Forest of a Thousand Lanterns by Julie Dao

Source of book: I own this

 This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. One of the things I enjoy about this club is that I end up reading interesting books that I never would have discovered on my own. Forest of a Thousand Lanterns was definitely not one I would have discovered on my own.

 

In general, this book wasn’t that well loved by our club. Perhaps it suffered in comparison with Deacon King Kong, which was outstanding, but it also had some flaws of its own. 

 The book is meant to be a retelling/reimagining of the backstory for the Evil Queen from Snow White. The sequel book presumably covers the Snow White part of the story. Dao sets the story in a mythical Asian-style kingdom that appears to draw elements from both Imperial China and Samurai-era Japan. 

 Xifeng is a beautiful young woman, trained by her abusive aunt to be cultured and talented, in preparation for a grand destiny. She is, so the cards say, to become the empress someday. To this end, she runs away with Wei, her lover, for the capital city. She then enters the Emperor’s palace as a lady-in-waiting, before scheming to eliminate rivals and eventually marry the Emperor. 

 Xifeng starts out as a sympathetic character, and for a while, there is at least the question of whether she will turn to the dark side or not. Unfortunately, the real turning point is when she abandons Wei to go to the palace...and this takes place only a third of the way into the book. Thus, pretty much any suspense is over early on, and the rest seems like playing out the string, so to speak. 

 The problem isn’t just with the early decision, but with the psychology. While Dao tries to make Xifeng struggle with her choices, it doesn’t seem like she really does, after she commits to being empress. In the cutthroat world of the palace, it is literally kill or be killed, and Xifeng doesn’t have much agency other than to “follow her destiny at whatever cost.” 

 Furthermore, Xifeng lacks complexity. Her most salient character is her beauty. That’s her calling card, and why she gets what she wants. She has some skills as a result of her training, but they seem performative. She knows vast amounts of poetry, for example, but poems seem to be weapons for her to use, not wisdom she has absorbed. Her motivations are too simple, too, to be believable. 

The book does have some good parts. I thought that the descriptions were evocative, particularly the forest and the palace. Dao creates a compelling world for her characters. The scene with the hot springs and mirror in the water is memorable and haunting. 

 The book also seems to start to go an interesting direction with Xifeng seeking to be free from the patriarchy of her “traditional” culture. This is one reason that she spurns Wei, who, after all, is a bit patriarchal. The forest demon queen is correct, however, that there isn’t anything more “free” about working in the palace. Even becoming empress is, in a world where women are rarely permitted to rule, simply a chance to be a more powerful possession of a man. This interesting question is rather cast to the side as the book goes on. In the actual event, Xifeng becomes the minion of the Serpent God, and not any more free than she would have been as a wife kept at home. And more than that, she wouldn’t even have the benefit of true friendship and love. 

“The truest love and friendship rarely come to those in power.”

 Also perceptive is a “red shirt” member of the diplomatic envoy they travel with. 

 

“I’m sick to death of lords and kings and emperors. What do they do but play games and let their people pay the price in blood? We have no quarrel with each other. Only kings are arrogant enough to believe the world too small to hold other men.”

 This echoes observations by Steven Pinker and Tim Blanning. 

 Overall, the book was disappointing, but not terrible. It was a diverting read for stretches, before kind of fizzling into inevitability by the end. 

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Source of book: I own this.

 This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. One of the things I enjoy about this club is that I end up reading interesting books that I never would have discovered on my own. I hadn’t heard of either this book (which just came out) and wasn’t familiar with James McBride, although a few of his other books sound familiar. However, I rather enjoyed it, as did other members of our club, making it one of the most universally loved selections since I joined the club. 

 James McBride has apparently written a number of other books, often with historical settings, and was awarded a National Humanities medal by President Obama. I dare say I will be putting his other books on my reading list.

 I’m not even sure what to call Deacon King Kong. It is literary fiction, in my opinion. But it is such a weird blend of pathos and humor that it defies categorization. It is a thoughtful book, but with elements of slapstick and magical realism. It makes a pair of suicides seem like a sacrament - a baptism. It makes a potential affair seem good for the characters. It has killer red ants, killer hooch, and mysterious cheese. And, more than anything, it has a bunch of memorable characters, any of which could be the center of their own story. 

