Circe

The Witch Of Aiaia

Madeline reimagined Homer’s Iliad for the modern reader in her wonderful, The Song of Achilles, that won her the Orange Prize in 2012. It is clear with her new book that the former Latin and Greek teacher has a way of modernizing mythology without diluting the essence. Circe retells Odyssey (mixed with other Greek epics) from her point of view, and turns her into a feminist heroine of our times.

Circe, meaning hawk, was so named  because of her yellow eyes. One of the daughters of Helios, the Sun God, she is mocked by her family of beautiful people for being ordinary and with the thin voice of a mortal. When she meets a fisherman, Glaucos, and falls in love, she first uses the power of herbs-- or pharmaka-- to turn him into a god, so that she could marry him.  But once he acquires the strength and status of a god, he shuns Circe. When he turns his attentions to a beautiful nymph, Scylla, a hurt Circe uses her newly acquired witchcraft to turn her into a monster (of Scylla and Charybdis fame!)

In punishment, she is exiled forever to a distant, uninhabited island, Aiaia (which later becomes the dumping ground for rebellious daughters of the gods).  But far from being devastated by the prospect of a lonely future, Circe hones her powers. To keep her company and give her news of the outside, the mischievous god Hermes flies in. When vicious sailors marooned on the island attempt to rape Circe, she turns them into pigs. Thus the name of the Witch of Aiaia travels far and wide.  It is here that Odysseus finds her, when he is returning from the Trojan War. He stays back with her longer than he intended, but when he leaves to return to Ithaca, he does not know Circe is pregnant. The fiery goddess Athena tries to steal away her son Telegonus, because he is destined to kill his father.

Circe protects her son fiercely, is kind enough to give shelter to Odysseus’s wife Penelope and son Telemachus when they have to leave Ithaca, and finally she fights her own battles and wins. In the course of the unputdownable novel, characters from mythology like  Apollo, Daedalus and his son Icarus, Ariadne and the Minotaur, Jason, Medea and others make brief appearances. Circe who was a footnote in male-dominated mythological stories is a full-blooded and fascinatingly strong character in this book.

As she says of the story about her and Odysseus that is commonly narrated, “Later, years later, I would hear a song made of our meeting.  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 Miller tells a story Circe deserves!

Circe

By Madeline Miller

Publisher: Little Brown & Co

Pages: 400

The Fallen

No Rest For The Weary

The Fallen is the fourth in David Baldacci’s terrific Amos Decker series, in which a head injury left the protagonist with hyperthemesia, or a perfect memory, and synesthesia which in his case, makes him associate events with colour—for instance, death as a disturbing electric blue. His inability to forget anything is perfect for his work as an investigator, but it also means that he always carries in his head the terrible image of the corpses of his wife and daughter (killed in the first book, Memory Man).

Over the last three books, Decker’s life unravelled, he pulled himself together and is now with a special task force of the FBI inducted by Ross Bogart (who stays out of this book, except as a voice on the phone), along with former journalist and best friend, Alexandra ‘Alex’ Jamison. The two promise to get each other’s backs in a crisis, but there is no romance yet.

Amos has reluctantly accompanied Alex on a vacation he does not want, since he has no life beyond work. They are visiting her sister, Amber and her family in a small town called Baronville. The once prosperous town has fallen on bad days, where John, the last of the Barons who founded it, lives in his decrepit mansion like a recluse, hated by other the inhabitants.

Socially awkward in the extreme, Amos is somehow befriended by Amber’s cute eight-year-old daughter Zoe, who is fascinated by the quiet giant with total recall. Amos may leave behind crime and adventure, but they follow him wherever he goes. Just lounging on the back porch of Amber’s house, he sees sparks of fire in the abandoned cottage next door. When he rushes to put out the fire, he finds two dead bodies in the house.

The local cops are hostile at first, going so far as to treat Amos as Alex as suspects. But when it turns out that there have been other unsolved and seemingly unrelated murders in Baronville, they reluctantly accept their superior investigative skills to help with the baffling case. There goes the vacation as the two have to get to work and put their lives on the line in the process.

As he starts to ask questions, Amos finds that the town in the grip of a drug addiction, which is often the case when there is an economic downturn. The only big employer there is a very large and new fulfillment centre (a place where vendors send merchandise to be delivered to buyers), and there is something not quite right out there.

When the big players from Drug Enforcement Administration turn up, the problems Amos faces are multiplied, while Alex and her family cope with the grief of the sudden death of Amber’s husband.

Baldacci deftly juggles the many tracks and a lot of colourful characters, so that The Fallenis a thrilling read and also a solemn look at the ugly side of the American dream.

