"Circe" by Madeleine Miller

Miller's first novel was the wonderful Song of Achilles in which Patroclus narrates. This is another story woven from the Greek myths. But now it is Circe, a nymph and a witch, who speaks. She is semi-divine and immortal. She falls in love with Glaucos and transforms Scylla into a monster. She travels with Daedalus to the court of King Minos in Crete to assist her sister, the wife of Minos, in giving birth to the Minotaur. And she meets and has a child by Odysseus.

She is fantastically cynical about her relatives, the Gods and Titans, and the way in which immortality and omnipotence warp character:

• “Gods love nothing more than novelty.” because they are immortal and thus easily bored(C 1)
• Who worships the gods? “A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him.” (C 8)
• “Monsters are a boon to gods. Imagine all the prayers.” (C 8)
• “Gods ... find their fame by proving what they can mar: destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters.All that smoke and savour rising so delicately from our altars. It leaves only ash behind.” (C 10)

She is equally eloquent about mortals:

• “Their bodies crumble and pass into earth. Their souls turn to cold smoke and fly to the underworld. There they eat nothing and drink nothing and feel no warmth. Everything they reach for slips from their grasp.” (C 2)
• “This was how mortals found fame, I thought. Through practice and diligence, tending their skills like gardens until they glowed beneath the sun.” (C 10)
• “Every moment mortals died, by shipwreck and sword, by wild beasts and wild men, by illness, neglect and age. ... No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke.” (C 12)

She can do wonderful description:

• “He stood up - I will not say gracefully, for he was too solidly built for that - but easily, like a door swing on a well-fitted hinge.” (C 9)
• “I stayed and watched her dance, arms curving like wings, her strong young legs in love with their own motion.” (C 10)

Other wonderful moments of poetry:

• “I felt a rushing in my throat, which was my love for him, so great sometimes I could not speak.” (C 3)
• “Nothing is empty void, while air is what fills all else. It is breath and life and spirit, the words we speak.” (C 3)
• “It was all like bees without a sting.” (C 4)
• “Until that moment I had not known how many things I feared. Huge, ghostly leviathans slithering up the hillside, nightworms squirming out of their burrows, pressing their blind faces to my door. Goat-footed gods eager to feed their savage appetites, pirates muffling their oars in my harbour, planning how they would take me.”(C 7)
• “I thought you would have learned that lesson in our father’s halls. None shrank and simpered as you did, and yet great Helios stepped on you all the faster, because you were already crouched at his feet.” (C 11)
• “Timidity creates nothing.” (C 11)
• “Hands, those appendages men use to mitigate the world.” (C 15)
• “‘Your wife sounds like a clever woman.’ ‘She is. I cannot account for the fact that she married me, but since it is to my benefit, I try not to bring it to her attention.’” (C 15)
• “Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if they can be no story unless we crawl and weep.” (C 16)
• “They have wrinkles, but no wisdom.” (C 16)
• “If she was forbidden something ... she would not simply submit. She would set about parsing the constraint down to its atom, and try to eke a way through.” (C 18)
• “His youth had swelled in him, ripening. The dark curls hung into his eyes, and his voice had deepened. Girls and boys would sigh over him, but all I saw were the thousand soft places of his body where his life might be ended. The bareness of his neck looked obscene in the firelight.” (C 19)
• “There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story's end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line.” (C 23)
• “I know how lucky I am, stupid with luck, crammed with it, stumbling drunk.” (C 27)

A beautifully written book. Shortlisted for the 2018 Waterstones Book of the Year and the Women's Prize for fiction in 2019.

September 2019; 333 pages

This is one of the books that my friend Fred has given or loaned to me (he also lent me the Song of Achilles). Other great books in the Fred collection include:

• The Ancient Olympics by Nigel Spivey
• A Time of Gifts: a wonderful travel book about a man walking through Europe between the wars; beautifully written
• Dynasty: the story of the first Roman emperors by the wonderful historian Tom Holland
• Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner; a memoir of a man who grew up in Germany during hyper-inflation and the rise of the Nazis
• The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace: a true story of a world obsessed with tying feathers and the crime that this provoked
• Amo, Amas, Amat ,,, and all that by Harry Mount: a book that tried but failed to encourage me to learn Latin
• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders: a Booker Prize winning novel narrated by ghosts

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God