23. The Odyssey Retold: Circe, Monsters and Myth

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2:36War has always seemed to me a foolish choice for men. Whatever they win from it, they will have only a handful of years to enjoy before they die. More likely, they will perish trying.

2:46Dominic Sandbrook: Well, there is the matter of glory, but I wish you could have spoken to our general. You might have saved us all a lot of trouble. What was the fight over? Hmm, let me see if I can remember the list. Vengeance, lust, hubris, greed, power. What have I forgotten? Ah yes, vanity and pique. Sounds like a usual day among the gods. He laughed and held up his hand. It is your divine privilege to say so, my lady. I will only give thanks that many of those gods fought on our side. Divine privilege. He knew I was a goddess then, but he showed no awe. I might be his neighbour whose fence he leaned over to discuss the fig harvest.

3:28Gods fought among mortals. Who?

3:32Dominic Sandbrook: Hera, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Athena, of course. We were ten years fighting on Troy's shores, and now it is longer still. We sailed from Troy two years ago. Our journey back has been somewhat more difficult than I would have wished. I think you are Odysseus. He did not start at the uncanny knowledge. He was a man used to gods. And you are the goddess Circe, daughter of the sun. This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society. The Greeks used myths to explain the natural world and to give shape to the past. These myths have been retold for centuries, bringing previously overlooked figures into view.

4:15This is exactly what Madeleine Miller does in Circe. She takes a figure everyone knows through Odysseus, but gives her her own story, full of exile and magic and loss and the discovery of powers.

4:28Dominic Sandbrook: The Folio Society's version brings that retelling into the design of the book. Julie Dillon's wonderful illustrations capture Circe's world, the island, the spells, the gods and the dangers that surround them. You can see her world in the slipcase, inspired by Greek black figure pottery. There you go. And in the cloth binding and in the gilded page tops. There's also a new introduction and an exclusive afterwards written by Miller herself. This is still Madeleine Miller's Circe, but it's with gorgeous artwork and with details that make you want to slow down and really relish every page. The Folio Society Circe is available now.

5:07Find your favourite story at foliosociety.com slash the book club. So hello everybody. That was of course from Circe by Madeline Miller and it's her second best-selling mythic fantasy novel published in 2018. She also wrote The Song of Achilles before that. And Circe is a retelling in a sense of Homer's odyssey. but from the perspective of a sideline character in the story, Circe, who is a powerful enchantress and goddess. She's very famous in Greek mythology. And it's on her island that Odysseus lands two years after leaving Troy, at which point she famously turns his men into pigs. Traditionally, she's kind of, I don't know, she's sort of an ambiguous antagonist, maybe something of a femme fatale that's what she's been turned into in traditional culture and she is known to have sort of delayed his return to Ithaca by a year and then becomes his lover and in this book in Miller's iteration it's her redemption and her vindication it's an example of a genre that's

6:16Dominic Sandbrook: very popular in the last 10 or 15 years which is basically taking ancient stories yeah and retelling them from a feminist perspective or rather a feminist perspective is too reductive It's giving voice to sideline female characters. Exactly so. It's sharing their experience. So it's like Natalie Hayes has written a lot of books about this, Pat Barker. So Tabby, you were a massive, massive fan of this from the absolute outset, weren't you? Because I remember when we first started the show, it was one of the books that you most wanted to do. Yeah. So I loved The Song of Achilles. And then when I read this, I just fell in love with it.

6:51I think this is my fourth time reading it. It's beautiful. It's supple. It's mesmerizing. It features the Greek myths and monsters and gods, which I grew up listening because I listened to the Greek myths long before I went to school. And Circe, as the character at the heart of it, is extraordinary. She's strange and resilient and she develops and she's endlessly intriguing. So it is one of those books that I will probably keep going back to for the rest of my life. But for you, Dominic, it was your first time reading it. And I was a bit nervous. I didn't know what you'd make of it but what did you make of it surprise us all well as you know i started

7:26Dominic Sandbrook: reading it about a week ago yeah we had to go to london to go for dinner with some friends and i texted you from the train to say i'm like 50 pages in and this is brilliant i'm absolutely loving this i was so pleased i was so pleased i loved reading it i think there's so much to unpick in this book it's a really really brilliant example of somebody taking an old story and doing something entirely new and entirely unexpected with it. So we'll get into all that. But first of all, let's talk about the author as we always do. Madeleine Miller, born in 1978 in Boston, grew up in New York and Philadelphia, a massive reader, particularly of ancient literature, so like you, Tabby.

8:05Dominic Sandbrook: Her parents split up when she was young. And she said in interviews, her father thought she was reading too much. So he took her books away, which seems very harsh. Terrible. right but her mother read her the iliad when she was young and took her on trips to see the amazing egyptian and greek artifacts at the met in new york which i did when we were on tour in new york i spent the temple of dendera is it that's um in in the metropolitan museum of art and so she felt like you she as a girl she fell in love with greek mythology in the ancient world she loved the the vividness of it but she also said in an interview i liked the fact there was so much unfairness and injustice which is a slightly odd thing to say although you put in the notes that you like that too yeah i totally get it it's it's i think people forget maybe they don't but about the green mist they're so entertaining you know the mix up the tangles they're quite shakespearean in the cruelty of them they're so cruel though and violent aren't they but children love that you know when when you're what when your world is quite sanitized as a child by your parents and older people that know better you're suddenly given this whole world of people behaving very badly and doing terrible things and it's tantalizing chopping children up into bits and throwing them into the waters or something yeah yeah so she did classics inevitably at brown university she got a master's degree she taught greek and latin to high school students and obviously this informed her novel writing and she's one of those writers who takes basically i mean it's getting on for a decade per book she's written two books only i know takes her a long time So the Song of Achilles is the first one.

9:39Dominic Sandbrook: You loved that, didn't you? I really, really liked it. Yeah. And that took her 10 years to write, which is extraordinary. And in that, she's doing something similar as she's doing in Circe. She gives voice to a sideline character. So in that, it's Patroclus, who is Achilles, sometimes cousin, sometimes friend, sometimes lover in that he's very much his lover. And then it took her seven years to write Circe. And she said that at one point, she'd written the first draft or whatever, she'd written 300 pages and she only kept two sentences out of that because only two sentences felt right and you can see that i think in the quality of the writing it's effortless and yet it's beautifully embroidered yeah the records the writing we can talk about that in a minute because obviously writing about the ancient world a world in which by definition there are no novels or no novels that we would recognize that's a kind of a tough ask to get the narrative voice right so that it's simultaneously accessible to us but it also feels that it's organically derived of that world exactly yeah which actually and i've read pretty much you know any ancient retelling that gets published i read because i you know i love the genre and i would say this is the one that does that best because a lot of them miss the mark i think right a lot of them are too modern anyway let's get into the plot so cersei the issue with cersei from the very beginning of the book is that she is an outcast she's an outsider she's on the margins she's somebody a daughter who is despised by her parents despised by her family she has to sort of as in so many stories of this guy and she has to grow into her powers to find her courage to find her identity the book goes through a series of episodes that are quite familiar from greek mythology and madeline miller is very clever about the way she introduces a series of characters so um king minus of crete yeah the minotaur uh jason of argonaut's fame odiseus and so on have you got a crush on jason tabby the way you're reacting i had such a crush on all the greek heroes when i was little perseus jason theseus they were my favorites okay so take us into the world of greek mythology since you love it so much so this is kind of it's the golden age of greek mythology, I'd say.

