During my recent conversations with my sister over the phone, she recommended me a very fascinating book- Madeline Miller’s ‘Circe’ (2018). I had always been intrigued by Circe’s character. So, I dived into the mystifying and labyrinthine world of this lesser known and infamous Greek Goddess immediately. I first read about her as a child in a tale that narrated about Odysseus’s arduous journey back to Ithaca after the Trojan war and how he had reached an island inhabited by a wicked and powerful witch, who transformed his crew into swine. Odysseus apparently spent a year with Circe in the island of Aeaea before he and his men were released from her captivity. But the tale never threw any light as to what made Circe the dreaded person that she was, her intention behind cursing Odysseus’s men to turn into pigs, and why was she the sole inhabitant of an island unknown to the world. Madeline Miller’s ‘Circe’ filled up all those gaps for me and how? The book is a riveting retelling of yet another powerful woman in the pantheon of mythology and this time it is the enchantress daughter of the Titan and Sun God Helios and the Oceanid nymph Perse. It will not be wrong to say that it is the retelling of the Greek mythology from Circe’s point of view. Madeline Miller’s Circe is not the evil sorceress that we have been exposed to in our earlier reads of Greek myth and mythology- the villainous virago that most books paint her as. Rather she is the misunderstood, exiled, and derided daughter of two powerful parents and the ridiculed and marginalized sibling of the more beautiful and formidable Perses, Aetees and Pasiphae. We are introduced to Circe at the beginning of the novel as “different”, and strange with yellow eyes and a screechy voice. When her powers of witchery or ‘pharmaka’ are discovered, Helios eternally banishes her to the rugged and barren island of Aiaia at the Olympian Zeus’s behest. She comes to be feared and is eventually alienated and shunned by the Titans and the Olympians. Thus begins Circe’s tale of her rediscovery of herself, her femininity, and her divinity.
The novel narrates Circe’s various encounters with the who’s who of the Greek mythical world- Glaucos (her unreciprocated first love), Scylla (her cousin who she turns into that eponymous dreadful monster in a fit of jealous rage), Hermes (her flitting companion on lonely nights and her only window to the world outside), the Minotaur (she helps Pasiphae give birth to), Daedalus (her companion who gifts her the loom), Jason and Medea, and finally her romance with the Hero Odysseus (with whom she has a son- Telegonous) and his son Telemachus, who helps her to confront Helios and win her freedom from her exiled existence. We also get to see the unfolding of a beautiful and gifted persona. Circe is a gifted botanist and herbologist (if I may be allowed to use the terms) and a survivor- a rape survivor at that. She uses her exile to hone her witchcraft, she understands the plant world and uses her immense knowledge to experiment with various draughts and potions. She literally coaxes seeds and plants to sprout and grow and transforms Aiaia into a verdant paradise. She becomes the lady of the island, befriending its animals and birds and its native flora and fauna. Circe challenges patriarchy and its stifling rules and liberates herself and women like her from becoming its wretched victims.
The best thing about the book is Miller’s dissection of divinity. She strongly critiques the myopic and selfish Olympians and the Titans, their decadence, their toxic masculinity, their puniness, their unwarranted fears and foibles. Circe’s battle to stand on her own in the male dominated halls of divinity, her will to find her voice and make herself heard, her struggles to survive the endless trials and tribulations that she faces as a single and lonely woman in an island is the story of every woman. I enjoyed the descriptions of the various islands (Aiaia, Crete, Ithaca, etc.) and the sub stories that are intricately woven into the fabric of the main story, much like the yarns that Circe and Penelope, later spin. Madeline Miller frees this vilified Goddess from her hoary image and negative tags. The novel very poignantly tells how viciously soft voices and lesser genders are squashed. Circe, when she receives and allows lonely and lost sailors to rest and recuperate in her island, is violently raped by the captain of a ship and that marks her transformation into the unforgiving and manipulative Sorceress who turns men into pigs.
The novel is set in the Greek Heroic Age and has the same antiquated feel to it. The atmosphere is as charged as Athena’s electric presence or Zeus’s fiery bolt or Helios’s luminosity. The language is simple and descriptive and gives the feeling of someone sitting beside you and narrating it to you. The book became my panacea to deal with the despondency, exhaustion, fatigue and boredom courtesy Omicron. Circe’s story is about choices- if they are not available to you, you must wrest it from Fate. I am happy the year began with this amazingly incredible book. A MUST read.
Amrita Satapathy 