Pod Insights The Book Club 23. The Odyssey Retold: Circe, Monsters and Myth About this episode How does Madeline Miller re-work Greek mythology to explore women’s experience? Is Circe the best fantasy novel of the 2010s? And, why do we remain captivated by the world of ancient Greece?
Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of Circe, the world it was born of, and the novel itself.
You can order Circe and explore our favourite Folio books at http://foliosociety.com/thebookclub
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Transcript 13,770 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:08 Speaker 02 War 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.
2:18 Dominic 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.
2:25 Speaker 02 What was the fight over?
2:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Hmm, let me see if I can remember the list. Vengeance, lust, hubris, greed, power. What have I forgotten? Ah, yes, vanity and pique.
2:38 Speaker 02 Sounds like a usual day among the gods. He laughed and held up his hand.
2:43 Dominic Sandbrook? It is your divine privilege to say so, my lady. I would only give thanks that many of those gods fought on our side.
2:51 Speaker 02 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. Gods fought among mortals? Who?
3:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Hmm, 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.
3:21 Speaker 02 I think you are Odysseus. He did not start at the uncanny knowledge. He was a man used to gods.
3:29 Dominic Sandbrook? And you are the goddess Circe, daughter of the sun.
3:34 Speaker 02 This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society.
3:37 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
3:47 Speaker 02 This 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.
4:00 Dominic 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.
4:13 Speaker 02 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.
4:27 Dominic Sandbrook? This is still Madeleine Miller's Cersei, but it's with gorgeous artwork and with details that make you want to slow down and really relish every page.
4:36 Speaker 02 The Folio Society Cersei is available now. Find your favourite story at foliosociety.com/thebookclub. So hello, everybody. That was, of course, from Cersei by Madeleine Miller, and it's her second bestselling mythic fantasy novel, published in 2018. She also wrote The Song of Achilles before that. And Cersei is a retelling, in a sense, of Homer's Odyssey, but from the perspective of a sideline character in the story. Cersei, 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
5:19 Speaker 02 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.
5:46 Dominic Sandbrook? It's an example of a genre that's very popular in the last 10 or 15 years, which is basically taking ancient stories.
5:52 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:52 Dominic Sandbrook? And retelling them from a feminist perspective, or rather, a feminist perspective is too reductive.
5:57 Speaker 02 It's giving voice to sideline female characters.
6:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly so.
6:02 Speaker 02 It's sharing their experience. So it's like Natalie Hayes has written a lot of books about this, Pat Barker.
6:07 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
6:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I loved The Song of Achilles. And then when I read this. I just fell in love with it. I 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.
6:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, as you know, I started reading it about a week ago.
7:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:01 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
7:11 Speaker 02 I was so pleased. I was so pleased.
7:13 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
7:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:37 Dominic 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.
7:47 Speaker 02 Terrible.
7:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. But her mother read her the Iliad when she was young and took her on trips to see the amazing Egyptian and Greek artefacts at the Met in New York.
7:56 Speaker 02 Which I did, when we were on tour in New York. I spent a whole afternoon there.
8:00 Dominic Sandbrook? The Temple of Dendero, is it? That's in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So she felt, like you, as a girl, she fell in love with Greek mythology in the ancient world. She loved 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.
8:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, I totally get it. It's, I think people forget, maybe they don't, but about the Greek myths, they're so entertaining. You know, the mix up, the tangles, they're quite Shakespearean in that.
8:28 Dominic Sandbrook? But the cruelty of them, they're so cruel though and violent, aren't they?
8:32 Speaker 02 But children love that, you know, 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 tantalising.
8:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Chopping children up into bits and throwing them into the waters or something. 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.
9:07 Speaker 02 I know, takes her a long time.
9:09 Dominic Sandbrook? So The Song of Achilles is the first one. You loved that, didn't you?
9:12 Speaker 02 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 Cersei. 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 Cersei. 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.
9:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, the quality of 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 recognise. That's a kind of a tough ask to get the narrative voice right so that it is simultaneously accessible to us. But it also feels that it's organically derived of that world. Exactly.