11:47Zeus rules from Mount Olympus as king. And among the Titans who have lasted into this age, because there was a terrible war in the heavens, the Titanamachy, where the Olympians fought against the Titans, the Olympians won. But one of the Titans to have survived is Helios. And he is the personification of the sun. And he drives this chariot across the sky every day, and that makes the sun rise. And he and a beautiful Nyad, who is the daughter of Oceanus, who is another titan she's called percy and they have three children there is pacifei the future queen of crete and she turns out to be the mother to the minotaur of greek mythology and then there's percy's and he's a necromancer and then there's aetes and he's a sorcerer and he ends up becoming the king of colchus so this is you know home to the golden fleece from the famous jason the Argonauts myth and then they have a third child she's the third or fourth and this is Circe she is plain by immortal standards she has these strange yellow eyes and that's part of the reason that they call her Circe because in the book Madeleine Miller translates it to hault and she has this strange ugly thin voice and she discovers after turning this nymph called Scylla into a terrifying monster so this is the skiller Scylla of the Odyssey that the terrifying multi-headed monster that eats men off ships this is because of a lover's tiff she falls in love with a mortal who she turns into a god and he ends up going for the nymph over her yeah he's also turned blue hasn't he he's turned blue yeah he's described as very dishy and all the other nymphs fancy him but i find that odd given he has green hair and his blue but you know there's someone maybe like the people in avatar yeah well that's true they're vaguely attractive i kind of get that And she realizes that she has some form of magic and it manifests through potions and herbs.

13:37And she is a witch. And this is something that the Olympians are very frightened by because they've never encountered witches before. And she and her siblings share this strange sorcery, this witchcraft. So she's deserted to the island of Aea and surrounds herself with wild animals, lions and wolves. If you look up paintings of Circe, she's often surrounded by lions. She immerses herself in her garden and her spells, and she sort of learns to master her witchcraft.

14:03Dominic Sandbrook: So she's stuck there on her island, isn't she? And at that point in the book, I thought, oh, is this going to be quite dull and a lot of interfering with herbs? But no, because basically, through the story, she meets all these brilliant people. She does. Before she even goes to the island, she's met Prometheus. So this is the person who stole fire from the gods. He gave it to mankind. And then he's punished by the gods for all eternity. a kind of eagle or whatever it is, is eating his liver forever. She meets Daedalus, the great sort of inventor and craftsman. And you hear about the story of Daedalus and Icarus who flew too close to the sun.

14:37Dominic Sandbrook: We get into the whole story of the labyrinth of Crete. So it's her sister, going to struggle to pronounce this properly, it's happy when I spent ages discussing pronunciation. Yeah, I think this name might just come up in different iterations throughout the course of the episode. We're doing our best. We're doing all kinds of different pronunciations, like ancient greek modern greek yeah english but anyway so her sister pacific had this monstrous child that i know tabby thinks i'm showing off my pronunciations yeah massively massively so she has this uh child the minotaur that stuff is brilliantly done the stuff with the minotaur i know we'll get to this there'll be a lot more minotaur action to come in this episode tabby's favorite jason and medea she has another brush with uh sylla who is her great antagonist really and then towards the end of the book probably the last third of the book odysseus turns up and the relationship with odysseus is brilliantly done gloriously done and his wife penelope and telemachus his son and through all this she sort of discovers her power she discovers her identity she becomes a mother she falls in love and she begins to reflect upon her own status as a god or goddess in a world of gods and mortals so her identity and what it is really in some ways to be a woman i suppose is at the absolute center of this book so as we said this is one of a series of books pat barker or however natalie haynes writers who have reinterpreted the greek myths and the trick as we've said to getting this right is in the writing because basically what you have to do line by line is to pitch the writing at a level that is neither modern vernacular prose no no no daddy's here right no there's no mention of pants for example as we had in a course of no one in the world should use the word pants not well unless you're describing underwear i suppose nor sidewalk that's happy you're alienating the american audience i'm sorry i love you guys but equally you don't want to be sort of archaic victorian archaic like jr tolkien at his worst you alienate people don't you exactly all of that kind of thing so what as she said herself i wasn't trying to write circe's story in a modern way i was trying to be true to her experience in the ancient world but that is a very hard trick to pull off you have to do you have to judge every sentence every word so that it is simultaneously accessible yeah but also there is a hint of strangeness to it and a hint of belonging to a world that is not our own.

17:07You can tell that she is a woman that is very familiar with a lot of epic poetry because she's able to use it in so looser way that she can almost write the echo of it in certain places, particularly points of high tension or climactic moments where Cersei encounters the great figures of Greek mythology, but then also makes it easygoing and natural and fluid and familiar. But let's get a little bit then into sort of the mythology behind the book because as we've already shown, Circe overflows with classical allusions and with Greek mythology. I think it's a wonderful element of it, the way that Miller binds together so many familiar myths, then weaves them into a single narrative, the focus being Circe's life and altering the perspective of the myths from this one formerly fairly unknown, fairly sidelined character.

17:53So we start with Helios. So Hesiod's Theogony, which is an ancient Greek poem, is the foundational myth for Circe's lineage because that's when we discover that the Oceanid Percy is her mother and Helios, Titan god of the sun, is her father. So in the book, Helios has to walk a very fine line with Zeus and the other Olympians because of this great war that was fought and because he can't ever be too powerful in case they're threatened.

18:19Dominic Sandbrook: So he's a Titan. Yeah, they're the people that ran Earth before all um the olympians came so that was cronus and deities like that and he and his obviously olympian siblings and children are in charge and as in the this book in most versions of the myth but particularly hesiod's myths helios banishes cersei to aea the island and he drives her there in his chariot that is true to the myth and obviously carries over into miller's book so a couple of other things um that are from greek mythology that would be familiar to be or roman mythology that would be familiar to people reading this book the story of cersei falling in love with this bloke who's human who's like a fisherman or something and she changes him into a god he's such a bore all he does is moan to her it's like the worst cliche of kind of boyfriend behavior she turns him blue yeah and he rewards her by falling in love with her love rival Scylla and Cersei poisons Scylla in revenge and Scylla basically turns into this hideous monster that attacks sailors terrifying the way that it's described these massive gray bobbing heads eyeless that loom out of this cave in the mist but stinking and foul it's wonderfully visceral writing yeah it is and then we've got Thetis and the Myotaur obviously so this is described by Ovid as indeed the story of Scylla is.

