Circe by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury, £16.99)

Review by Lesley McDowell

In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe is the witch who beguiles Odysseus, who changes his men into swine and distracts him from his task for a whole year. In Ovid, she is the avenging goddess who changes her love rival into a dragon. Subsequent eras have painted her as sexually predatory, or all-powerful and full of vengeance.

Classics scholar Madeline Miller, six years after her debut The Song of Achilles won the Orange Prize for fiction, has brought us another reading of Circe, one that embodies many of the stories about her over the generations but which gives them a twist to produce a sympathetic and believable female figure. Actually, she does much more than that. She weaves a spellbinding tale of a woman growing to her power through self-knowledge; she tells a gripping, page-turning story of threats and exiles and rape and murder; she shows a world that’s both recognisable and unrecognisable, and makes us gasp and laugh in equal measure.

If that sounds like exaggeration, the novels justifies it. The Song of Achilles was a well-thought-out, well-crafted retelling of Achilles, which offered something new by focusing on his relationship with Patroclus, who was the narrator of the story. It was certainly prize-worthy but not without problems, which saw critics divided. This second book is superlative: it is assured but elegant; passionate but never sentimental; a portrait of a girl growing to a woman and a mother, a story about becoming: ‘When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist’, is the opening line.

With that, we step into that other world of fantasy gods and goddesses. Circe is the daughter of Helios, king of the Titans and Perse, a naiad. When Circe unintentionally changes her love-rival, Scylla, into a dragon, she is sent to an island, exiled for ever by the gods. There, she finesses her knowledge of her plant-based powers, and waits. Hermes visits her occasionally, bringing news of her family, but her regular companions are tamed wolves and lions.

When her treacherous sister summons her to help her give birth to the Minotaur, Circe meets Daedalus and falls in love. She learns the extent of her power: she saves Daedalus from Scylla but cannot undo the wish of the gods who have exiled her. She returns to her island, but soon nymphs start to arrive sent there by other fathers angry at disobedient daughters. Then the sailors follow: the first group she welcomes, unthinking, into her home and what happens there changes her for ever. Now she has her reputation as the witch who changes men into swine, feared throughout the ancient world, and yet still the sailors keep arriving.

When Odysseus arrives, he avoids that fate, but they become lovers and Circe gives birth to his son, Telegonus, after he finally leaves. This son fights her all the way, desperate to find his father as he grows up, and stories pile on stories as characters seek to manage their own fates and are defeated every time.

Such storytelling could hardly be avoided as a theme in Circe’s own tale: she passes from someone whose voice nobody wants to hear as a young girl, to a woman of whom people will finally ask, what do you have to tell me? Miller mixes the visceral and the lyrical to give Circe’s voice as unique a quality as she can, whether describing the birth of the Minotaur (‘At last I saw it clear: the nose broad and flat, shining wetly with birth fluid. The shaggy, thick face crowned with two sharp horns. Below, the froggy baby body bucked with unnatural strength…’), or her own moment that pregnancy alerts her: ‘I heaved until my throat was torn, my stomach rattling like an old nut, my mouth cracked at its corners.’

Circe is a classic outsider, a woman considered ugly as a girl who is cast out, unloved and unwanted. She makes a life for herself, finds out what true beauty means and what she can control and what she cannot. If I found the ending in this retelling more domesticated a fate than I wanted for her, then perhaps that is just my own sorrow at such a spell-binding story ending at all.