10:08 Speaker 02 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.
10:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
10:21 Speaker 02 A lot of them are too modern. Anyway, let's get into the plot.
10:24 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. Spies by her family, she has to sort of, as in so many stories of this kind, 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 Madeleine Miller is very clever about the way she introduces a series of characters. So King Minas of Crete.
10:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:58 Dominic Sandbrook? The Minotaur, Jason of Argonauts fame, Odysseus and so on. If you've got a crush on Jason, Tabby, the way you're.
11:06 Speaker 02 I had, I had such a crush on all the Greek heroes when I was little, Perseus, Jason, Theseus, they were my favourites.
11:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Okay, so take us into the world of Greek mythology, since you love it so much.
11:15 Speaker 02 So this is kind of, it's the golden age of Greek mythology, I'd say. Zeus 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 Titanamachae, 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 Niaad, who is the daughter of Oceanus, who is another Titan, she's called Percy. And they have three children. There is Pasiphae, the future queen of Crete. And she turns out to be the mother to the Minotaur of Greek mythology.
11:58 Speaker 02 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 Colchis. So this is, you know, home to the golden fleece from the famous Jason and the Argonauts myth. And then they have a third child, she's the third or fourth, and this is Cersei. She is plain by immortal standards. She has these strange yellow eyes. And that's part of the reason that they call her Cersei, because in the book, Madeleine Miller translates it to Hawke. 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
12:42 Speaker 02 in love with a mortal who she turns into a god and he ends up going for the nymph over her.
12:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, he's also turned blue, hasn't he?
12:49 Speaker 02 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 is blue. But, you know, there's someone for everyone.
12:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Maybe like the people in Avatar.
12:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, that's true. They're vaguely attractive. I kind of get that.
13:02 Dominic Sandbrook? There you go.
13:03 Speaker 02 And she realises that she has some form of magic and it manifests through potions and herbs. And she is a witch. And this is something that the Olympians are very frightened by because they've never encountered witches before. And all, and she and her siblings share this strange sorcery, this witchcraft. So she's deserted to the island of Aeia 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.
13:35 Dominic Sandbrook? So she's stuck there on her island, isn't she? And you, 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. So 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 Dedeus, the great sort of inventor and craftsman. And you hear about the story of Dedeus and Icarus, who flew too close to the sun. We get into the whole story of the labyrinth of Crete. So it's her sister, going to struggle to pronounce this properly, Tabby, and I spent ages discussing pronunciation.
14:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think, I think this name might just come up in different iterations throughout the course of the episode. We're doing our best.
14:24 Dominic Sandbrook? We're doing all kinds of different pronunciations, like ancient Greek, modern Greek,
14:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
14:29 Dominic Sandbrook? But anyway, so her sister, Percyphe, had this monstrous child that, I know Tabby thinks I'm showing off my pronunciations.
14:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, massively, massively.
14:39 Dominic Sandbrook? So she has this child, the Minotaur. That stuff is Brilliantly done, the stuff with the minor talk.
14:44 Speaker 02 I know, we'll get to this. There'll be a lot more minor talk action to come in this episode.
14:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Tabby's favourite, Jason and Medea. She has another brush with Scylla, 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.
15:01 Speaker 02 Gloriously done.
15:01 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 centre of this book. So as we said, this is one of a series of books, Pat Barker or whoever, Natalie Haines, 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,
15:45 Dominic Sandbrook? is to pitch the writing at a level that is neither modern vernacular prose.
15:52 Speaker 02 No, no, no daddies here.
15:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. No, there's no mention of pants, for example, as we had in A Court of Thorn and Roses.
15:59 Speaker 02 Well, no one in the world should use the word pants.
16:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Not so well, unless you're describing underwear, I suppose.
16:04 Speaker 02 Nor sidewalk.
16:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Tabby, you're alienating the American audience, I'm believing.
16:07 Speaker 02 Sorry, love you guys.
16:09 Dominic Sandbrook? But equally, you don't want to be sort of archaic, Victorian archaic, like J.R. Tolkien at his worst.
16:15 Speaker 02 You alienate people, don't you?