19:43Dominic Sandbrook: Circe is not in those stories of the Minotaur. No. So the classic thing about the Minotaur that people know is he's born to Queen Pasiphae, he's hideous, he's thrown into the labyrinth, which is designed by Daedalus, and then Theseus, the great Greek hero, comes in with his thread, and Ariadne, he kills the Minotaur, doesn't he? Yeah, exactly. But the focus here is on the birth of the Minotaur. Then we have Daedalus and Icarus, a very, very famous myth. it originates in antiquity but again the definitive version comes from ovid much later and here it's very humanized so deidolus is so he's the famous craftsman imprisoned in crete for his abilities here he sort of becomes cersei's lover he is a father worrying about the fate of his son trying to escape and then we later learn of icarus's fate and this is when he flew too close to the sun and the wax on the wings that his father had made for him melt and he falls to his death you know we were talking about the cruelty of the greek myths earlier i remember reading this when i was about seven i know i actually yeah i it was the one myth that i hated most i actually agree because he's stockpiling the feathers for years and years and years and years and years from the birds that come to his window it's the time and the effort and they get so close it's but then it's the boy like oh look daddy and he's flying closer and higher and higher yeah and then deedless shouts to him the wax melts yeah and he falls into the sea and that's the end of him it's heartbreaking and then we get medea and the golden fleece so this comes from jason the argonauts one of the most famous ancient greek myths the most famous surviving literary version comes from the third century bc and this is apollonius of rhodes so jason steals the golden fleece from colchus he must face an undead army terrifying fire-breathing bulls and a dragon to do so and then here and it's also true in the argonautica jason and medea sail to circe's island to have ritual kind of purification, I guess, because they have brutally murdered Medea's brother in their efforts to get away.

21:41And in most versions of Cersei's myth, she is sister to the king of Colchis, a powerful and very cruel sorcerer called Aetes. But in this, again, there's a much more human dimension in that he's turned into Cersei's little brother who she adores and raises. And so his transformation is heartbreaking for her. But Jason and Medea are pretty much the versions of themselves that we get from Apollonius. He's kind of a heroic meathead. She is dark and infatuated and ruthless. And I've always been fascinated with the character of Medea.

22:13Dominic Sandbrook: She's a great character, Medea. She's always interested dramatists, hasn't she? But there's one story in particular that this is based on, and it's probably the most famous story that there is from the ancient world. Soon to hit the big screen. Exactly so. So you've got the Iliad, Homer, Homer's Iliad, and then the Odyssey. Now, Now, whether Homer existed, historians still argue about this. Let's assume that he did exist. The Odyssey is probably composed towards the end of the 8th century BC, and people think it may have originated in the Greek settlements in what's now Western Turkey. It was an oral work.

22:47Dominic Sandbrook: It wasn't written to be read. It was written to be read aloud, which is obviously different, to be recited to listeners. and it probably evolved over a fairly long period of time so that it only reached its final form in the 7th century so 100 years or so later how you translate the odyssey has become quite a controversial subject in recent years so a scholar called emily wilson brought out a very controversial new interpretation where she basically said you know people have translated it in an archaic fusty formal way and that's she doesn't think that's how it was written to be recited the beginning of the book is basically saying to the muses tell us the story tell us sing us the song right of what kind of man a complicated man uh a many-sided man a man of twists a resourceful man an audacious man how you translate that it sort of conditions how you see odysseus and as we will see madeline miller has obviously thought very hard about how to portray the character of odysseus in her book because he's not quite as we would expect but and is it anyway probably the most complicated the most three-dimensional of all the heroes of greek myth so it's a fascinating thing in itself how the translation contributes you know to this interpretation exactly exactly because he's an ambiguous figure he's a trickster he's a liar he is wily he is smart he is the bloke who came up with the idea for the trojan horse he was the king of ithaca he went with all the rest of the greek heroes to troy to fight in the trojan war but then he's 10 years at troy and then he's another 10 years in the odyssey getting home yeah so he's left his uh wife penelope and their infant son telemachus behind he has a whole load of adventures in the odyssey with kind of whirlpools and sea monsters and there's the cyclops very well-known case but also he meets a witch called cersei in the odyssey who turns his men into swine into pigs and in the odyssey so she basically comes and goes quite quickly doesn't she only she only first she first appears in book 10 and her time is gone very very quickly she's a pretty passive figure she's more symbolic of kind of temptation supernatural temptation but she in in most versions she as with this version she advises Odysseus about how best to get home how to avoid Scylla and Charybdis she's always interested people hasn't she because there are different kind of adaptations of her and iterations over time you know when i was reading this interview with miller about why she chose this story i just i totally agree i've been fascinated with cersei since i was a little girl i mean we'll talk about why but she she has this incredible staying power for a character that has always been at the sideline of greek mythology and classical literature and you know even more recent literature the renaissance or whatever she has this incredible hold on people's imagination So I think maybe something to do with the animals, the beauty, the fact that her origins are often complex and not very well known.

25:49So despite never being at the forefront, she pops up again and again and again. So first of all, in Hesiod's Theogony, as I said, so this is a poem that describes the origins and the genealogies of the Greek gods, approximately from 700 BC. And she makes a very brief appearance. She's pretty passive, but it establishes her, as we said, as the daughter of Helios. and percy and it also establishes her witchcraft which is the whole idea of her throughout the

26:16Dominic Sandbrook: centuries well i was about to say that's you can see why people are fascinated with her consistently because a sexy witch is always it's always enticing but because witches in greek mythology they're they're sort of overlooked i think because we think about the gods don't we the immortal power of the gods and that's also something miller plays within this yeah so if you trace her through various kind of iterations there's the telegony written by Hugh Gammon of Cyrene. I'm not massively familiar with Hugh Gammon of Cyrene. Don't you like his work? No. He's like Harry Potter. Really? When I'm not reading other books, I'm listening to Hugh Gammon.

26:50Dominic Sandbrook: Hugh Gammon, yeah. Hugh Gammon. He's a great... It's like somebody shouting at Nigel Farage. Hugh Gammon. Yeah. Right. Anyway, this is a lost poem anyway, so you're not listening to it. That was a lie. We have fragments of it. But basically, it's a story of Odysseus being killed by his son, Teleganus. It's the sequel to the Odyssey. And then Telemachus, his son, and Penelope, his widow, travel to Circe's island. And Circe marries Odysseus' son. Wow, that's a twist. Yeah, who'd have thunk it, exactly. So as we'll see, Madeleine Miller draws on this quite heavily in Circe. Then there's a couple of other appearances.