 Set in the Brooklyn projects in 1969, the book starts and centers around a bizarre incident. “Sportcoat,” an old man who lost his wife a few years back and has spiraled into alcoholism, shoots the ear off the local drug dealer, a young man named Deems, who was once Sportcoat’s protege in the local baseball team. From there, the past and present swirl around the fallout from that incident, drawing in gangsters, cops, smugglers, an ancient artifact, and a few old secrets. Sportcoat is the deacon of the title - a deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church who prefers the illicit hooch King Kong to any commercial preparation. 

 As it turns out, there are connections to The Elephant, the last in a line of Italian smugglers. Why did his dad fund the construction of the church, including an epic mural of Christ on the side? Deems, in turn, is the pivot point of a drug war. And why did Sportcoat’s wife Hettie end up floating in the harbor? And what happened to the Christmas Fund money she kept but never told anyone where? 

 McBride brings in an honest Irish cop trying to make it alive to retirement, a dying gangster whose daughter runs a bagel shop, the delightful maintenance man for the building, Hot Sausage, and so many more. 

 I hesitate to describe the book more than that, because the plot is fun and full of surprises (although I figured out a few things ahead of time.) I recommend reading it for yourself. 

 McBride’s writing is outstanding - one of the comments in our club meeting was that from the first few pages, you really feel like you are there. The sights and sounds and smells and social dynamics really come alive. One person who had lived in New York City concurred with the reality of the area described - McBride grew up there, the son of an African American preacher and a Jewish-Polish mother - the daughter of a rabbi. The thing is, McBride doesn’t actually spend a whole lot of words on descriptions: he manages to create the picture without obviously doing so. Also a feature of his style is that he can take shootings and drugs and booze and gangsters and add the humor and slapstick without it feeling like a parody. It’s as much a part of the world he creates as the ghost of Hettie. 

 There are lots of good lines, a few of which I jotted down. 

 The first is an incident that is pretty hilarious, but has almost nothing to do with the rest of the plot: an explanation of how the red ants came to Brooklyn. Hector, the Colombian immigrant, gets too big for his britches, and dumps his wife and kids back home. She tearfully agrees to a divorce, and packs him lunch. When he opens it back in Brooklyn, he finds it full of the red ants, and a note saying “Adios motherfucker...we know you ain’t sending no pesos!” The ants establish themselves, and become part of the yearly life of the projects. This leads into a fantastic sentence in which the ants become

 

...a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs eat their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the lives of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich — West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious — and on it went, the whole business of the white man's reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrows slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

 

I’m not the only reviewer to have noticed that line. It’s arguably the most memorable line in the book.

 The missing Christmas Fund money is not only a big motivation for Sportcoat, it puzzles everyone in the church. Hettie never did disclose its location, and it never does appear. (Sorry about the spoiler.) Did she simply pocket the money herself? It seems possible. Is it hiding somewhere in the church? Also possible. What isn’t a mystery is why she kept it herself. 

 

“She ain’t supposed to walk around with the Christmas box.”

“She had to hide it someplace after she collected for it. Normally she hid it at church. But she didn’t always have time to wait for church to empty out. Sometimes folks would linger eating fish dinners or the pastor would preach overtime or some such thing and she had to go home, so she brung it home with her.”

“Why didn’t she lock it in the pastor’s office?”

“What fool would keep money ‘round a pastor?” Rufus asked. 

Sportcoat nodded knowingly.  

 

I have been a part of a number of churches in my lifetime, and one thing I can say is that I agree with Rufus. And, interestingly, one of the best ways to tell if a pastor is honorable about money is how careful he is to distance himself from the money. The honorable ones keep as far away as possible from it, delegating the financial stuff to someone independent. (Or at least as independent as possible in a small church.) It makes a difference. 

 Another interesting observation comes from the old, retired gangster, the Governor, talking about his deceased brother. (Who was also an artifact smuggler - he found a cave of stolen Nazi treasures including, in a fictional incident, the Venus of Willendorf. This artifact is in the book, although clearly the whole episode is fiction, not fact.) 

 

“He had an apartment in the Village the size of a rugby field. Full of fancy things. I never asked. He had no kids, so I figured it wasn’t anything. My poppa couldn’t stand Macy. He used to say, ‘Macy likes boys.’ I told Poppa, ‘There was a priest at Saint Andrews who’s said to like boys.’ But he didn’t want to hear it. I was a young man back then, fast on my feet and a bit of a wanker, but even then I knew the difference between a sick man who likes children and a man sweet on men.” 

