Circe
Review of the novel by Madeline Miller
This one surprised me. The beginning was rocky. The rewriting of Greek myths from the first-person perspective of a minor deity felt arbitrary and rambling. It was hard to empathize with the trials and tribulations of an immortal, who didn’t age and quickly healed from any injury, for whom a few hundred years meant nothing. The prose was pedestrian. The story was slow and confusing — the centuries-long coming of age tale of a goddess.
Then halfway through, with the arrival of Odysseus this book started to become brilliant. The characters came alive, the lot made sense on a human timescale, and the prose was often striking and memorable.
The narrator and main character is Circe, the witch/sorceress from the Odyssey, who in this retelling plays a role in one myth after another: Prometheus, the Minotaur, Jason and Golden Fleece, Daedalus, Theseus and Ariadne, Medea. She’s the ostracized daughter of Helios, the Sun, and by mythological genealogy is related to everyone who is anyone on Mount Olympus.
The human half of the book involves not just Odysseus, but also his son Telemachus and wife Penelope, and Telegonus, son of Circe and Odysseus, and takes the reader to interesting territory outside the limits of mythology, with Circe becoming first the lover of Odysseus and later the wife of his son Telemachus and mother of two daughters with him. And Circe eventually succeeds in turning herself into an aging mortal human being.
I suspect that I would appreciate the beginning much more on a second reading.
