2022/47: Circe -- Madeleine Miller

'Take them to your bed.'
‘That is absurd,’ I said. ‘They would run screaming.’
‘Nymphs always do,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you a secret: they are terrible at getting away.’
At a feast on Olympus such a jest would have been followed by a roar of laughter. Hermes waited now, grinning like a goat. But all I felt was a white, cold rage. [p. 158]

Circe is one of the children of the sun god Helios and the naiad Perse. She grows up maligned by her father and her siblings, derided for her yellow eyes and thin voice. As a young woman, she brings nectar to Prometheus: later, she falls in love with a mortal, and uses pharmaka, witchcraft, to make him a god. This does not work out well and Circe is exiled to Aiaia, where she is befriended by Hermes and visited by various relatives and strangers. Then comes Odysseus ...

I have attempted The Song of Achilles several times and found it unengaging, so I hesitated to read this: but a reliable friend recommended it, and I'm grateful. Circe, here, is a goddess and a witch, but also intrinsically a woman. She is emotionally, and later physically, abused: she acquires and exerts power and agency in the ways available to her, she falls in love, she exacts her vengeance, and she tries to temper the more extreme acts of her sister Pasiphae. Giving birth to Odysseus' son Telegonus (concerning whom dark prophecies are uttered) she experiences post-partum depression; she mourns the death of her favourite lioness; she approaches pharmaka as a scientist. And when she transforms men into swine, she has a very good reason.

I wasn't familiar with the story of Circe's son Telegonus, but Miller's treatment of his tale, and its aftermath -- and especially Circe's interactions with Penelope and Telemachus -- has emotional resonance: the interactions ring true, they feel human. Odysseus apparently told Penelope, about Circe, that 'he had never met a god who enjoyed their divinity less': and that is the theme of the novel, Circe's fraught relationship with mortality and with mortals. Deceived by Medea -- her niece, her favourite brother's daughter -- and the mortal Jason into granting a form of absolution (katharsis, 'the oldest rite of our kind', means that Circe cannot ask about the evils for which they seek cleansing), mocked by her family, beguiled by love, grieving mortality, transforming 'the other woman' to an actual monster: this Circe is wholly relatable, her exile sometimes enviable, her skills self-taught and powerful enough to terrify the Olympian gods.

I'm very glad I read this: I might now even have another try at Achilles.