“Let me have the rest”: Madeline Miller’s ‘Circe’
Timidity creates nothing.
I’ve had this one on an IV drip for the last two months and it would not be hyperbole to say it’s been quite literally anchoring my sanity.
Before, I couldn’t possibly have imagined it landing with anywhere near the stratospheric impact of The Song of Achilles. Because how could it?
Reader, I was wrong.
Retreating into the sweet wilderness of Aiaia with the eponymous witch—mixing her herbs, digging up roots, singing on the beaches, weaving crimson and purple cloaks on her loom, padding through the trees with her lions and wolves, knitting spells on the mountain—has been like balm on an open wound.
She struck the room, tall and straight and sudden-white, a talon of lightning in the midnight sky. Her horsehair helmet brushed the ceiling. Her mirror armour threw off sparks. The spear in her hand was long and thin, its keen edge limned in firelight. She was burning certainty, and before her all the shuffling and stained dross of the world must shrink away. Zeus’ bright and favourite child, Athena. ‘What I desire will come to pass. There is no mitigation.’ That voice again, like shearing metal. I had stood in the presence of great gods before: my father and grandfather, Hermes, Apollo. Yet her gaze pierced me as theirs had not. Odysseus had said once she was like a blade honed to a hair’s fineness, so delicate you would not even know you had been cut, while beat by beat your blood was emptying on the floor.
I cannot even begin to express how in love I am with this woman’s writing. Perhaps not even Donna Tartt can work language quite like this. DT’s words are very much married to the broiling storms of her plots and characters and themes, scything their way through the soul with all the delicacy of a maelstrom. But the spells Madeline Miller weaves with every sentence could quell Trygon. I’ve never read anything that so closely mirrors music, every rise and fall, push and pull, major and minor swirling in a euphorically numinous counterpoint, each note as perfectly placed as the tiles in a mosaic. As I’ve parroted before and shall no doubt parrot forth again with just about every breath I have left, to witness and consume such art quite simply makes life worth living.
Penelope said, ‘What makes a witch, then? If it is not divinity?’ ‘I do not know for certain,’ I said. ‘I once thought it was passed through blood, but Telegonus has no spells in him. I have come to believe it is mostly will.’ She nodded. I did not have to explain. We knew what will was.
It seems it’s a truth universally acknowledged that one cannot finish a Madeline Miller novel without weeping.
So I’ll just be out here, manifesting The Children of Prospero into existence, waiting for MM to cruise back into literary headlines, collect her Booker, and save the 2020s…
‘Father,’ I said, ‘I never will. I leave this place tomorrow.’ He would not ask where, he would not even wonder. So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself. ‘You have always been the worst of my children,’ he said. ‘Be sure you do not dishonour me.’ ‘I have a better idea. I will do as I please, and when you count your children, leave me out.’
Can we take a moment though to just consider this goddess, who spends untold centuries tortured by the knowledge of what she unleashed on the world, the wretched tyranny of Scylla, a living nightmare that would ravage generations of sailors, who confronts the oldest power in existence, old as the first drop of salt, to acquire a poison that could kill her, a venture that pitches the very rule of the gods into doubt, then choosing to take the same potion that rendered Scylla thus, that exposes one’s true form, risking monstrosity, just for the faintest sliver of a chance that it would grant her the condition she has yearned for across the annals of time, the one most tragic most fundamental quality of the human: mortality.
A being with power beyond imagining at her fingertips, with the gaping fathoms of immortality unfurled before her…
Choosing transience.
I passed a pear tree drifted with white blossoms. A fish splashed in a moonlit river. With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a moment to recognise what it was. I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.