16:16 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
16:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:34 Dominic Sandbrook? But also there is a hint of strangeness to it and a hint of belonging to a world that is not our own.
16:39 Speaker 02 You 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 loose a way that she can almost write the echo of it in certain places, particularly points of high tension or climax. 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, Cersei 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 Cersei's life and altering the perspective of the myths from this one formerly fairly unknown,
17:24 Speaker 02 fairly sidelined character. So we start with Helios. So Hesiod's Theogony, which is an ancient Greek poem, is the foundational myth for Cersei's lineage because that's when we discovered 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.
17:51 Dominic Sandbrook? So he's a Titan?
17:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, they're the people that ran earth before 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 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.
18:19 Dominic Sandbrook? So a couple of other things 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.
18:35 Speaker 02 He's such a bore. All he does is moan to her. It's like the worst cliche of kind of boyfriend behaviour.
18:41 Dominic Sandbrook? She turns him blue. And he rewards her by falling in love with her love rival, Scylla. And Circe poisons Scylla in revenge. And Scylla basically turns into this hideous monster that attacks sailors.
18:57 Speaker 02 Terrifying, the way that it's described, these massive grey bobbing heads, eyeless, that loom out of this cave in the mist, but stinking and foul. It's wonderfully visceral writing.
19:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, it is. And then we've got Theseus and the Minotaur, obviously. So this is described by Ovid, as indeed the story of Scylla is. Circe is not in those stories of the Minotaur. So the classic thing about the Minotaur that people know is he's born to Queen Pacifici. He's hideous, he's thrown into the labyrinth, which is designed by Diodanus. And then Theseus, the great Greek hero, comes and with his thread and Ariadne, he kills the Minotaur, doesn't he?
19:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. But the focus here is on the birth of the Minotaur. Then we have Diodanus 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 Diodanus is, so he's the famous craftsman imprisoned in Crete for his abilities. Here, he sort of becomes Circe'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.
20:11 Dominic Sandbrook? You know, we were talking about the cruelty of the Greek myth, so I remember reading this when I was about seven.
20:15 Speaker 02 I know.
20:15 Dominic Sandbrook? And finding it, it was the one myth that I hated most.
20:18 Speaker 02 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.
20:28 Dominic Sandbrook? But then it's the boy like, oh, look daddy. And he's flying closer and higher and higher.
20:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:33 Dominic Sandbrook? And then Diodanus shouts to him, the wax melts.
20:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:36 Dominic Sandbrook? And he falls into the sea and that's the end of him.
20:38 Speaker 02 It's heartbreaking. And then we get Medea and the golden fleece. So this comes from Jason and the Argonauts. One of the most famous ancient Greek myths, the most famous surviving literary version comes from the third century B.C. And this is Apollonius of Rhodes. So Jason steals the golden fleece from Colchis. 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. And in most versions of Circe's myth, she is sister to the king of Colchis, a powerful and very cruel sorcerer called Aetes.
21:21 Speaker 02 But in this, again, there's a much more human dimension in that he's turned into Circe'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.
21:45 Dominic Sandbrook? She's a great character, Medea. She's always interested dramatists, hasn't she?
21:49 Speaker 02 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.
21:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So, so you've got the Iliad, Homer, Homer's Iliad, and then the Odyssey. Now, whether Homer existed, you know, historians still argue about this. Let's assume that he did exist. The Odyssey is probably composed towards the end of the eighth century B.C. And people think it may have originated in the Greek settlements in what's now western Turkey. It was an oral work. 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 seventh century, so a hundred years or so later. How you translate the Odyssey has become quite a controversial subject in recent years.
22:39 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
22:58 Speaker 02 Tell us, sing us the song.
23:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, of what kind of man? A complicated man, 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, Madeleine 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.
23:20 Speaker 02 But 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.
23:34 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 is 10 years at Troy, and then he's another 10 years in the Odyssey getting home.
23:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:55 Dominic Sandbrook? So he's left his 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 Circe in the Odyssey, who turns his men into swine, into pigs. And in the Odyssey, Circe basically comes and goes quite quickly, doesn't she?
24:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, she only, she only, 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.
24:35 Speaker 02 But she, in most versions, she, as with this version, she advises Odysseus about how best to get home, how to avoid Scylla and Charybdis.
24:44 Dominic Sandbrook? She's always interested people, hasn't she? Because there are different kind of adaptations of her in iterations over time.
24:49 Speaker 02 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 there's very, her origins are often, you know, complex and not very well known. So she's, 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
25:32 Speaker 02 the origins and the genealogies of the Greek gods, approximately from 700 B.C. 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 centuries.
25:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, I was about to say, that's, you can see why people are fascinated with her consistently because a sexy witch is always, is always enticing.
25:57 Speaker 02 Well, because witches in Greek mythology, they're, they're sort of overlooked, I think, as we think about the gods, don't we? The immortal power of the gods. And that's also something Miller plays with in this.
26:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. So if you trace her through various kind of iterations, there's the Telegony, written by Eugamon of Cyrene. I'm not massively familiar with Eugamon of Cyrene.
26:15 Speaker 02 Don't like his work? God, he's like, he's like Harry Potter. When, when I'm not reading other books, I'm listening to Eugamon.
26:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Eugamon, yeah. Eugamon.
26:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
26:25 Dominic Sandbrook? It's like, it's like somebody shouting at Nigel Farage.
26:28 Speaker 02 Eugamon.
26:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. Right. Anyway, this is a lost poem anyway, so you're not listening to it. That was a lie.
26:36 Speaker 02 We have fragments of it.
26:38 Dominic Sandbrook? But basically, it's a story of Odysseus being killed by his son Telegonus.
26:43 Speaker 02 It's the sequel to the Odyssey.
26:44 Dominic Sandbrook? And then Telemachus, his son, and Penelope, his widow, travel to Circe's island. And Circe marries Odysseus's 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. She appears in Apollonius's Argonautica to 50 B.C. This is her cleansing Medea of her blood guilt for murdering her brother. She's in Virgil's Aeneid, where the Trojans sail past, not the Greeks, but the Trojans sail past her island. They hear the sound of men being turned into pigs.
27:22 Speaker 02 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.
27:41 Dominic Sandbrook? And then she's in Ovid, in the Metamorphosis. So now we're into A.D., so we're well into the Roman period. And she is this sort of scary, evil sorceress, isn't she, in Ovid?
27:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, and that kind of sets the image of her that then carries over into, say, the Renaissance, where she becomes symbolic of sexual temptation and female power, emasculating female power. And it's also an allegory against greed and desire, i.e. if those men hadn't eaten her food, they wouldn't have become swine.
28:09 Dominic Sandbrook? I'll tell you who would 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 Circe. So there's, for example, every teenage girl's favourite painter, John William Waterhouse, loves her.
28:22 Speaker 02 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 Circe 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 Circe, I think, slightly lonely, slightly pensive.
28:48 Dominic Sandbrook? So really, Madeleine 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 empathise with a hero. Here, Cersei is the main character. And actually, one of the things that she does, Madeleine Miller does a lot, is to play with. There's lots of in-jokes about the other versions, aren't there?
29:19 Speaker 02 Witty classical in-jokes, yeah, right up my street. So at one point, she actually, she jokes about retellings in and of themselves. She, 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.
29:38 Dominic Sandbrook? And this is Homer, right?
29:40 Speaker 02 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 tail. And that is the Midgard serpent of Norse mythology.
30:01 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 recognise 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? But then there's other things, because of the prophecies, because of dreams and stories and things like that, that occur throughout the book, we're able to see things that we're
30:41 Dominic Sandbrook? not present at, the fall of Troy, the death of the Minotaur. Yeah, death of the Minotaur, all of those kinds of things. So she's able to weave in different sort of versions of, you know, 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.
31:08 Speaker 02 There'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 Cersei asks why a god would do such a thing, help them essentially. And this is the question that sort of runs through the whole book and it's answered in the final pages.
31:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, exactly. So it's about the gods have total contempt for mortals. They think of mortals as as grubby, insignificant and so transient. Their lives are worthless because they're going to die. Cersei 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 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 a being with a beginning and an end.
32:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Who has found herself in this world of darkness, but I, my true destiny maybe lies elsewhere.
32:39 Speaker 02 Yeah. And it's interesting because as a child, when she grows up in the halls of her father Helios, and he's lives in halls built 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. And 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 on the other, and Cersei is somewhere in the middle.
33:24 Dominic 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.
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35:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Hi everybody, welcome back to the book club now. Before we get into the story of Madeleine Miller's Cersei, actually, we have an exciting announcement, don't we Tabby?
35:44 Speaker 02 Yes.
35:45 Dominic Sandbrook? 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. I would like to see more comments along those lines.
36:11 Speaker 02 And it's about time there was one person who did do that. So be the first. Be a trailblazer, I dare you.
36:19 Dominic Sandbrook? So if you want to sign up for more of this merry banter, you sign up at thebookclubhq.com. So that's thebookclubhq.com. You just put in your email address, absolutely free, and we'll send you the newsletter every Saturday. All right. So Cersei, I described her very ungallantly as a sexy witch.
36:38 Speaker 02 So ungallant, reflects poorly on you.
36:41 Dominic Sandbrook? I meant it as a compliment. Right, you're going to tell us why Cersei is so compelling as a character. Why, why does she speak to you particularly? Because you, I mean, of all the characters we've talked about, apart from, of course, Cathy in East of Eden, she is the one who really speaks to your soul. Am I wrong?
36:57 Speaker 02 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 honours all of the stories and the myths and the figures that I have grown up loving. She is the most original and interesting part. So 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-
37:34 Speaker 02 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 Odyssey, she's complex and very human. And so the whole story delves into totally new emotional landscapes, 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 remortals 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 Cersei. And then a mortal will encounter with her and we realise that she's
38:17 Speaker 02 got this divine lustre to her, and she's got these incredible eyes, and she is not mortal. And 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.
38:32 Dominic 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.
38:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, in many ways, it's a coming of age story.
38:46 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
38:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:51 Dominic Sandbrook? It's a story about how you discover yourself. It's an interesting thing, this business about being immortal or mortal, because the immortals, what sets them apart is their beauty, their cruelty, their extraordinary...
39:02 Speaker 02 Their callousness.
39:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, their callousness, their power, all of these things. And she seems to lack all those things. We are told that she's not regarded as beautiful, she is not regarded as powerful. She feels great sympathy and pity, for example, for Prometheus, where he is tortured, which the other gods do not.
39:18 Speaker 02 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 her means to some degree. Cersei is, she watches everything.
39:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
39:37 Speaker 02 She's also very trusting, which none of them are.
39:39 Dominic Sandbrook? She has pity. She has an innocence to her, I think. She feels guilt at times. She doesn't, she, so she's not as cruel and as uncaring as the other gods are. And also, the other gods are kind of static.
39:53 Speaker 02 Yes.
39:53 Dominic Sandbrook? They are one thing.
39:54 Speaker 02 Frozen in time.
39:55 Dominic Sandbrook? And then they're frozen emotionally, psychologically.
39:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
39:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Their identity is fixed.
40:00 Speaker 02 Kind of in and of themselves, like you are the god of wisdom. You are the god of beauty.
40:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, exactly.
40:05 Speaker 02 That's your thing. You can't change. You can't grow.
40:08 Dominic Sandbrook? She changes and grows because she's cast out. So this is part of her, as we will discover, I mean, 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.
40:23 Speaker 02 She does.
40:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Witchcraft. But this has 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.
40:36 Speaker 02 It's earned and it's delicate.
40:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. You've, I said messing around with herbs and you said something very nice, which is.
40:42 Speaker 02 Yes.
40:43 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
40:50 Speaker 02 Pharmacy.
40:50 Dominic Sandbrook? The funny thing, as 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.
41:04 Speaker 02 There are these wonderful, though, descriptions of the way that she tends the herbs and the right times to pick them and when the moon is high and, you know, that kind of thing. Classic 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.
41:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
41:32 Speaker 02 And we know that it's because Cersei is practicing a great degree of self-control and artistry to make it happen.
41:38 Dominic Sandbrook? But the difference between magical realism and 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, first 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?
42:04 Speaker 02 Uh huh.
42:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Anyway, so to go back to the issue about her working at things. So there's a nice line where she's talking about Ariadne of thread fame.
42:15 Speaker 02 Yes.
42:16 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 Ikar 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.
42:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, and also makes them bored. But Cersei uses this same mortal practice and diligence to become a great sorceress. And we see the contrast when she goes to stay with her sister Pasifey. 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. They were 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 Cersei. 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.
43:41 Speaker 02 You know, she, she, 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 in Rich as it, I think it's it's wonderful. It's very personal. You don't get a lot of that, say, in the Odyssey, which is kind of describes great sweeping events.
44:14 Dominic 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 is 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 sort of thrown forward to a point after he has arrived on the island. And then she moves back and tells us about his arrival. And Odysseus's defining qualities are, of course, his cunning and his cleverness. But also he's got this kind of sardonic, wry wisdom. So in the reading we did right at the beginning, when they're talking about what the Trojan War was about, his answer.
44:57 Dominic Sandbrook? 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?
45:18 Speaker 02 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. He'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.
45:43 Dominic Sandbrook? You do. Odysseus, the sardonic side of him, he only ever sees the 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.
45:56 Speaker 02 We realise later that he's actually sort of been in love with his own myth all along, like all the other heroes. So Telomachus 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. The 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.
46:38 Speaker 02 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 wearing 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 and hearth is no longer enough.
47:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, he's a very dark character. He turns out in this book to be a very dark character. It's not that he's traumatised by the Trojan War, it's that the Trojan War 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
47:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:27 Dominic Sandbrook? that the war satisfied. And once he got home to Penelope and Telemachus, his 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. 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.
47:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, because also the way that Penelope transforms in the book reflects that. So when we first hear about Penelope from Odysseus's tellings, you know, to Cersei, she, 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 Cersei 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. Humbling 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 A little 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.
48:34 Speaker 02 It's it's a form of self defence, 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.
48:48 Dominic 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?
48:54 Speaker 02 Because it is a male dominated world, yeah.
48:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Cersei is trapped within the world absolutely where people are enthralled 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 is what did you describe him as a meathead?
49:31 Speaker 02 A meathead hero and also because she emasculates him by taking control herself and enabling his escape. Yeah, even Pasiphae, 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 breeds to death. And 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.
50:13 Speaker 02 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 can, I mean, think. Just incredibly raw, fleshy, horrible prose.
50:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, of course. And the Minotaur. Actually, that scene really does live in the mind.
50:44 Speaker 02 Oh, doesn't it? It bites off her fingers.
50:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Pasiphae, 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
51:01 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:02 Dominic Sandbrook? will not hear a word against it. Though 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 Dedeus built this structure in which Pasiphae 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.
51:25 Speaker 02 I mean, we'll find out it's a family fetish.
51:27 Dominic Sandbrook? There is a lot of bull 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.
51:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:48 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 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 ethereal things, it's really anchored in kind of earthly realities.
52:23 Speaker 02 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. it'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. The bloody beak, the shredded organ regrowing, only to be ripped forth again. It really hits home.
53:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, 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.
53:15 Speaker 02 Bestiality.
53:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, so at the beginning of the book, chapter one. The great discovery that Cersei makes about her father is that her father has these kind of sacred cows. He sleeps with them, he has sex with his cows.
53:29 Speaker 02 Impregnates them.
53:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, 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. That is how he makes new ones. He turns into a bull and size 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, that underpinning everything is this kind of manipulative, aggressive, violent objectification. And actually, the the worst example of this is when sailors arrive on her island. And she welcomes them in.
54:15 Dominic Sandbrook? She's genuinely kind.
54:17 Speaker 02 Well, and she's lonely as well.
54:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, she's lonely and she thinks, she perhaps has created a sort of idealized portrait, do you think, of human beings?
