Everyone has heard of Icarus. Even if you don’t know his story you know he is the boy who flies too close to the sun. The wax holding his wings together melts and he plunges to his death. The story is sometimes raised as a parable about overreaching; about wanting too much or being too reckless. The artist, Breughel, has him plunging into the sea, a mere background detail in a sumptuous canvas, unnoticed by the wider world. That’s another lesson: just because you think you’re hot stuff doesn’t mean others notice or give a damn.

But for our purposes it’s a metaphor about prisons and whether we choose to live within them. They may be prisons of the mind, of convention or constraints placed upon us by others, but the issue is always the same: we can choose to live in a prison or we can look for escape. Icarus and his father, Daedalus, are trying to escape from their prison on the island of Crete when Icarus falls to his death. Prisons are a kind of death, too, and you have to take risks if you truly want to live.

It’s an apt metaphor for the protagonist of Madeleine Miller’s second novel based on Greek myth, Circe, which has several prisons. Circe is literally imprisoned when she is exiled to the island of Aiaia (usually spelled ‘Aeaea’) by her father, Helios, for transforming her love rival, Scylla, into a hideous monster. There’s also the matter of her divinity. Like her parents, Helios and Perse, and her siblings, Aeëtes and Persiphaë, Circe is immortal, and while this seems like a good thing, she has begun to be fascinated by mortals, and she later questions the long centuries of her loneliness. To start with, Circe has become alienated from her kind due to her family who hold her in contempt. As Daedalus tells her, “A golden cage is still a cage.” And he should know. Before he makes his prison break with Icarus he builds a prison beneath the Palace of Knossos, a confusing labyrinth, to hold Pasiphaë’s own son, Asterion, better known as the Minotaur.

Circe is Madeleine Miller’s second book based upon Greek legend. Her first, The Song of Achilles, told the story of Achilles, the hero from the Trojan War, from the point of view of his lover Patroclus, following popular tradition. Miller remained faithful to the supernatural elements of the original tales while at the same time re-imagining Achilles as a complex man with a more nuanced attitude to war and women than we may expect from his representation in The Iliad. The Song of Achilles won the Women’s Prize for fiction. Perhaps it was an odd subject for this award, some may think, although there is no reason to assume that a prize meant for women writers must be awarded only to works about women. Nevertheless, Circe is in fact more concerned with female characters and the world of women. Yet, Miller’s treatment of Circe has similarities with her treatment of Achilles. Miller narrates Circe’s childhood, as she did with Achilles, thus rounding her and explaining the long journey she takes to give us a more layered character. But Circe’s childhood is not just about the influence of her family. She offers us Circe’s seminal moment, too.

That moment is the punishment of the titan, Prometheus, for providing the gift of fire to mankind. Circe goes to him in her parents’ home where he has been tortured by a Fury and secretly provides comfort, prior to his being chained in the Caucasus Mountains where an eagle will eat his liver daily. Prometheus, unlike other divinities, has sympathy for mortals – Aeëtes believes mortals best serve gods when they are miserable and worshipping – and he does what he does even though he knows he will be punished. There is something noble, dignified and wholly individual in this act that attracts Circe, especially since she feels that she too, is an outcast; that she cannot merely obey and placate her father, as he placates Zeus to avoid punishment.

Never mind that this meeting between Circe and Prometheus does not happen in any traditional Greek myth: it is a moment wholly of Miller’s creation. But, so what? The Greek myths are a mess if all you care about is fidelity to details: about tethering a once-living culture to a single narrative, as though what we are concerned with is facts and history. For example, the other key moment in Circe’s story – the transformation of a love rival, Scylla, into a hideous sea creature that kills and devours sailors – has no authoritative version in Greek myth. In some versions, Scylla is the daughter of Cratais, “who bore her as a blight on mankind”, suggesting that Scylla was a monster from the start. The goddess Hecate is also credited as her mother in some texts. In other versions, Scylla is transformed by Amphitrite, the consort of Poseidon, over her jealousy of Scylla, caused by Poseidon’s infidelity. This is closer to Miller’s version, since Miller has Circe transform Scylla because she is made jealous of Glaucos’ by his interest in Scylla after he rejects her. Miller’s account seems to draw upon Ovid’s version of the story from The Metamorphoses. Although Ovid’s version provides no insight as to why Circe transforms the men, nor why Ulysses (the Latin name for Odysseus) and his men stay for a year on Aiaia after Ulysses forces Circe to transform his men back by threatening her with his sword. In Ovid, events unfold without explanation. In Homer’s account, it is made clear that Circe lays a trap when she invites the men into her house. She is an aggressor: she is the one who abuses power. But in Miller’s account, Circe is identifiable and sympathetic. She is a woman who has seen shiploads of men land on her island before Odysseus and his crew ever arrive: a woman who has been wronged; a lone woman who has had to learn the importance of defending herself against men. On this account, Circe seems very identifiable and human to us.