 

This is a distinction lost on a lot of people in my Fundie former tribe, alas. 

 Another perceptive passage concerning sex is between the Irish cop and the wife of the pastor of Five Ends Baptist. She is in a loveless marriage, to an older man who she married before she understood what she was doing. As a divorce attorney, this rings true. 

 

She had been seventeen when she wed a man twelve years older than her. He had seemed to have purpose but turned out to have none, other than an affinity for football games and the ability to pretend to be what he was not, to pretend to feel things he did not feel, to make jokes out of things that did not work for him, and like too many men she knew, daydream about meeting some lovely young thing from the choir, preferably at three a.m., in the choir pew. She didn’t hate her husband. She just didn’t know him.

 

This one too was fascinating. Sister Gee (the pastor’s wife) is pressed for information by Potts, the Irish cop, after an incident in which the hapless Earl tries to put a hit on Sportcoat, but ends up bonked by a wayward bottle, then set on the subway back home by Sister Gee and a young gentle giant from the church. 

 

“You should have called us.”

“Why we got to have the police around every time we has a simple party? Y’all don’t watch out for us. Y’all watch over us. I don’t see y’all out there standing over the white folks in Park Slope when they has their block parties.” 

 

In recent years, as cell phone video has made it increasingly obvious even to this sheltered white guy that our experience with the police is vastly different from the experience of non-whites, McBride calls it straight. “To Protect and Serve,” as the LAPD motto goes, is directed at whites. The police protect “us” from “them.” And serve “us” at the expense of “them.” It’s a heartbreaking state of affairs. 

 

In a conversation later in the book, Potts can’t quite understand why the Five Ends folks are so obsessed with that Christmas Club money. 

 

“You were talking about the church money. It’s got nothing to do with this trouble.”

“It’s got everything to do with it. That Christmas Club money is all we can control. We can’t stop these drug dealers from selling poison in front of our houses. Or make the city stop sending our kids to lousy schools. We can’t stop folks from blaming us for everything gone wrong in New York, or stop the army from calling our suns to Vietnam after them Vietcong done cut the white soldiers’ toenails too short to walk. But the little nickels and dimes we saved up so we can give our kids ten minutes of love at Christmastime, that’s ours to control. What’s wrong with that?”

 

Although Potts isn’t quite getting it, he is falling in love with Sister Gee, and he flounders trying to express his concern for the danger she is in. After all, the drug bigwig wants to put the hit on Sportcoat; and, since the hapless Earl failed, is sending in his big gun: Harold Dean. 

 

He wanted to say, “He’s a killer and I don’t want him near you.” But he had no idea what her reaction would be. He didn’t even know what Harold Dean looked like. He had no information other than an FBI report with no photo, only the vaguest description that he was a negro who was “armed and extremely dangerous.” 

 

Dang, that’s some good satire. And it particularly hits home because “Harold Dean” is actually Haroldeen, a young woman. The whole “hey, he looked like the suspect” is problematic for the reason above. It seems the “all black people look alike” trope is alive and well in law enforcement, alas.

 [Side note: years ago, when I saw the Harlem Globetrotters, one of the jokes was that the big “clown prince” guy borrowed a purse from an older woman in the front row. When the referee told him to give it back, he said he couldn’t, because he wasn’t sure who he took it from. It was some woman. What woman? A white woman. Which one? He didn’t know, because they all looked alike…]

 Anyway, Potts keeps harping on “he’s dangerous.” Sister Gee is ready with a great response:

 

“Nothing in this world is dangerous unless white folks says it is,” she said flatly. “Danger here. Danger there. We don’t need you to tell us about danger in these projects. We don’t need you to say what the world is to us.”

 

Preach it. And Potts really is trying to get it, which makes him better than a whole lot of people in our country. 

 I have to end with a humorous bit. It would take too long to explain the characters and the situation, but suffice it to say that rumor has it that Hot Sausage was killed in a gun battle. (He was only injured, don’t worry.) 

 

Joaquin, several spots behind them, looked strangely sad. “I borrowed twelve dollars from Sausage,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t pay it back.”

“God, you are cheap,” Miss Izi said. She was standing a good five people ahead of her ex-husband and stepped out of line to address him. “You’re so tight with money your ass squeaks when you walk.” 

 

This book was a lot of fun, thoughtful and perceptive, and packed with great characters. I’m definitely planning to add some more James McBride books to my list. 