27:31Dominic Sandbrook: She appears in Apollonius' Argonautica, 250 BC. this is her cleansing Medea of her blood guilt for murdering her brother she's in Virgil's Aeneid with the Trojans sail past not the Greeks but the Trojans sail past her island they hear the sound of men being turned into pigs it's a really creepy passage this is the first time that we see a genuinely frightening Circe because up till now she's kind of been a bit passive a bit eerie and at one point actually quite wise and then now suddenly she comes across as seductive supernatural dangerous a disembodied kind of scream in the mist and then she's in ovid in the metamorphosis so now we're into ad so we're well into the roman period and she is a this sort of scary evil sorceress isn't she in ovid yeah and that kind of sets um the image of her that then carries over into say the renaissance where she come becomes symbolic of sexual temptation and female power emasculating female power and it's also an allegory against greed and desire i.e.

28:34if those men hadn't eaten her food they wouldn't have become swine i tell you who would

28:38Dominic Sandbrook: agree about the sexy witch is the pre-raphaelites because the pre-raphaelites they love a sexy witch and they can't get enough of cersei so there's for example every teenage girl's favorite painter john william waterhouse loves her but you know actually i have a sweet connection because when my dad was away when i was little he would send me postcards and a lot of them were john william waterhouse because they're kind of beautiful women looking very romantic and i got all the Cersei ones and so I love love love them there's one of her poisoning Scylla's pool looking very witchy there's one of her with her elbows on a table looking out into the distance in an orange robe and that's very much Miller's Cersei I think slightly lonely slightly pensive so really Madeline Miller's is only the latest of many retellings of this story so you know we've talked before about stories that kind of are built on stories well all books are and this is a very very good example but the difference here is that in almost all of those stories cersei is not the protagonist cersei is the antagonist cersei is the you know we're meant to empathize with a hero here cersei is the main character and actually one of the things that she does madeline does a lot is to play with there's lots of in jokes about the other versions aren't there witty classical in jokes yeah right up my street so at one point she actually she jokes about retellings in and of themselves she writes this is cersei years later i would hear a song made of our meeting her and odysseus the boy who sang it was unskilled missing notes more often than he hit yet the sweet music of the verses shone through his mangling and this is homer right so she's making fun of her mythos yes exactly and then later odysseus tells her that in india there were ants the size of foxes which dig up gold among the dunes that's a reference to herodotus and he also tells us i love this bit about the people in the far north who believe in a serpent that encircles the world devouring its own tale and that is the Midgard serpent of Norse mythology yeah so there's the jokes but also I think what's really clever about the writing the writing is full of foretellings and prophecies and what that allows her to do is to throw forward to stories that we will recognize from Greek mythology so right quite early on in the book Hermes the kind of trickster god messenger god he tells her a man called odysseus will come to your island so from that point onwards we the readers think ah i know all about odysseus and you're kind of looking forward to this bit aren't you yeah then there's other things because of the prophecies because of dreams and stories and things like that that occur throughout the book we were able to see things that were not present at the fall of troy uh the death of the death of the minotaur all of those kinds of things so she's able to weave in different sort of versions of reality there might be prophecies there might be flashbacks there might be people telling stories so that we get a very textured account of the kind of cultural imagination of the Greeks I guess.

31:36There's one moment in particular that foreshadows and also sets in motion many of the events in the book and this is her meeting with the titan prometheus so as we said this is the guy that stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind because he pitied them and the gods were threatened because they thought it meant that mankind would need the gods less and so they punished him for eternity and this sets up you know both prometheus's love of mankind but also cersei's interest in and sympathy with mankind even though you know he says the only thing that mankind share is death and Circe asks why a god would do such a thing, help them essentially.

32:15And this is the question that sort of runs through the whole book and it's answered in the final pages.

32:20Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, exactly. So it's about the gods have total contempt for mortals. They think of mortals as grubby, insignificant and so transient. Their lives are worthless because they're going to die. Circe meets Prometheus very early on and that's the point where she has a sense of her own distinctiveness. she thinks and there's wonderful a couple of lines all my life had been murk and depths but i was not a part of that dark water i was a creature within it so the murk and the depths there is the world of the gods divinity i guess immortality she just feels that i'm a creature i'm i'm a being with a beginning and an end yeah who has found herself in this world of darkness but my true destiny maybe lies elsewhere.

33:07Yeah, and it's interesting because as a child when she grows up in the halls of her father Helios and he lives in Paul's belt of obsidian because it reflects his sunlight it really is very dark and murky which is why she clings to her father all the time because he's so blazing. So you can see that she's sort of searching for something even at this point. And then in chapter eight she learns definitively what it is that makes her different and it's Hermes again that tells her and he says that you were born with a mortal's voice. you sound like a mortal. Most gods have voices of thunder and rocks, which I like because, you know, in the ancient world, people attributed landslides, storms to the gods.

33:44And then he says, they won't fear you as they fear the rest of us. So automatically, the gods are on one side, the mortals are on the other, and Circe is somewhere in the middle.

33:52Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly. So where exactly she fits is the question that runs through the book. And I guess we'll discuss that after the break. Ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease symptoms don't pause for the moments that matter. That's why understanding your treatment options matters. Discover what's possible with Trimphia. Gucelcomab. Trimphia is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections, or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur.

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36:19Dominic Sandbrook: hi everybody welcome back to the book club now before we get into the story of madeline miller's Circe. Actually, we have an exciting announcement, don't we, Tabby? Yes. So we have a new newsletter. It's called Book Club Notes and it lands in your inbox every Saturday. It is completely free. What we do is we offer more thoughts about the books. There's a guide to further reading. You know, if you liked this, read this. But particularly, we like to have and like to feature the opinions of listeners. So if you have strong views about a book, write in, tell us if you disagreed, particularly if you disagreed with Tabby, send those thoughts in.

36:51Dominic Sandbrook: I would like to see more comments along those lines and it's about time there was one person who did do that so be the first be a trailblazer i dare you so if you want to sign up for more of this merry banter you sign up at the book club hq.com so that's the book club hq.com you just put in your email address absolutely free and we'll send you the newsletter every saturday all right so cersei um i described her very ungallantly as a sexy witch so ungallant reflects poorly on you i meant it as a compliment right you're gonna tell us why cersei is so compelling as a character why i am why does she speak to you particularly because you i mean of all the characters we're taught about apart from of course kathy and east of eden um she is the one who really speaks to your soul am i wrong well she's very like alike to me which is obviously always compelling in and of itself I just think that she, in a very original retelling that still honors all of the stories and the myths and the figures that I've grown up loving, she is the most original and interesting part.

37:55So she's, as we've said, a formerly muted perspective, but she's a mysterious figure in and of herself in the Odyssey because she is sorceress who can harness animals to her will and turns men into pigs. here though she is almost human and the whole story is rooted in her emotions her psychology the things that she's feeling and so it's interesting as well because it's obviously that of a woman rather than the man after whom the odyssey is named and rather than coming across as dangerous and lascivious or lustful the way that she often comes across in the in the odyssey she's complex and very human and so the whole story delves into totally new emotional landscapes you know insecurity loneliness a growing sense of what one is able to achieve and what one is able to do a growing independence and it's only through the reactions of the immortals that she encounters that we remember that she's a goddess and then that in itself is intriguing because we think we've gotten to know the earthy not homely but certainly very human Circe and then a mortal encounter with her and we realise that she's got this divine luster to her and she's got these incredible eyes and she is not mortal.

