And so very bad at getting away.” Daughter of a naiad and Helios the sun god, Circe is immortal, and this first-person account is a kind of greatest hits of the ancient Greek world: Prometheus and his endless punishment, Scylla and Charybdis, Hermes, Apollo, Athena, Daedalus and his son Icarus, Ariadne and the Minotaur (who is Circe’s nephew), Jason and the Golden Fleece – and Odysseus, of course, who in Book 10 of The Odyssey encounters Circe when he lands on her island and she changes some of his sailors into pigs. We were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing.
“Brides, nymphs were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. This first-person account is a kind of greatest hits of the ancient Greek worldĬirce, the subject of her second book, is also a nymph. A kind man who would become a well-loved king, Peleus was nevertheless required, by those same gods, to overpower her the rape resulted in Achilles, “best of the Greeks” – and made the nymph as chilly and harsh toward humans as the depths of the sea in which she lived. This could be seen especially in her characterisation of Thetis, a young nymph given by the gods to the mortal Peleus. The Song of Achilles now exists in 23 languages and despite disapproving mutterings in some quarters – it had “the head of a young adult novel, the body of The Iliad and the hindquarters of Barbara Cartland”, according to the New York Times – won what was then still called the Orange prize.Ī striking aspect of The Song of Achilles was the degree to which Miller was alive to gendered inequalities of power, describing how fighting men gathered when a well-born woman (Helen) came to puberty, and how Greek wars were fought: arrive, kill the men, take the women, parcel them out, tumble them on marsh-reed beds then require them to serve and feed the now entrenched army.
Homer did not spell out the exact nature of a relationship that might trigger such a reaction Miller made it a love story, tender and loyal, and by clearly showing what Achilles’ hubris would cost him gave it not only intimacy but the arc of true tragedy. I n her first novel, The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller retold the siege of Troy from the point of view of Patroclus, whose death Achilles avenged by unleashing outsize destruction on Troy and especially on Hector, whose body he tied to his chariot and dragged around the city walls.
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