 

***

 

Just for fun, here is the list of books that our book club has read. At least the ones I have read too. Most of these were read for the club, but a few were ones I read previously - those posts pre-date the club discussion - and some I read afterward, because I missed the discussion. 

 

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn

Circe by Madeline Miller

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Calypso by David Sedaris

The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

There There by Tommy Orange

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Educated by Tara Westover

Stiff by Mary Roach

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Artemis by Andy Weir

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

 

Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn

Source of book: I own this.

Back in 2018, our book club read some of the Patrick Melrose novels. Technically, I believe we were reading the first three, since they are relatively short, but not everyone finished that much. I read only the first novel, Never Mind, which I reviewed at the time, intending to come back and read the rest in sequence. This is the second novel, Bad News. 

Like the first novel, Bad News is somewhere between a novella and a short story, although at around 160 pages, it is definitely long enough to be a novella. It too focuses on an extremely limited time frame, that of a couple days, and a particular scenario or idea, so to speak. 

Patrick Melrose is now grown up, at least physically. He is twenty-two, and a marginally functional drug addict. The “bad news” that kicks off the story is the death of his abusive father, possibly the most vile person I have encountered in fiction. So, good riddance. Except that he clearly continues to be a demon haunting Patrick. Anyway, David dies in New York City unexpectedly, and as Patrick is the next of kin (his parents split up), he gets to claim the body. Over the course of two days and nights - more or less: it is difficult to follow the exact timeline because Patrick is so drugged out of his mind that sleep and time seem both distorted out of recognition - Patrick sees his dead father, meets with a few friends, visits a few drug dealers, nearly kills himself a couple of times, and works through some of his complex feelings about his father in the most unconstructive way possible. 

As in the previous book, excellent writing combines with a thoroughly distasteful story, unpleasant characters, and drug hallucinations that just won’t end. While not strictly autobiographical, the books are somewhat true to life. St. Aubyn did in fact take obscene quantities of drugs during this time in his life - funded by an inheritance from his grandmother. And it is a miracle he is alive. (As he fully admits.) 

The thing is, despite all the darkness in this book, it does have a sort of humor. It is an ugly, sneering, nasty humor some of the time, kind of like you would expect David Melrose to appreciate. But St. Aubyn also has an eye for a less vicious wit too, and his observations of various broken characters can be empathetic too. It would have been interesting to have seen more of those characters. In the first book, Patrick was less of the focus, so the other people in the story got more of the time. In this one, everything is filtered through Patrick’s head, so much of the time he is way too smashed to even figure out what is going on around him. 

It is kind of interesting to read about drug addiction from someone who writes this way. I have read other books, of course, fiction and non-fiction, in which drugs feature to varying degrees. But there is something peculiarly horrifying about this one. Patrick has what is essentially the great love affair of his life with cocaine and heroin (often at the same time), so St. Aubyn can write a rather authentic love letter to the drugs. But at the same time, reading this book doesn’t paint a pretty picture of drug use and addiction at all. Even as Patrick praises the glorious feelings and the escape from the terror in his own psyche, the horrors of what the drugs do to him and what they make him do are so apparent that I cannot imagine wanting to try one. 

The psychology is fascinating too. I feel as if Patrick takes the drugs in part because he fears he is like his father - and then the drugs enable him to act more like his father. He isn’t an outright abuser, but he can be verbally cruel in the extreme, and he sure does sound like David at times. It is a weird kind of self-awareness, which one wonders if St. Aubyn himself came to possess as part of his therapy. 

There are a few scenes which stood out. Right at the outset, Patrick is accosted on the plane by a guy named Earl, a caricature of the most vulgar of the nouveau riche, and an incentive to never fly with the rich. Yikes. 

Patrick more or less escapes by withdrawing into a mental scene involving his girlfriend Debbie, or, more accurately her father. 

Debbie’s father, an Australian painter called Peter Hickman, was a notorious bore. Patrick once heard him introduce an anecdote with the words, ‘That reminds me of my best bouillabaisse story.” Half an hour later, Patrick could only count himself luck that he was not listening to Peter’s second-best bouillabaisse story.

There is also an interesting line - a remix of Hamlet, in essence - when Patrick is about to eat and drink himself into oblivion in a futile attempt to stay off heroin for the remainder of the day. 

