A Divine Retelling?: A Review of Madeleine Miller’s Circe (2018)

Madeline Miller is well-known for her bestseller, The Song of Achilles (2011), which seeks to reinvent Homer’s ‘The Iliad’. Accordingly, I expected a similarly powerful “feminist slant” in her following retelling of ‘The Odyssey’: her second novel Circe (2018). This centres around the daughter of Helios in ancient Greek mythology, and could be simultaneously described as a fantasy and a coming-of-age Bildungsroman. Singled out as different from the beginning, Circe is strange and stripy-haired, and, unlike her immortal counterparts, despises her divinity. There are certainly admirable elements of this retelling by Miller, but I admit that I did not expect Circe to be a drawn-out tale of centuries spent pining over what she cannot have.

Firstly, the protagonist’s upbringing as an outcast is lamented through a dull and matter-of-fact narrative. Unable to physically part from the earth, Circe is tolerated because of her royal blood and  banished to the island of Aiaia when she retaliates by turning to witchcraft. Yet, the pace of her blatant and unfeeling words is too swift for the imagination—reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and her cold, clinical outlook on love and life. According to Alex Preston, the novel “balances the past and present in the text, so that it both celebrates and collapses the distance between then and now.” I, however, find Circe’s story choppy and unmemorable, with flickers of apparent emotion that are never fully fleshed out. If her bland tone and sweeping narrative speed are designed to be reflective of the cruel, impassive attitudes of the great gods, then in that way Miller has succeeded. Yet, this comes across to the reader as vague and dismissive.

It often feels as though too many myths are being crushed into one through Circe’s self-deprecating lens, as she becomes so bored of immortality that she disregards legends in a way which is almost vindictive. Famous names skip through the pages, including Medea, Ariadne, Athena, Hermes, and Prometheus, but none of their stories are told. This is understandable, as Miller “gives voice to a previously muted perspective in the classics” (Preston) by telling Circe’s story, yet these brief encounters enhance the dullness of her own narrative in comparison to the glimpses of her counterparts. Miller’s novel might seek to uncover this lesser-known character through a “modern tone”, but ends up depicting a goddess who, once tired of her own kind, aspires to wreck the mortality of others for her own means. 

The greatest difficulty with this novel is time. I found myself unaware that decades had passed between chapters, with no indication of what year it was meant to be. However, this effect is perhaps reflective of the timelessness of immortality. Years resemble mere days to Greek gods and goddesses. This did render the narrative hard to follow, and seemingly major events—such as the deaths of Dedalus and Icarus, entire stories by themselves—are brushed past in a single sentence. It seems careless of Circe. She thinks herself kind-hearted and set apart from the cruelty of her family, but in these moments she is just as spiteful. The novel finally takes a turn when she finds companions in the washed-up sailors and disgraced nymphs on Aiaia, and most of all in the animals that prowl her newfound land. Although her heartless demeanour lives on in exile, Circe supposedly tries to right her wrongs by keeping to herself and her craft, enduring “self-harming rages” and “the joys and loneliness of independence”, according to Aida Edemariam.

There are pleasant elements of Miller’s writing, such as the gloriously magical descriptions of Aiaia, and the heart-breaking departure of her son Telegonous. This cannot distract from the underlying fact that it is a tale of everything within nothing. Ultimately, Circe’s narrative is flat and tedious, haphazardly punctuated with names and legends, and in her underlying bitterness she holds them hostage beyond the reader’s capacity. In fact, the most anticipated part of this tale (when Circe meets and falls in love with Odysseus) occurs within the second part of the book; the reality is a disappointing anti-climax, and the potential for Circe’s monotony to transform into a vibrant story about forbidden love and single motherhood is deeply missed. 

The only fitting moment of Circe was the ending, when, desperate to escape the manacles of everlasting misery, the protagonist drinks a potion to become her true self: a mortal. Throughout this novel, Circe makes leaps and bounds as she turns men into beasts, casts spells, brews wrath, and never leaves a life untouched. “Thrum[ming] with contemporary relevance” (Edemariam), Miller closes this retelling by hinting at the crux of Circe’s character, to overcome the impasse of immortality and be born again into a new world. Can Circe’s tale be retold? Miller seems to banish her to the archaic, inaccessible depths of mythology, rubbing salt in the wounded chasm between ancient Greek and contemporary society. The lingering aftertaste is of mortality. These mythological personae exist as clunky and irreconcilable in the mortal world, whereby Miller conjures anxieties of the ancient gods’ dissipation in the cultural imagination, and lays bare the scope for the demise of all retelling.