54:26 Speaker 02 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. They, 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. She 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 defence. So she says at one point, when the first crew had come, I'd been a desperate thing, ready to fawn on anyone who smiled at me. Now I was a fell witch proving my power with sty after sty. So that is the Cersei that we kind of have from classical literature.
55:12 Speaker 02 And you can see the relish takes in her retribution for this terrible crime in the description of the transformation. His rib cage cracked and began to bulge. I heard the sound of flesh rupturing wetly, the pops of breaking bone. His nose balloomed 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.
55:35 Dominic 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 Cersei 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, you know, women of all kinds that are basically just being constantly abused and raped by the by the male gods.
56:06 Speaker 02 The Greek myths themselves are full of rape, particularly with Zeus. Zeus 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.
56:41 Dominic 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 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. They hate each other, they hate themselves, they live in dread of being punished by Zeus.
57:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Zeus himself is frightened of being overthrown.
57:26 Speaker 02 It'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.
57:38 Dominic Sandbrook? They do. So 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.
57:57 Speaker 02 This is like us with the other goal hanger presenters.
58:00 Dominic Sandbrook? It so is, actually. Tavi in particular, very cruel towards the other goal hanger presenters.
58:06 Speaker 02 I've still got a foot in both camps. You, however, you've been on Olympus for years.
58:11 Dominic Sandbrook? They literally call me the Zeus of the.
58:14 Speaker 02 They most definitely do not. Dionysus, maybe.
58:17 Dominic Sandbrook? I'll say Dionysus.
58:18 Speaker 02 You make merry with the grape.
58:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Completely.
58:20 Speaker 02 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, Cersei 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.
58:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, exactly right, exactly right. So set against them are the mortals. So the first mortal that we meet is Glaukos, 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.
59:14 Speaker 02 They're the worst.
59:15 Dominic Sandbrook? But Daedalus, 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, Daedalus is quite an admirable character. And Daedalus 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.
59:41 Speaker 02 And also the value of of working for something to become really good at it. And then another mortal who epitomizes 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 lauded and renowned he is, he knows the real suffering caused
1:00:23 Speaker 02 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.
1:00:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Telemachus does.
1:00:42 Speaker 02 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 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
1:01:25 Speaker 02 is Hesychia. And he gets value and meaning from small daily pleasures and his relationship with Circe. He doesn't care about glory, riches and fame. And Circe loves him for this, and so therefore do we, the reader.
1:01:36 Dominic Sandbrook? That's so interesting because he's an un-Greek character.
1:01:40 Speaker 02 He's a very un-Greek, and he's, yeah, very un-Greek and very un-Roman, which is probably why that myth was never really taken up.
1:01:46 Dominic Sandbrook? The myth of Telemachus killing his father and all of that.
1:01:49 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:01:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Because he's not a glamorous or dramatic character. He's ordinary.
1:01:55 Dominic Sandbrook? He and and he's, 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.
1:02:10 Speaker 02 Have children.
1:02:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Wife, 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 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.
1:02:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, and he loves every living thing like Cersei, 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, despite watching her dance and see how much she cares about that one thing. Her life counts for nothing.
1:02:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:03:00 Speaker 02 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, you know, 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 realise this and basically answer the question that she asks Prometheus at the very beginning. Why would you basically risk eternal suffering to help mankind?
1:03:31 Dominic Sandbrook? And you would risk it precisely because being human is worth more than mere god. Because the fragility of it.
1:03:36 Speaker 02 And he gets it.
1:03:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, the fragility of it, the fact that it is so brief and then you're gone, is precisely what gives it a power and a dignity to your life and a and a beauty to your life that is denied.
1:03:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:03:48 Dominic Sandbrook? You if you're immortal. And actually, for her. Um. It's the experience of parenthood as well, is to have love, of the love of a mother.
1:03:57 Speaker 02 And that contrasts with all the gods of Olympus, who have hundreds and hundreds of children, don't really care about their offspring and generally just live in fear that they're going to be killed by their offspring. Cersei bears a mortal son and is fascinated by watching him grow and and becomes very relatable as a mother.
1:04:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Hmm. Completely, she does. I think this is really, really powerful. The final quarter of the book, she has a son called Telegonius, who is their son with Odysseus.