Eating was only a temporary solution. But then all solutions were temporary, even death, and nothing gave him more faith in the existence of an afterlife than the inexorable sarcasm of Fate. No doubt suicide would turn out to be the violent preface to yet another span of nauseating consciousness, of diminishing spirals and tightening nooses, and memories like shrapnel tearing all day long through his flesh. Who could guess what exquisite torments lay ahead in the holiday camps of eternity? It almost made one grateful to be alive. 

I’ll mention the scene in the funeral home where he is accidentally directed to the wrong corpse - complete with a party by the friends and family - and then is tempted to put his foot on his father’s chest as a final gesture of hate. Also the wretched search for drugs in a disreputable part of NYC, because his usual source was sleeping off a binge. Both of these are emotionally devastating, but in different ways. 

Finally, there is a scene where Patrick is talking with friends of his mom’s, and hoping to score with the daughter (he doesn’t), and his father comes up. Eddy (the husband) had his own difficulties with his father. 

“But wouldn’t we now say that he was just wery disturbed?” asked Eddy.

“So what if we did? When the effect somebody has is destructive enough the cause becomes a theoretical curiosity. There are some very nasty people in the world and it is a pity if one of them is your father.”

“I don’t think that people noo so much about how to bring up kids in those days. A lot of parents in your fawther’s generation just didn’t know how to express their love.”

“Cruelty is the opposite of love,” said Patrick, “not just some inarticulate version of it.”

That really is the difference. I know plenty of people who have struggled with their children (and that is me sometimes too), and most of them are just humans who fail. But there are some for whom the issue isn’t “love”: it’s cruelty. David raped Patrick - and that was evil cruelty. His mom looked the other way, which wasn’t love either. So there are ordinary human failings - and we all will fail to a degree. And there is deliberate cruelty, which cannot and should not be dismissed as “they didn’t know how to love.” (Just to be clear, I do not mean to imply anything about my parents here – this is a more general comment stemming from my experience both with divorce law and with toxic church doctrine about abuse.)  

It will be interesting to see where this book series goes from here. It has been pretty dark so far, without much hope. Since the next book is called Some Hope, perhaps there will, at long last, be some. 

My biggest issue with the novels so far is that St. Aubyn, like his protagonist, comes from a place of overwhelming privilege and wealth. Both family background and a multi-million pound inheritance enabled him to chase drugs at ludicrous expense while still living a wealthy lifestyle. His aristocratic family, even if he wasn’t part of that branch, allowed him to drop names and get his degree by the skin of his teeth. He still hobnobs with the A List, so to speak. One of us plebes who did what he did wouldn’t have ended up as a best selling novelist, but broke and imprisoned and eventually dead and looked at with contempt by all. It burns a bit to see that, as it always has, money matters far more than choices if you have enough of it. Although St. Aubyn is a good writer, he also seems to me to be eminently slappable prick and the sort I would loathe to be around in person. (And no, the New Yorker article on him doesn’t help that at all.) Yeah, I feel sorry for him for a horrific childhood, and find his writing fascinating. But, like Patrick, I pretty well dislike him personally, and wish he had had to actually experience poverty for once. Oh well. I feel the same way about Wagner. I shall be entertained, yet also glad I never have to suffer through a dinner party with him. 

***

The Guardian had an interesting article on assumption of wealth and class within the book writing and publishing universe. To a degree, St. Aubyn is a spot-on example of the way things work. I’m not clarivoyant enough to know how to change the system, other than to keep reading books by those outside the “white, upper-middle-class, and privileged” norm. 

***

Here is the list of books that our book club has read. At least the ones I have read too. Most of these were read for the club, but a few were ones I read previously - those posts pre-date the club discussion - and some I read afterward, because I missed the discussion. I have listed them in no particular order. 

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Calypso by David Sedaris

The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

There There by Tommy Orange

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Educated by Tara Westover

Stiff by Mary Roach

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Artemis by Andy Weir

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

Circe by Madeline Miller

Source of book: I own this. 

Circe was one of last year’s book selections for our book club. I was unable to attend that meeting (although my wife did), so I never got around to reading it. However, she convinced me that it was really good, and, since she bought a copy, I figured I would want to read it. In the meantime, our club read The Song of Achilles, the first book by Miller, which was quite enjoyable. The consensus of our club, however, was that Circe was even better. In what has to be an interesting coincidence, the club also read The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood last year, so fully three of our twelve books were remixes of Greek mythology. I guess things go in cycles.