39:05And so it's always interesting to have a figure that you know well from mythology transformed and turned into something much deeper and much more complex.

39:15Dominic Sandbrook: But also more, I hate to use the word, but more relatable. So she, at the beginning, she's lonely, she's insignificant, she's despised. I mean, it's actually a very familiar trajectory in fiction. yeah in many ways it's a coming of age story do you know what i didn't want to say that because it's such a cliche but i'm glad you said it because it's both a cliche and slightly true yeah it's a story about how you discover yourself it's an interesting thing this business about being immortal or mortal because the immortal is what sets them apart is their beauty their cruelty their their callousness yeah their callousness their power all of these things she seems to lack all those things we are told that she's not regarded as beautiful she is not regarded as powerful.

39:54Dominic Sandbrook: She feels great sympathy and pity, for example, for Prometheus, where he is tortured, which the other gods do not. And also, the other gods, because they are just innately divinely confident in exactly who they are and what they are, because they are born magnificent. They don't have much curiosity. They want to be entertained, but they are not entertained by watching and listening and observing. Maybe Hermes to some degree. Circe is. She watches everything. She's also very trusting, which none of them are. She has pity. She has an innocence to her, I think. She feels guilt at times. So she's not as cruel and as uncaring as the other gods are.

40:33Dominic Sandbrook: And also, the other gods are kind of static. Yes. They are one thing. Frozen in time. And then they're frozen. Emotionally, psychologically. Yeah. Their identity is fixed. Kind of in and of themselves. Like, you are the god of wisdom. You are the god of beauty. Yes, exactly. That's your thing. You can't change. You can't grow. she changes and grows because she's cast out so this is part of her as we will discover i'm in a big spoiler alert here her essential humanity is that she grows over time and she changes but also her power such as it is i mean she does become very powerful through her she does witchcraft but this is actually gained not it's not innate or rather there's an innate element to it but she has to work at it she has to experiment she has to mess around with the herbs and all of that stuff It's earned and it's delicate.

41:21Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly. I said messing around with herbs and you said something very nice, which is... Yes. That's the dynamic at the centre of the podcast. So the witchcraft, the Greeks called it pharmakeia, didn't they? From which we get pharmacy. Pharmacy. The funny thing is I mentioned about the messing around with herbs and of course that's part of it. But actually, Madeleine Miller's not that interested in all the herbs. What she's interested in is, as you said, quite rightly, I think she's much more interested in the curiosity and in the willpower that drives it. There are these wonderful descriptions of the way that she tends the herbs and the right times to pick them and when the moon is high and that kind of thing.

41:55Classic witchy-witchiness. But yeah, I think you're right. She's fascinated by the fact that it's bound to Cersei's will. So there's almost an element of magical realism when Cersei practices her magic. Because it's never like, oh, a lightning bolt shot across the sky, a golden aura descended. it's sort of things gradually happen and we know that it's because Circe is practicing a great degree of self-control and artistry to make it happen but the difference in magical realism and

42:23Dominic Sandbrook: fantasy which is a really interesting difference is that magical realism what makes it so strange and so haunting is that it's anchored in the world of the everyday so for his fantasy is just all bonkers like you know fairies with wings or whatever it was in a court of thorns and roses but in this you simultaneously believe in the world but you're also struck by the strangeness of the things that can happen within it do you not think anyway so to go back to um the issue about her working at things so there's a nice line where she's talking about ariadne of thread fame yeah she's watching ariadne dance and improving her dancing and cersei thinks to herself this was how mortals found fame i thought through practice and diligence tending their skills like gardens until they glow beneath the sun but gods are born of ichor and nectar their excellence is already bursting from their fingertips so they find their fame by proving what they can mar destroying cities starting wars breeding plagues and monsters in other words human beings are creative whereas gods are destructive what gives life meaning as a human being is working at something is trying things is developing is you know patience and diligence and and practice and curiosity and all those kinds of things which the gods by definition do not have yeah and also makes them bored but Cersei uses the same mortal practice and diligence to become a great sorceress and we see the contrast when she goes to stay with her sister Pasiphae and she comes across her witch's cupboard and she realizes that because her sister is so lazy in her divinity so she says for her will had always been strong but she was lazy and here was the proof those few samples were old and weak as dead leaves then be collected haphazardly some in bud some already withered cut with any knife at any time of day it means that she will never be a great witch such as Circe and she develops a love of simplicity that is also unusual in the gods so she says I was not Athena I was happy with simple scarves with cloaks and blankets that lay like jewels upon my chairs.

44:24You know, there's a wonderful domesticity to her life on the island and it's sumptuously elaborated. And, you know, the descriptions of her picking and preparing her herbs, her love of the animals that grow old around her is really tender. Her weaving, her even wiping her table and pressing her olives, the movement of the seasons. It adds a new texture, a very female texture to an old tale and it enriches it. I think it's wonderful. It's very personal. You don't get a lot of that, say, in the Odyssey, which kind of describes great sweeping events.

44:57Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, absolutely right. You don't get the texture in the Odyssey. Now, that actually brings us very neatly to Odysseus. So he's the male character that we've been waiting for since his coming was foretold. Clever writing this, he's introduced obliquely. He asked me once, why pigs? She's talking about her turning male visitors to pigs. And the he there is Odysseus. So he's sort of thrown forward to a point after he's arrived on the island, and then she moves back and tells us about his arrival. And Odysseus' defining qualities are, of course, his cunning and his cleverness, but also he's got this kind of sardonic, wry wisdom.

45:33Dominic Sandbrook: So in the reading we did right at the beginning, when they're talking about what the Trojan War was about, his answer. Ah, let me see if I can remember the list. Vengeance, lust, hubris, greed, power. What have I forgotten? I.S. vanity and pique. There is a sort of dry, slightly cynical, world-weary awareness of the darkness of human nature in Odysseus. When you first encounter him in the book, he's a very appealing character, isn't he? Because you get the sense that a bit like Cersei with her divine compadres, that he sees things that no one else does. He sees the weaknesses in men. He's still not the out-and-out villain that he becomes in later Greek tragedy.

46:14He's only, you know, the slipperiness of his cunning. And then he sort of becomes heroic after that. He's sort of admirable. He's intriguing. You like sitting and listening to their conversations, so to speak.

46:25Dominic Sandbrook: You do. Odysseus, the sardonic side of him, he only ever sees the bad in people. He's a trickster, so he knows how to manipulate people. He knows their weaknesses. But that can become corrosive and that he has perhaps lost sight of the good in people as well. We realise later that he's actually sort of been in love with his own myth all along. like all the other heroes. So Telemachus tells us about the arrival of his father home. So that's Tom Holland in the new movie, by the way. And in his version of the story, we get a totally different Odysseus. So he says of his father's character, he brings out the cruelty and the paranoia.

