature and their characters to enable us to see them in a new light. In this way, Miller matches her achievement in The Song of Achilles, which swept away centuries of homophobic apologising for the extraordinary same sex bond at the centre of Homer’s epic and allowed us to hear the story afresh. Circe achieves similar because even as Miller recounts the familiar figures and stories of Greek myth, she does what so few engagements with that material do: she tells us about a complicated woman.