The Fallen

By David Baldacci

Publisher: Grand Central

Pages: 432 

Another Life

Lonely People, Desolate Lives

That Mohan Rakesh’s influence on Indian theatre and literature has been strong is proved by that fact that old and new production of his famous plays like Aadhe Adhure and Ashadh Ka Ek Din are being performed somewhere or the other in the country.

His short stories are not that well known, especially to younger readers, and Rakesh was one of the heralds of the Nai Kahani movement in Hindi literature.  Another Life, a new book of translations of thirteen of his stories and his masterpiece, Aadhe Adhure has been published by HarperCollins; it not just gives an introduction to his writings, but a lengthy, and rather candid, interview with him at the end of the book offers glimpses of his thought process. He died aged just forty-seven, or his body of work would have been more extensive.

The stories, all set in middle-class India, captures a country changing from feudal, joint-family agrarian, to middle-class, nuclear family urban. Relationships are shredding, the mood is bleak; the women, in particular, are adrift in a haze between traditional and modern. Though, Rakesh’s idea of modernity is women drinking and having affairs (the story Safety Pin). Men are trying to find their place in the workplace and family, with no new role models to fall back –in The Sky Of Steel a man encourages the liaison of his wife with her past lover, who is now a powerful man.

 The characters have complex inner lives, but the stories meandering through extensive descriptions of landscapes, tend towards the simple, and today may seem even simplistic. It could be because the passage of time renders certain people and social phenomena extinct, or because translations are never perfect.

The stories are bleak and, but for one, Savourless Sins, about a man trying to jolt his complacent wife, entirely lacking in humour, as if the lonely people that inhabit Rakesh’s world have forgotten how to laugh.  Like Manorama In Married Women, who judges her maid, Kashi, for putting up with an unfaithful, abusive husband, while her own has abandoned her, so that she can work and provide for his family; her yearning for companionship and a child are not important.

In Glass Tank, which seems to have echoes of Aadhe Adhure, an unhappy woman and her daughter are attracted to the same man, whose exact place in the family remains undefined, but his arrivals and departures cause much emotional upheaval.

Another Life, is a strange story about Prakash, who has split from his first wife, so overbearing that she makes her son lisp, and married a mentally retarded woman. After an encounter with his son and divorced wife, Prakash is left even more lonely and desolate.

The stories have to be read keeping the period and context in mind, or they lose their impact. Most of them also remain strangely incomplete, leaving the reader to imagine what must have gone before and what might happen after.  However, as a reflection of the time when Mohan Rakesh was writing, they are sharp, poignant and with the mildly caustic tone of the disappointed or disoriented.

Another Life: Thirteen Stories And a Play

By Mohan Rakesh (Translated by various)

Edited by Carlo Cappola

Publiser: Harper Perennial

Pages: 408

Macbeth

Ruthless Ambition

The Hogarth Shakespeare project invited modern novelists to reimagine some of his best-known plays. Norwegian novelist Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth is the latest, after writers like Howard Jacobson, Edward St Aubyn, Margeret Atwood Anne Tyler and Jeanette Winterson have taken a stab at Shakespeare.

Nesbo has turned Macbeth into a noir thriller, set in a lawless town in seventies' Scotland. Most cops are corrupt and on the payroll of the town’s rival drug lords, Hecate and Sweno. In a grim, damp, sooty town where rampant unemployment has driven people to drugs, Macbeth steps in with the aim to get crime off the streets.

A man with an ugly past spent in an orphanage, when he appears in the book, he is head of the armed SWAT unit, much admired by his men. Duff is his buddy from the orphanage days, and Banquo his mentor and friend in the force. Duncan is the chief commissioner of the police and Malcolm his deputy, Duff is the ambitious leader of the narcotics unit. Three of Hecate’s drug-brewing crew stand in for the witches, and Lady is the beautiful, read-haired, power-hungry owner of the town’s classy casino, Inverness.

The parallels are neatly built up and some lines from Macbeth deftly inserted, even though so much murder and bloodshed just to be the chief commissioner of a small town, does seem excessive. It also seems implausible that Macbeth could plot and kill so many with impunity and find others to blame.

Still, Nesbo layers on the darkness, guilt, blackmail, paranoia, remorse, revenge, and writes some vivid action sequences, that will no doubt look great on screen, should the novel be filmed—which it should be. Overlook the anachronisms, and this is a terrific page-turner, as nightmarish as the Shakespeare play.

Macbeth

By Jo Nesbo

Publisher: Hogarth

Pages: 464

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