47:01The war did not break him, it made him more himself. And I found that really interesting because you get the sense of this struggle in Odysseus in the Odyssey of the call of home and hearth and family and then the lure of fame the likes of which Achilles won. Odysseus chooses the former that's why he's so desperate to go home but we don't actually see in the Odyssey what happens later after he's settled back home and it's interesting to see him grapple with that here but we get like you know in the telegony we get his different ending where we're in home as a mirage and he's unsatisfied because he's frightened that he will be forgotten his myth will be forgotten and actually he's become addicted to wandering and stillness and restfulness and home

47:45Dominic Sandbrook: and hearth is no longer enough yes he's a very dark character he turns out in this book to be a very dark character it's it's not that he's traumatized by the trojan war it's that the trojan has brought out something very sinister in his personality which is the love of manipulating other people a slightly contempt for other people actually but also there is a violence and a cruelty in his nature that the war satisfied. And once he got home to Penelope and Telemachus' son, he was bored. He wanted to go on being paranoid and vengeful and violent. And actually that's the sort of disappointment in a way for Cersei, who had slightly idealised him, I think.

48:24Dominic Sandbrook: She fell in love with him, basically. And then she realises there was another side to him that actually with all her abilities that she had never really seen, I guess. Yeah, because also the way that Penelope transforms in the book reflects that. So when we first hear about Penelope from Odysseus' tellings to Circe, it's a bit like the myth, a long lost wife who is still in love with. But then later he goes home and it's very sad and disappointing. And Circe actually makes fun of Homer's interpretation of their story. So she says, I was not surprised by the portrait of myself, the proud witch undone before the hero's sword, kneeling and begging for mercy.

48:59Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets, as if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep. So in this version, she doesn't beg him to go to bed with her. They have this wonderful battle of wits. And then almost as a joke with herself, she takes him to bed. And we discovered the reason that she turns his men into pigs is actually it's a justification. It's a form of self-defense, but we'll get to that. So in a sense, by writing the book, by telling her own story, Miller is kind of wrestling control away from the men who tell the story of Odysseus and make it about Cersei and imbue her with a brand new agency.

49:30Dominic Sandbrook: but isn't that the story of the whole book to some degree about women trying to find their own agency in a male-dominated world because it is a male-dominated world yeah cersei is trapped within the world absolutely where people are in a thrall to her father helios the sun god and she's then kicked out because she tried to develop a kind of agency of her own with her witchcraft and she was kicked out and banished to this island and then on the even on the island where men visit they treat her as a sex object they see her as no more than that almost all the women we meet in the story they are going to be reduced to an appendage to a male character so ariadne for example will basically just become theseus's girlfriend medea is doomed in part because she ties herself to jason who's what did you describe him as a meathead a meathead hero and also because she emasculates him by taking control herself and enabling his escape yeah even pacify who you know she shares the cold arrogance of the gods and she doesn't earn much of our sympathy but then even she says of her husband, King Minos of Crete, Minos does not want a queen, only a simpering jelly who he keeps in a jar and breathes to death.

50:37And then her childbirth scene itself is horrifyingly violent. So this is when she gives birth to the Minotaur. And it's a terrible indictment of childbirth. And again, it is a pretty monstrous baby. The lips of my sister's wound parted and the thing slid forth. It's thrashed like a fish on a hook and muck flew across our faces her belly a slaughter yard and then this adorable newborn mangles his aunt's hand so Cersei's hand who helps to birth him until it is a mass of broken pain and blood and he himself is very cute 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 so you I mean, just incredibly raw, fleshy, horrible prose.

51:22Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, of course. And the Minotaur. Actually, that scene really does live in the mind. Oh, doesn't it? It bites off her fingers. Pasifia, she has to be cut open. She has a caesarean section, hasn't she? Which is described in kind of visceral detail. Then the Minotaur is effectively pulled out. Everybody else is absolutely horrified by this creature, but its mother will not hear a word against it. The prose is so physical. the shaggy thick face the shining wetly with birth fluid all of this kind of stuff i mean every element of this even the conception of the minotaur so dedalus built this structure in which pacific concealed herself so that she could be penetrated by a bull i mean that is that's quite hardcore stuff and in the greek myths i mean we'll find out it's a family fetish there is a lot of and cow action generally if you're into that this is the book for you definitely the violence of the book reflects the world of greek mythology so when prometheus is being punished and this is the first moment of the really visceral violence quite early on prometheus is punished and cersei watches they all watch and the gods they are sadists they love watching this kind of thing yeah cersei is horrified by it a blooded strip tore from his back she that's it's one of the furies isn't it who is who is uh tormenting him she began to carve in earnest each blow falling on the next peeling his flesh away in long lines that crossed and recrossed the skin and this sort of sense of the fleshiness the carnality of the prose the descriptions of blood and fat and flesh and meat i mean they recur throughout the it's a book that is for all that it's about gods and and ethereal things it's really anchored in kind of earthly realities but i think that's also very clever because what Madeleine Miller is doing, she's taking the story out of myth and legend, i.e.

53:13it's not just a parable or anything like that. She's like, you know, when you grow up and you listen to these stories as a child and you love them, and this is what it actually means. If this were to happen in the real world, this is what it would actually mean, the violence of it. And then you see that as well when his punishment is described, i.e. we all know about the eagle and the liver and it's just an image in your mind. But she goes into it in visceral detail. An eagle was commanded to come every noon and tear out his liver and eat it, steaming from his flesh. Unspeakable punishment, she said.

53:42The bloody beak, the shredded organ regrowing, only to be ripped forth again. It really hits home.

53:48Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, and now you mentioned cow action. There is a sort of sexual violence is there from the beginning. It's not just human beings on each other, it's human beings on animals. Bestiality. Yeah. Yeah. So at the beginning of the book, chapter one, the great discovery that Circe makes about her father is that her father has these kind of sacred cows. He sleeps with them. He has sex with his cows. Impregnates them. Yeah, he impregnates them. They give birth to calves. When the cows themselves are old, he cooks and eats them and then he has sex with the calves and they in turn give birth. And so the cycle continues.

54:24Dominic Sandbrook: That is how he makes new ones. He turns into a bull and sizes their calves, then cooks the ones to get old. That's why everyone thinks that the cows are immortal. There is a sense when you're about halfway through the book, in fact, more than halfway, that there's no such thing really as romantic love. And there's no such thing as innocence or idealism. The underpinning everything is this kind of manipulative, aggressive, violent objectification. And actually, the worst example of this is when sailors arrive on her island. and she welcomes them in. She's genuinely kind. And she's lonely as well.

55:01Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, she's lonely and she thinks she perhaps has created a sort of idealised portrait, do you think, of human beings? Yeah, I think she thinks that if they're not immortal, they can't be as cruel as the immortals that she's grown up with. There must be an innate goodness in them by virtue of the fact they suffer because they die. She's very much wrong about this. It turns out they can be just as brutal because she is brutally raped by these sailors. This is why she turns men into pigs. And Madeline Miller said in an interview that this was the question that drove her to write the book in the first place.