In any event, I can concur with the consensus that, of the three, Circe is the best. Fans of The Odyssey will be familiar with the Circe of mythology, of course. The daughter of the sun (aka Helios) is banished to the island of Aeaea (or Aiaia in the book - English spellings have been changed in the last few years, and I’m still not used to it…) for her experiments in sourcery. She is visited by Odysseus and his crew, but is outwitted by Odysseus with the assistance of Hermes. She sleeps with him, naturally, and (in later myths) bears him children. 

In addition to The Odyssey, Miller draws from a few episodes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, other myths, and fills in the rest of the story with some interesting alternate ideas of her own. The story is written from the point of view of Circe, and, like The Song of Achilles, imagines that the bards have been less than honest. Because history is generally written by the winners, so to speak, the characters who serve as foils to the heroes and gods are assigned base motives and painted as mere villains. Like Patroclus, the lover of Achilles, Circe functions in Homer’s legends as an episode, or at best a muse, in the life of the hero. 

As a nymph, Circe exists on the lesser level of godhood. She is descended from Helios, a Titan - not one of the Olympians - and is thus aligned with the older gods, including Prometheus. (Hey, I just read some great works about him!) She also lacks the power of either the true Titans or the Olympians. Basically, she is immortal, but has to get by on guile, seduction, or whatever she can find for herself. In her case, it is “sorcery,” a combination of botanical knowledge, a few spells, and a lot of will. 

Miller does take a few liberties with the backstory. Circe is allowed to participate in a few mythological episodes in which she isn’t mentioned in the classical myths. For example, she gives comfort to Prometheus, transforms Glaucus into a god, and assists in the birth (and imprisonment) of the Minotaur - the monster born to her sister Pasiphae. These incidents do serve to explain some of the other myths, like how Circe came to possess a loom crafted by Daedalus, and why she had a falling out with Scylla. 

One of the things I love about Miller is her ability to draw together the various myths and make them fit together for modern readers who were not, perhaps, raised in the Classical tradition. Here in the US, it is pretty rare for any of us to have learned Greek and Latin and read the ancients in the original languages. That was (and to a degree is) an artifact of the British upper class, and of a bygone era for the rest of us. In my case, at least I read this stuff in my teens and twenties - and own a Bulfinch’s Mythology for reference. (In addition to a few others - I have a well stocked library, shall we say.) But remembering all the family trees isn’t an easy thing. That is why I find Miller’s ability to weave the relationships into the story so seamlessly to be a delight. 

This book has, in my view, two major themes. The first is a feminist one. Circe is a nymph, a female demigoddess, which means her function in life (or whatever immortals call it) is to be pretty, marry well, and use her feminine wiles to her advantage. Which is pretty much how it is even for the Olympians other than Athena and Artemis, if you think about it. Even Hera pretty much exists to be the embodiment of the female heridan, endlessly jealous of the younger, nubile women that her randy husband is endlessly bonking and impregnating. Circe refuses to play the game, and naturally incurs the wrath of the patriarchal and petty gods. 

The other theme is the nature of humanity. Circe, like Prometheus, has a natural sympathy for mortals. She takes it one further in this book by looking with an honest eye at the advantages of mortality and the disadvantages of immortality. With immortality, there seems to be no real need for - or even possibility of - growth and change. By nature, the gods are everlasting, and their petty disputes and jealousies and obsessions are unchanging. It is mortals who, by very virtue of their limited lives, must seek to become something. In the classical Greek ethos, this was fame - the one way that mortals can gain immortality. 

In exploring the psyche of Circe, Miller looks at deeper (to our modern psyches) questions. Does the very transient nature of our lives as humans give us an impetus toward change and growth? Is the fact that our relationships - even the most permanent and timeless - are destined to end motivate us to form stronger bonds? Is the pain of having mortal children enough to make an immortal eschew immortality? (That last one is one of the interesting questions posed by Paradise Lost: would Adam have chosen immortality over Eve?) And, ultimately, is immortality boring? If all outside relationships are fleeting, because mortals die, is eternity just eternal ennui? 

These are some of the “imponderables” which we cannot stop pondering. 

