Greek Re-tellings

[mtvessel]

Apr / Aug 2019
Mythos - Stephen Fry – Penguin, 2017 / Circe - Madeline Miller - Bloomsbury, 2018
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Unlike their Norse equivalents, I can't remember the book in which I first read about the gods and mortals of ancient Greece - it may have been Roger Lancelyn Green again, or possibly even Robert Graves. For Stephen Fry it was (probably) Enid Blyton, which is reason enough to justify a re-telling now.

Despite Fry's clever-clogs reputation, this is a far from academic read. Fry plays fast and loose with stories he has culled from Homer, Ovid and elsewhere and, like Neil Gaiman, he ascribes modern motivations and jokey dialogue to the actions of the gods which invoke a smile but which I suspect will not age well. One pleasing piece of scholarship at the start is a family tree showing how the three generations of gods in the creation myths - the primordial deities, the Titans and the Olympians - relate to each other. This useful piece of housekeeping helps the reader keep track of the bewilderingly complex array of family relationships and rivalries that make them up.

Unlike their Norse or Christian equivalents, the Greek myths have a beginning but no apocalyptic end. The rule of the Olympians, once established, is taken to be eternal. So it is somewhat inevitable that the book loses momentum halfway through as the epic struggles of the Olympians to obtain their positions cease and the focus turns to the interactions between gods and humans. Fry largely sticks with Ovid for this section, avoiding the Trojan War and the demi-god heroes like Herakles, Jason and Theseus to avoid the book "becoming too heavy for even a Titan to pick up". This is probably a wise decision, and the stories of Pyramis and Thisbe, Philemon and Baucis and others are touching and well-told, but I missed the drama of the first half.

Good as Fry's re-tellings are, he doesn't really bring a radically new take on the tales he is recounting. Not so Madeline Miller, whose fine follow-up to The Song of Achilles, Circe, retells some of the stories told by Fry but from a woman's perspective. Circe is a great protagonist to pick - she is most famous as the witch who turned Odysseus' crew into pigs in the Odyssey, but she is in fact a nymph who is a daughter of the sun god Helios.

It is fair to say that the stories in Homer and Hesiod, and their subsequent Roman elaborations, paint a less than flattering picture of a powerful sorceress given to transforming love rivals into horrible monsters in a fit of jealousy but who can be tamed into domestic servitude by a strong man like Odysseus, so a more sympathetic rendition is long overdue. Here, Circe is a fiercely independent woman who refuses to bow to the more powerful gods and gets exiled for her troubles. Lacing the drinks of sailors who land on her island with a transformation potion is a necessary protective measure for a woman who is living alone. Miller weaves in other episodes such as an encounter with Daedalus and the minotaur that I think she must have invented, but which fit very naturally. Helios, Hermes and the other godly characters have the same powerful but inhuman personalities as Thetis did in The Song of Achilles which I think work really well in delineating them from the semi-divine and mortal characters, something that Fry's re-telling does not do. To be fair, Fry's point is that the ancient Greeks created their gods in their own image so they should presented as normal humans writ large, but I prefer Miller's version.

Both of these re-tellings are worthwhile. Fry re-introduces us to the ancient Greeks' uniquely human take on theology in a way that works for modern audiences. But Miller implicitly critiques the patriarchal assumptions on which they are based and then in the story of Circe creates a new myth that corrects the balance, much as Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia did for the Iliad. And that, I would say, is a more substantial achievement.