55:33She kept wondering why this character did this, this drastic thing. And so this is the explanation that she gives. It's a form of self-defense. So she says at one point, when the first crew had come, I had been a desperate thing, ready to fawn on anyone who smiled at me. Now I was a fell witch proving my power with stye after die. So that is the Circe that we kind of have from classical literature. And you can see the relish takes in her retribution for this terrible crime in the description of the transformation. His ribcage cracked and began to bulge. I heard the sound of flesh rupturing wetly, the pops of breaking bone.

56:08His nose ballooned from his face and his legs shriveled like a fly sucked by a spider. He fell to all fours. He screamed and his men screamed with him. It went on for a long time.

56:18Dominic Sandbrook: It's a horrible scene, But it's a horrible scene that's kind of been earned, I suppose, by Miller and by the reader, because we have been now reading for 200 pages or something in which there's been constant violence towards women. And in which, I mean, there's a line that when Circe is reflecting on this, we were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing, and so very bad at getting away. and she's talking about women of all kinds that are basically just being constantly abused and raped by the male gods. The Greek myths themselves are full of rape, particularly with Zeus.

56:53Zeus is constantly transforming into other animals to impregnate mortals. Again, there's more bull action. Let's reduce turning into a bull to lure a pretty maiden. And this is one insight among many into the heartlessness of the gods. And I think one of the greatest parts of this book is the way that she writes the gods because she imbues them with all the recognisable traits from the myths, but it makes them even colder and even more frightening because with all the ridiculousness of their behaviour in the myths, you forget how terrifying the gods would be.

57:24Dominic Sandbrook: Yes, exactly. That they are, they're overwhelming. I mean, they're obviously superhuman. There's a description of Hermes, his mind a thousand times sharper and more swift. It's shone like light upon the waves, dazzling to blindness. There's a sense that to gaze upon the gods in any conceivable way, even to engage with them, you know, you're opening your mind to unbelievable terrors that will overwhelm and destroy you. But the gods themselves, here's a brilliant detail. I thought this was really cleverly done. The gods themselves live in constant fear. They live in what's called a great chain of fear with Zeus at the top.

57:59Dominic Sandbrook: They hate each other. They hate themselves. They live in dread of being punished by Zeus. deuce himself is frightened of being overthrown that's why he's terrified of the titans it's why he's terrified of cersei because he's never seen her kind before but they also delight i mean let's be honest we all have an element of schadenfreude in us they delight in the suffering of one another they do so um when sylla so this is cersei's great love rival when cersei punishes sylla by poisoning her and turns her into this monster the other gods don't react in shock or sympathy they laugh and they can't wait to talk about it and they giggle and they gossip with each other this is like us with the other goal hanger presenters it so is actually it's having in particular very cruel towards the other god i've still got a foot in both camps you however you've been on mount on olympus for years they literally call me this use of the they most definitely do not Dionysus, maybe.

59:00Dominic Sandbrook: I'd say Dionysus. You make merry with the grape. Completely. But they also, they delight in the suffering of mankind because the more that mankind suffers, the more that they look to the gods. Humans have always sought to explain the randomness of life or the suffering that they experience with divine intervention or the absence of divine intervention. So that the more that they suffer, the more the offerings they give to the gods. So at one point, Circe asks, why is it that they punished Prometheus as they did? And he says, who gives better offerings? a miserable man or a happy man and man is more likely to be happy if they have fire yes exactly right exactly right so set against them are the mortals so the first mortal we meet is glaucos who is turned into this blue bloke and he lets himself down by falling in love with sylla he is the selfishness and vanity and heartlessness of humanity isn't he because basically becoming a god has brought out the worst in him there are mortals like jason who's obsessed with his own legend they're the worst but dedalus for example he's much more attractive isn't he he's clever he makes things he loves his son he grieves his son icarus when he dies and so actually dedalus is quite an admirable character and dedalus is he's the first example really of how mortality and loss and grief gives your life meaning gives your life depth and gives it a beauty that actually is denied to the gods.

1:00:24And also the value of working for something to become really good at it. And then another mortal who epitomises this is Telemachus, and this is Odysseus' son on Ithaca. Again, this is Tom Holland in the movie. And he's a very different hero from the traditional hero of Greek mythology. He inherits none of his father's brilliance, cunning, or charisma. Instead, he's like Circe. He's insecure and he's full of doubt, but he's gentle and thoughtful and kind and having grown up in his father's shadow and having experienced what it actually meant to be without a father all those years to have to deal with the suitors and then to experience his return you know no matter how lord and renowned he is he knows the real suffering caused by war and heroic ambition so he says he made a life for others a misery all those years of pain and wondering why for a moment's pride he would rather be cursed by the gods than be no one So unlike Odysseus or these other heroes of Greek mythology, he values genuine quiet and peace over glory.

1:01:24Dominic Sandbrook: Telemachus does. Telemachus does. He chooses to be nobody, to live out his life in obscurity. So this is the choice that is offered to Achilles at the heart of the Iliad, i.e. to live a life, a short life, but that earns you glory and fame. So this is Cleos, or a long life lived in anonymity. Famously, Achilles chooses the former through glory and battle, but then he dies. and in the Iliad the glory of this trumps all but not interestingly in the in the Odyssey because when Odysseus encounters Achilles in the underworld he sort of bemoans his choice he says don't give me consolation about death glorious Odysseus I'd rather slave on earth for another man than rule down here over all this breathless dead and so Telemachus embodies the other choice the choice that he turned down and this is Hesychia and he gets value and meaning from small daily pleasures and his relationship with Circe.

1:02:13He doesn't care about glory, riches and fame. And Circe loves him for this. And so therefore do we, the reader.

1:02:19Dominic Sandbrook: That's so interesting because he's an un-Greek character. He's a very un-Greek and he's very un-Greek and very un-Roman, which is probably why that myth was never really taken up. The myth of Telemachus killing his father and all of that. Exactly. Because he's not a glamorous or dramatic character. He's ordinary. And as you said, he's given the choice or effectively he's given the choice would you like to be somebody whose fame is sung by poets down the years or would you rather be nobody and he says well i'd rather be nobody i'd rather be a normal person have a normal life you know happy quiet peaceful children children all of that do i want to go and like fight in some mad battle and then die at the age of 25 and people will sing about me no i'd rather live to the age of 65 and die in my bed and by this point in the book we have become there's been so much violence and so much cruelty and so much suffering that we're like alas finally you know a character that that actually captures what it is to be human in a way that the others don't yeah and he loves every living thing like Circe which the gods most certainly do not so Hermes says at one point come if you cry every time some mortal dies you'll drown in a month and we hear of Ariadne's death and she's killed for some slight that no one remembers by Artemis and her life means nothing.