The two themes together make for a compelling re-telling of a timeless story. Reading Homer through a 21st Century lens can be horrifying. The objectification of women, and the assumption that they exist to serve as foils to the male heroes is problematic, as my teens have informed me after reading parts of The Odyssey. And they are, to a degree, correct. But there is a reason that the myths endure. Part of that reason is that myths aren’t static. Or, at least, they shouldn’t be. Circe has fascinated writers for more than 2500 years for a reason. Some reactionary medieval theologians have used her as a warning against sorcery and female sexuality, but others have seen in Homer’s tale a warning against intoxication, or an example of an egalitarian pairing. All good myths combine timeless evocation of human nature and psychology with a flexibility and adaptability to new times and circumstances. This is how C. S. Lewis can transform the myth of Cupid and Psyche into a powerful and devastating work that spoke to my late grandmother (who I never met) and myself two generations apart. It is how Percy Bysshe Shelley can take the Prometheus myth and write a paean to the universal siblinghood of humankind, while his wife Mary can invent the genre of Science Fiction and warn of the dangers of technological prometheanism. It is why Antigone in the hands of Anne Carson can resonate so well today with the question of law versus ethics, conflicting duties, and fairness versus anarchy. This is why I love the classics even as I cringe at the misogyny and militarism. And also why I am endlessly frustrated by the stupidity and moral nihilism of a literalist and theonomist approach to that other example of ancient literature: the Hebrew scripture and the new testament. The truth of mythology doesn’t lie in its cultural specifics, but in its timeless adaptability to the truth of human nature as expressed across cultures and times. 

I really wish I had been able to participate in the discussion of this book - alas, I had a camping trip planned for that weekend. I imagine this would have been a fascinating discussion, based on our discussions of related books about mythology. 

Although there were plenty of great lines, there is one which particularly stood out as astute. Circe isn’t a true prophet, like some of the gods and mortals. But she has a sort of prophetic ability which shows itself throughout the book. Here is what she says about it:

Among the gods there are a few who have the gift of prophecy, the ability to peer into the murk and glimpse what fates will come. Not everything may be foreseen. Most gods and mortals have lives that are tied to nothing; they tangle and wend now here, now there, according to no set plan. But then there are those who wear their destinies like nooses, whose lives run straight as planks, however they try to twist. It is these that our prophets may see. 

This is so very true. As both an attorney and as a person who observes things, I have found I have an uncanny ability to predict marriages that will eventually fail (to use one example.) Just as Circe predicts that Jason will ultimately cast Medea aside, with catastrophic results, it isn’t that difficult to see cases where disaster is hanging around the necks of people I meet. Forget the fates: their own choices doom them to disaster. And, like Circe, there isn’t much I can do to change their destiny. This applies to clients, naturally, but also to friends and family all too often. As the old saw goes, your character becomes your destiny. 

Circe was definitely an interesting take on the old myths, with compelling characters, good writing, and thoughtful questions. I hope Miller takes on more myths in the future. 

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It is impossible to discuss mythology without at least mentioning some amazing art it has inspired. Circe has been represented by many over the years, but the best must be John William Waterhouse, who painted not one, but two iconic depictions of the goddess. (In addition to his Greek myths, he painted Arthurian stuff - his Lady of Shallott has to be the best known of that legend.) 

 Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus is an amazing depiction. She dominates the picture, with Odysseus merely reflected in the mirror, a hesitant character to her supreme confidence. (And why not? She holds a potion in her glass, and one of his crewmen as a pig sits beside her feet.) The sheer garment teases at her nude figure, with her areolas visible and tempting. This picture fits far more with Miller’s portrayal of Circe as powerful, sexual, and not at all a stooge of Odysseus than Homer’s version. 

  

Equally moving is Circe Invidiosa, which portrays the moment when Circe, jealous of Scylla for stealing the affections of Glaucus, poisons the pool where she bathes. Again, what is barely visible - the transformation of Scylla under Circe’s feet - is part of the power. But it is Circe’s fierce expression which you can’t take your eyes off of. Waterhouse is fantastic at capturing the emotions of Circe in both pictures. 

Speaking of Scylla, and that whole thing with Gaucus, I have actually seen this picture in person. Laurent de La Hyre - Glaucus and Scylla. This one is at the Getty, which is one of our favorite places to visit. 

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Just for fun, here is the list of books that our book club has read. At least the ones I have read too. Most of these were read for the club, but a few were ones I read previously - those posts pre-date the club discussion - and some I read afterward, because I missed the discussion. 

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Calypso by David Sedaris

The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

There There by Tommy Orange

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Educated by Tara Westover

Stiff by Mary Roach

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Artemis by Andy Weir

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore