Jonathan EmmesediFollowing a student reader's recommendation in a library, I picked up a copy of Madeline Miller's "Circe" and am not sorry I did so.
This reworking and expansion of the lore of Circe from a woman's point of view absorbed me. Unlike some readers, I did not find the narrative dragged at any point, although I did note some weaknesses.
Writing the preceding paragraph, I chose the phrase "from a woman's point of view" rather than "feminist" because the former description seems more appropriate for two sections of the novel which, as it happens, I also consider weaker parts of the work.
The first was the account of Circe's rearing of the infant Telegonus, her child by Odysseus. Unlike all those parts of the novel where Miller has reworked ancient narratives, this section lacks - as far as I am aware - much in the way of precedent in the literature of antiquity. This lack throws Miller on her own resources, and the result, with its account of the problems getting the baby to sleep and the other quotidian challenges with which any of us parents reading will be all too familiar, came across as something more inspired by mommy blogging than a mother in myth.
The second section that struck a false note with me was that dealing with Circe's growing love for Telemachus. Here the source material for the liaison can be found in ancient sources, but its narrative treatment in the novel owes more to the modern romance. A narrative's woman protagonist using her feminine sensibility to reawaken an emotionally wounded man to the possibility of love can be found in "Jane Eyre" and its successors of course, but the focus on the man's ability to undertake domestic repairs and facility with refitting means of transport, and the vision of shared travels that follows on from this manly manual labor is indebted, I suspect, to American romance narratives marketed to women but which would be difficult to describe as feminist.
Nevertheless, the conclusion of the novel in which Circe transforms herself from goddess to mortal so that she might live and die as a human with Telemachus shows an impressive use of literary craft in its mirroring of the novel's earlier account of Circe's earlier transformation of the mortal Glaucos into a god and her subsequent disappointment.
The feminist currents of the novel, particularly the attention given to male violence, work well in provoking thought, as do the novel's reflections on magic and mortality. In addition, "Circe" testifies to the enduring power of antique myth. I have more to say about the author's attitude to the gods of Olympus, but that will have to wait for another post. In the meantime, thanks to that student who recommended the book - you should follow up their recommendation too!
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