Circe by Madeline Miller: A Review

My sister sent me a copy of Circe, a novel by Madeline Miller that is built around the title character's role in Greek mythology. Although I have spent a lot of time with Greek mythology, history, and philosophy, I would probably never have bought this book for myself. I generally do not read things written in the last hundred years, with rare exceptions that come highly recommended. 

The NYT review they cite as a pull-quote gives it thus: ""A bold and subversive retelling of the goddess's story," this #1 New York Times bestseller is "both epic and intimate in its scope, recasting the most infamous female figure from the Odyssey as a hero in her own right" (Alexandra Alter, The New York Times)."

I am sure it was intended to be subversive since that is the thing to be as a contemporary author, but I did not find it so. I think Plato would have hated it for exactly the same reasons he hated the poets' treatment of the gods, which readers are familiar with from our trip through the Laws. In an important way, then, it's well-placed in the tradition rather than subversive of it. The problem for Plato was that the Greek popular ideas about the gods were subversive to the philosophical idea that justice was somehow rooted in the divine order -- an order that the stories about the gods showed to be entirely based on divine behaviors that would be predatory and vicious in a human being. 

That theme is the major theme of the book: that the divines are really very bad people, and just because they do not struggle, suffer, and die like mortals do. Mortals have all the same vicious inclinations, but they end up being tempered those qualities that would seem to make mortals' lot undesirable by comparison. It is our need to work hard and practice to perfect our crafts that develops virtues like patience, self-discipline, and temperance. It is our doom of death that forces us to develop courage, prudence, and that can enable us to develop a sense of mercy. It is our suffering that opens us to empathy, as we know what suffering is like. It is our need to struggle to gain our masteries that give us sympathy for those who -- unlike the Greek gods, in her telling -- are still struggling to gain a foothold. 

This reading would probably have gotten you executed as a philosopher in ancient Athens, but they executed Socrates (and nearly Aristotle). It is just why Plato wanted to force the poets to reform in their stories about the gods, so that the gods would not seem like spoiled and vicious beings. She also shows why a god could even come to see death as desirable once she sees the value of mortal beings. This underlines why the ancient mythic order was readily subverted by a God who would choose to walk as a mortal, to suffer and die as we do, and then to prepare the way for us for a better next world. This is not a theme and never mentioned, but it undermines the idea that this novel is subversive: yes, but not of our own moral order. It is subversive of the ancient mythic order, just as Plato warned these stories would be. It is therefore a fit part of the ancient tradition, and undermines it only on its own terms.

Miller departs from the ancient Greek tradition in places, but her choices are defensible. For example, she elects to follow Ovid in her treatment of Scylla, rather than Greek sources. She also follows a lost poem that is probably authentically ancient Greek, but which we have only in summary. I didn't care for that choice personally because it gives Odysseus a worse story than some other sources and he is my favorite of the Homeric characters; but she was writing about Circe, and her decision is entirely within an author's prerogative. 

She loses focus on her major theme only once that I can tell, when she introduces a feminist element to (partially) justify Circe's violence against sailors like Odysseus'. Only in that one chapter do male mortals become reliably vicious characters; and even then the one chapter is tempered by later reflections on the morality of using violence against others. It ends up being balanced against Telemachus' participation in the executions of the slave girls (and everyone else) at the end of the Odyssey, which Miller views with contemporary horror. Yet Circe has done as much, and as carelessly of whether or not her violence was always deserved, as she admits and of which she refuses to be absolved. 

I will close with some praise for her skills as a writer. Much of the book is beautifully written, especially in the context of modern novels which are rarely so. Well done.