Book Review The New York Times

Fiction

Giving Her a Voice

By Zoe Gordon
December 6, 2019

Circe
By Madeline Miller
400 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $27.

There is a long tradition of taking beloved characters from classic texts and giving them
their own story and voice. Many recent novels such as Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls,
or Madeline Miller’s first novel, Song of Achilles, have taken the stories told in Homer’s
classic work and turned it on its head. In her newest novel, following this tradition,
Miller takes a rather unlikeable character from the Odyssey, the witch Circe, and gives
her a voice by recasting her as the protagonist of the story.

The story begins with Circe and her siblings: Perses, Pasiphaë, and Aeëtes. They are all
the children of the Titan Helios and the Oceanid Naiad Perse, but Circe is the least
beautiful and least remarkable of family; until she discovers that she has power that can
compete with the gods themselves. Miller sets the tone of the novel on the first page,
“When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. They called me nymph,
assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and thousand cousins…That word,
nymph, paced out the length and breathe of our futures. In our language, it means not
just goddess, but bride” (Miller 3). Miller sets Circe up as a character born into a role
that she does not fit. Her fellow nymphs do not understand her, and her family mocks
her.

From the very beginning of her immortal life, Circe seems to feel more of a connection
to mortals than her fellow immortals. She is told by Hermes that she has a mortal voice,
she helps Prometheus while he is being punished by Zeus for helping mortals, and even
falls in love with a mortal sailor, Glaucos. Desperate to make Glaucos immortal, she
begins to learn about Pharmaka, powerful plants that grow where the gods blood has
watered the earth. Just speaking of Pharmaka is illegal, and Circe risks everything by
using them to turn Glaucos into a god. The other gods assume that his transformation is
the work of the Fates, and he is accepted. To Circe’s horror, Glaucos shuns her and falls
in love with a nymph, who has been horrible to Circe in the past. Filled with jealousy,
Circe uses the Pharmaka to change the nymph into the horrible sea creature known in
classic myths as Scylla. Although it could be easy to read these actions as villainous,
Miller is careful to keep Circe a sympathetic character by giving her understandable
reasoning for her actions.

When her powers are discovered, she is exiled to the island Aiaia, where she is given a
prison disguised as a palace. While on this island she meets many heroes and gods on
their own adventures and takes many of them as lovers while the stay with her on Aiaia.
For anyone familiar with classic Greek mythology, Circe is filled with many recognizable
names and stories. Circe takes part in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, Daedalus
and Icarus, Jason and Medea, and of course Odysseus and his Odyssey. In each of these
stories, Circe plays the part of a character that means well, but things do not always
work out the way she had hoped. In classic Mythology, Circe is painted as a witch that is
another obstacle that the hero Odysseus must overcome. However, Miller paints this
infamous woman in a new light.

Circe is written in first person, bringing the reader into the mind of a character that
lurks in the shadows of mythology. She gives reasons for Circe’s more questionable
deeds, pulling sympathy from the reader. Circe is in many ways a feminist text, as Miller
makes her a character with power that rivals that of any male hero, and therefore has
been feared and villainized by many men. The novel seemed to stretch on at times, due
to the large amount of time the narrative spans (Circe is immortal), and I found certain
guest characters more interesting than others. Circe’s relationship with Odysseus is the
major plot line of the text, but this well-known hero is portrayed in a different light in
this story. While Miller has clearly done her research, she applies a specific reading of
texts like the Iliad and Odyssey. Like many other famous heroes mentioned in this text,
Miller exposes many flaws in Odysseus that are only hinted at by Homer. She creates a
well-rounded character, that is somewhat unlikable, but also possible for the reader to
see what Circe see in him.

Where classic myths have let the men define her, Miller has given a voice to a powerful
woman, and given us her side of the story. While Miller sometimes falls into the trap of
clichés, there characterization of the heroine is well crafted, and her master’s degree in
classics is apparent in her thorough knowledge of each myth incorporated in this text.
goodreads
(Zoe Gordon rated this book 5 Stars)

Circe
By Madeline Miller

While the beginning of this book felt

endless at times, I wish the second half
could have been extended, maybe even
enough for me to live inside this story.
Circe, is about an immortal witch, one
that may sound familiar if you are a fan of
classic Greek mythology. She makes
cameo appearances in many well-known
myths, but Miller has finally given her a
chance to take center stage. Circe is the
immortal daughter of a titan and a sea
nymph and the beginning of the book works as her own kind of creation
myth. She is born, she doesn’t fit in, she makes a few bad decisions, and
through those decisions she discovers that she has powers beyond that of a
normal nymph. She is exiled to the island Aiaia where she builds a life for
herself and begins practicing using her powers with plants on the island
called Pharmaka. Honestly, the beginning of the book was pretty slow. She
sleeps with the god Hermes, other well-known characters from myths make
appearances such as Deadalus, Theseus, and Jason, and finally Odysseus
lands on her shores. While Circe plays the villain in Homer’s Odyssey,
Miller has recast her as the lover interest. She turns Odysseus’s men into
sheep because she feels threatened and then when they become lovers, she
learns to trust him more. Him and his men stay on the island because they
do not want to leave. When they finally do leave, Circe is carrying the hero’s
baby. She names their son Telegonus, which sounds eerily similar to
Telemachus, the name of Odysseus’s older son, whose mother is Penelope.
Through a twist of fate Penelope and Telemachus end up on Aiaia after
Odysseus has died and Circe falls in love with Telemachus. They travel
together to right the wrongs of her youth and live happily ever after. I loved
this book and I am eagerly waiting Miller’s next book.
 Works Cited

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New York Times, 18 July 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/books/18cnd-potter.html.

“Meet Your next Favorite Book.” Goodreads, Goodreads, www.goodreads.com/.

Miller, Madeline. Circe. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

Sehgal, Parul, et al. “Books.” The New York Times, The New York Times,

www.nytimes.com/section/books.