1:04:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:04:20 Dominic Sandbrook? The description of her birth, of 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 face their enemies, sword up against the coming blows. I love that. I think it's really well done.
1:04:47 Speaker 02 I know, I know, I totally. Lots of mothers must feel that way.
1:04:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course, exactly. But in the character, in her relationship with her son, there's another dimension to this book, which, as you know, 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.
1:05:08 Speaker 02 Pulls against you.
1:05:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Pulls against you, wants to go out into the world. And this is absolutely what Telegonius 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.
1:05:24 Speaker 02 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 Telegonius, 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.
1:05:51 Dominic Sandbrook? 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, she thinks like she can't bear it. She she wants to to press him, to set him into my skin.
1:06:08 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
1:06:09 Dominic Sandbrook? But she has no choice because, you know, 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, it's the fragility, the brevity of life. And she's come to realise 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.
1:06:49 Speaker 02 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. I 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 realisation, she chooses to be a mortal by trying to do the reverse spell that she did on Glaukos at the very beginning to turn him into an immortal. So the story comes
1:07:30 Speaker 02 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 it's also full of joy, I think.
1:07:43 Dominic Sandbrook? It is. Agree completely. It's a really, we've talked a lot about 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 traumatising 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, a 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.
1:08:09 Speaker 02 This is a safe space.
1:08:11 Dominic Sandbrook? You adopted precisely the same tone.
1:08:14 Speaker 02 Slightly patronising.
1:08:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Slightly patronising tone at the end of the Mrs. Dalloway episode. I've never quite recovered from it, to be honest.
1:08:20 Speaker 02 So we both love this book. So I think the question both of our minds must be, what next from the brilliant Madeleine Miller? Well, she has. 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. But given that it took her 10 years to write Song of Achilles and I think seven years to write Circe, I think it might be a long time coming.
1:08:40 Dominic Sandbrook? I think it should be The Tempest.
1:08:41 Speaker 02 No, keep it in the ancient world.
1:08:43 Dominic Sandbrook? No, you've done this. Don't be a one trick pony.
1:08:45 Speaker 02 No, be a one trick pony.
1:08:46 Dominic Sandbrook? 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 given me different options. I think absolutely terrifying Minotaur babies is surely the one.
1:08:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, terrifying Minotaur babies it is. All right, you go first. Mister weepy. You're like Echo, you know, the myth of Echo.
1:09:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Gone.
1:09:06 Speaker 02 Who cries over Narcissus.
1:09:09 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, people would not have believed this in my Daily Mail columnist days. I mean, I would have been, 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 10.
1:09:20 Speaker 02 I actually, I'm pretty pleased with that.
1:09:22 Dominic Sandbrook? I loved reading this. It's 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, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and the interminable slog that was East of Eden. But 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. I deducted a point, I've deducted a point for no good reason, really.
1:09:52 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:09:53 Dominic Sandbrook? I think possibly because.
1:09:54 Speaker 02 The callousness of the gods.
1:09:56 Dominic Sandbrook? 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.
1:10:03 Speaker 02 Fair enough.
1:10:03 Dominic Sandbrook? So there you go. What about you? You're going to give it, you're going to give it 11 presumably.
1:10:07 Speaker 02 I'm giving it 10 terrifying Minotaur babies out of 10. It's richly written, it's joyful. Circe is the beating heart of it, is revelatory and compelling. It's set amongst stories that I've grown up loving all my life and.
1:10:24 Speaker 02 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.
1:10:32 Dominic Sandbrook? So Tabi, next week, something, a total change of tone because we are doing.
1:10:36 Speaker 02 We're doing The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buckon. 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 Nabokov. All of these, by the way, were sent in by people in the newsletter. So this is where you have your say.
1:10:56 Dominic Sandbrook? You know, when you read them like that, it does sound quite a daunting amount of reading.
1:10:59 Speaker 02 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.
1:11:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. We will see you next time for more Sexy Witches with John Buckon. Bye bye.
1:11:09 Speaker 02 Bye bye.
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