Though Circe is a lesser goddess, a water nymph, the daughter of Helios (the Sun) and Perse, herself a water nymph, Miller is interested in finding her humanity and telling a story that resonates for a modern audience. Circe’s sense of her own growing humanity is articulated through an exploration of what it means to be mortal and immortal. Prometheus describes mortality to Circe:

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.

Circe’s later thoughts about her own son’s mortality echo these sentiments:

The best that I could hope for would be to watch his body fail, limb by limb. To see his shoulders droop, his legs tremble, his belly sink into itself. And at last, I would have to stand over his white-haired corpse and watch it fed to the flames.

From the perspective of immortals, the fate of mortals is an existential dread. This obsession over their physical deliquescence blinds the gods to their own limitations. When Aeëtes describes his idea of immortality to Circe, it is in terms of an unrestrained, endless physical perfection: “Like a column of water that pours ceaselessly over itself, and is clear down to its rocks.” Yet for Circe, the gods and their immortality represent an unchanging world, a world of stasis that lacks the vitality of the human world, which includes the possibility of change, of variety and urgency. When Circe first sees mortals, she judges them like most immortals do – “Their hair hang lank, their flesh drooped off their soft bones . . . They looked weak as mushroom gills” – but later, their physical imperfections and the variety of men in Daedalus’ crew cause Circe to look past corporeal limitations and instead see a dynamic collective in humanity: “It made me dizzy to realise that this was but a fraction of a fraction of all the men the world had bred. How could such variation endure, such endless iteration of minds and faces?” She also sees in her own son, Telegonus, that the relentless passing of time makes human lives urgent and meaningful.

So, as in The Song of Achilles, Miller is weaving traditions into the main story and making something distinctly modern. Sure, Circe is a witch and performs magic; but she rebels against her parents and gods equally, she strives to make a life for herself and her son, and she tries to empower herself even though the point of her exile is to disempower her. Her exile to Aiaia for transforming Scylla gives her independence and a chance to follow her own path. In tandem with this, the stories of her brother, Aeëtes, and her sister, Pasiphaë, help to place Circe within a broader context for readers, drawing in elements like Jason and Medea, returning from their theft of the Golden Fleece, or the horrendous birth of the monstrous Minotaur on the island of Crete. These are counterpoints to Circe’s story. Medea and Pasiphaë have lost some of their humanity, though they are not fully human; meaning, they have lost those qualities that make them sympathetic to us. Medea has murdered her own brother without hesitation, merely to affect their escape. Pasiphaë has had sex with a sacred bull and has given birth to the Minotaur.

Circe works as a modern text because it appeals to the common experience of being an outsider; of trying to find one’s place in the world; of feeling constrained yet desiring freedom and independence; of defining oneself, even if it is in opposition to how others see us.

The fate of Prometheus is a seminal moment for Circe because she finds that by offering a cup of nectar to him against the interdictions of her parents, she has experienced what it is like to rebel and be her own person, too. Though she does not know it when she does it, Circe has undertaken her first step of escape. Her father, on the other hand, is entirely unlike Prometheus. He bows to the gods and avoids conflicts, even though the titans are their equals. Circe’s first act of rebellion makes her more like the titans of old who fought a war with the Olympian gods: like Prometheus who has given mortals fire, for this, too, is an act of rebellion. Prometheus is a champion of mortals, though by freeing them he has been assigned his own physical prison.

And Circe is an outsider in her own home, her status little better than a mortal’s, anyway. For instance, her mother despises mortals – “savage bags of rotten flesh” – and her contempt is no less vituperative against Circe:

Circe is dull as a rock. Circe has less wit than bare ground. Circe’s hair is matter like a dog’s. If I have to hear that broken voice of hers once more. Of all our children, why must it be she who is left?

Helios’ feelings are no better:

Worst of my children, faded and broken, whom I cannot pay a husband to take. Since you were born, I pitied you and allowed you licence, yet you grew disobedient and proud. Will you make me hate you more?

Later, Circe will be drawn to Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, who feels he has been a disappointment to his father, too. But long before that happens, Circe makes this connection with Prometheus, an outsider like herself, because he provides her a path forward, as long as she can bear it: “Not every god need be the same”, he tells her. She takes a dagger from her father’s treasury and cuts her hand, wondering if she has the fortitude to stand alone like Prometheus does, and suffer to be free.

So, Circe is distinctly modern though it immerses us in the fictional world of Greek myth. We follow characters who rebel and choose their own paths – even Circe’s son, Telegonus and the son of Odysseus, Telemachus, must do so. Circe rejects a belief in biological determinism – “We are not our blood” – and instead embraces a belief in the will of the individual over fate. When Circe first uses the flower, moly, to transform Scylla, her father tells her it was merely a premonition she had, that caused her to think she had power: that it was not achieved by her will. But later, when Penelope asks Circe if divinity is crucial to being a witch, Circe replies, “I have come to believe it is mostly will.” That is also Circe’s life.

Circe is a different read to The Son of Achilles, but it is just as compelling and well written, offering us ancient characters who resonate with our own lives.

Madeline Miller’s Mythology Books