1:03:36Despite watching her dance and see how much she cares about that one thing, her life counts for nothing. And Cersei is appalled by how little every mortal life is mourned and how little it all means at the end, at one point in the book, because all they are in the end is kind of smoke and dust. But then as she discovers, as you say, that the fragility of human life is what gives it value. and it takes her the course of the book to realize this and basically answer the question that she asks prometheus at the very beginning why would you basically risk eternal suffering

1:04:12Dominic Sandbrook: to help mankind and you would risk it precisely because being human is worth more than me god because the fragility of it yeah the fragility of it the fact that it is so brief and then you're gone is precisely what gives it a um a power and a dignity to your life and a beauty to your life that is denied you if you're immortal. And actually for her, it's the experience of parenthood as well, instead of love, of the love of a mother. And that contrasts with all the gods of Olympus who have hundreds and hundreds of children and don't really care about their offspring and generally just live in fear that they're going to be killed by their offspring.

1:04:48Cersei bears a mortal son and is fascinated by watching him grow and becomes very relatable as a mother.

1:04:56Dominic Sandbrook: Completely she does. I think this is really, really powerful. The final quarter of the book, She has a son called Teleganus, who is their son with Odysseus. The description of her birth, of the experience of childbirth, is again, very visceral, very raw. You know, there's nothing romantic or idealized about it at all. And she struggles as a mother. She finds it very difficult. She finds him very frustrating at times. Wonderful lines. I did not go easy to motherhood. I faced it as soldiers faced the enemies, sword up against the coming blows. I love that. I think it's really well done. I know, I know, I totally, lots of mothers must feel that way.

1:05:33Dominic Sandbrook: Of course, exactly. But in her relationship with her son, there's another dimension to this book, which as a parent I found very moving. You want to protect your child, shield them from every conceivable harm, sort of gather them close to you. And yet at the same time, the child, by definition, pulls against you, pulls against you, wants to go out into the world. And this is absolutely what Teleganus wants to do. he wants to go out into the world and become something different and we know that he is going to leave her because this is foreshadowed by athena isn't it by the goddess athena athena just sort of she she lands on the scene and i love her appearances because it's just what you hope athena will be but she's terrifying because she's got it in for um telegonus because she has heard a prophecy that he will kill odysseus who she loves she's sort of the one thing living that she loves because he's so brilliant and clever and cunning and so Cersei must strive even harder to protect her son her magic reaches new heights driven as it is by her love of her son but ultimately her son will leave her maybe we won't spoil it completely and say exactly how he leaves her but the scene where he leaves her forever I found very very moving when she's saying I she thinks like she can't bear it she she wants to to press him to set him into my skin oh yeah but she has no choice because fate has decreed, I guess, that they will be parted, which is of course the experience of all human beings and an experience of mortality, the experience of parenthood.

1:07:04Dominic Sandbrook: It's the fragility, the brevity of life. And she's come to realize at the end of this book that mortality and the delicacy, the vulnerability of being human, that those are the things that make life worth living and are so so much more valuable than the kind of fixed certainties of the immortals which actually are so sterile and empty and hollow and give her nothing yeah and also that there's sort of an inevitability to prophecy and the gods put so much store by prophecy but that but in trying to change the course of fate they often bring it upon themselves and so there's a randomness to life that you sort of have to lean into and then at the very end she's left with telemachus and he tells her it will be all right.

1:07:51I quote, he does not mean that we are not frightened, only that we are here. That is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive. And so because of this, this realization, she chooses to be immortal by trying to do the reverse spell that she did in Glaucus at the very beginning to turn him into an immortal. So the story comes full circle. Whether or not she achieves it, we never really know it's sort of open-ended but she sees a vision of herself as a human woman growing old with telemachus and it's lovely and it's very moving and it's melancholy but

1:08:24Dominic Sandbrook: it's also full of joy i think it is agree completely it's a really it's we've talked a lot about the the the violence and cruelty of it i should say if you haven't read it and you might be sort of put off by that it's not a traumatizing read at all i wouldn't have said i mean there are there are dark things in it but it's actually a beautiful book and i found it particularly at the end really really moving book i don't want to make a habit tabby of bursting into tears at the end of these podcasts mrs dalloway style this is a safe space you adopted precisely the same uh tone slightly patronizing slightly patronizing tone at the end of the mrs dalloway episode i've never quite recovered from it to be honest so we both love this book so i think the question both of our minds must be what next from the brilliant madeline miller well she has said that her next book will be either about Shakespeare's The Tempest or, and fingers crossed for this one in my case, The Aeneid by Virgil.

1:09:17But given that it took her 10 years to write The Song of Achilles and I think seven years to write Cersei, I think it might be a long time coming.

1:09:23Dominic Sandbrook: I think it should be The Tempest. No, keep it in the ancient world. No, you've done this. Don't be a one-trick pony. No, be a one-trick pony. Well, on that we disagree. Okay, what are we marking this in? I think we're clearly marking it and looking at your different options. Tabby's giving me different options. I think absolutely terrifying minor tall babies is surely the one. Yeah, terrifying mind-of-tall babies it is. All right, you go first, Mr. Weepy. You're like Echo, you know, the myth of Echo. Go on. Who cries over Narcissus. I mean, if people would not have believed this in my Daily Mail columnist days, I mean, I would have been...

1:09:57Dominic Sandbrook: They would never have me back now. Okay, I'm going to give it nine. I know that'll disappoint you, Tabby. I'm going to give it nine out of ten. No, I actually... I'm pretty pleased with that. I loved reading this. is probably of all the books that we've done on the book club so far i mean of the new ones that i've read it's probably the one i enjoyed most i mean some of the new ones that i read were the hunger games and the interminable slog that was east of eden um but uh i really really love this book i would recommend it to anybody i've actually been telling like friends of mine and stuff oh i read this book and you would never normally read it but it's brilliant um i deducted a point i've deducted a point for no good reason really yeah i think possibly because the callousness of the gods no i think it's i mean i do have the callousness of the gods i don't know i've just done it for out of willful capriciousness fair enough so there you go what about you you're going to give it you're going to give it 11 presumably i'm giving it 10 terrifying mindful babies out of 10 um it's richly written it's joyful cersei is the beating heart of it is revelatory and compelling.

1:11:02It's set amongst stories that I've grown up loving all my life and roots them on the inside and on a relatable perspective. And it's my fourth time reading it and I'm sure that I will read it again.

1:11:15Dominic Sandbrook: So Tabby, next week, something, a total change of tone because we are doing... We're doing The 39 Steps by John Buchan. Then we've got My Brilliant Friend by Eleanor Ferrante, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Lolita by Vladimir Nubikov. All of these, by the way, were sent in by people in the newsletter. So this is where you have your say. You know, when you read them like that, it does sound quite a daunting amount of reading. I know, but that's the wonderful thing about this show, that you don't have to have read the books to enjoy our takes.

1:11:47Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly. We will see you next time for more Sexy Witches with John Buchan. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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