What If Odysseus Isn't the Hero of The Odyssey?

[00:00:10]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.

[00:00:20]>> 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.

[00:00:27]>> What was the fight over? Hm. Let me see if I can remember the list. Vengeance, lust, hubris, greed, power. What have I forgotten? Ah yes, vanity and peak.

[00:00:40]>> Sounds like a usual day among the gods.

[00:00:43]He laughed and held up his hand.

[00:00:45]>> It is your divine privilege to say so, my lady. I would only give thanks that many of those gods fought on our side.

[00:00:53]>> Divine privilege. He knew I was a goddess then, but he showed no awe. I might be his neighbor whose fence he leaned over to discuss the fig harvest.

[00:01:03]Gods fought among mortals. Who?

[00:01:06]>> Hera, Prooseidon, Aphroditi, Athena. Of course, we were 10 years fighting on Troy's shores, and now it is longer still. We sailed from Troy 2 years ago.

[00:01:18]Our journey back has been somewhat more difficult than I would have wished.

[00:01:24]>> I think you are Adysius.

[00:01:26]He did not start at the uncanny knowledge. He was a man used to gods.

[00:01:31]>> And you are the goddess Cersei, daughter of the sun. This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society.

[00:01:39]>> 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.

[00:01:49]>> This is exactly what Meline Miller does in Cersei. She takes a figure everyone knows through Adysius, but gives her her own story full of exile and magic and loss and the discovery of powers. The Folio Society's version brings that retelling into the design of the book.

[00:02:08]Julie Dylan's wonderful illustrations capture Cersei's world, the island, the spells, the gods, and the dangers that surround them.

[00:02:16]>> You can see her world in the slipcase inspired by Greek black figure pottery.

[00:02:20]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.

[00:02:29]>> This is still Madlin Miller's Cersei, but it's with gorgeous artwork and with details that make you want to slow down and really relish every page.

[00:02:38]>> The Folio Society Cersei is available now. Find your favorite story at foliosocciety.com/thebook club. So, hello everybody. That was of course from Cersei by Meline Miller and it's her second best-selling 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 Adysius lands two years after leaving Troy, at which point she famously turns his men into pigs.

[00:03:25]Additionally, she's kind of, I don't know, she's sort of an an ambiguous antagonist, maybe something of a fem fatal. 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.

[00:03:47]>> It's an example of a a genre that's very popular in the last 10 or 15 years, which is basically taking ancient stories and retelling them from a feminist perspective, or rather a feminist perspective is too reductive.

[00:03:58]>> It's giving voice to sideline female characters. Yeah.

[00:04:02]>> Exactly. So, it's sharing their experience. So, it's like Natalie Hayes has written a lot of books about this.

[00:04:07]Pat Barker. So Tabby, you were a massive, massive fan of this from the absolute outset, weren't you? Because I remember when we first started the show, it was one of the books that you most wanted to do.

[00:04:19]>> Yeah. So, I love The Song of Achilles.

[00:04:21]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.

[00:04:26]Uh it's supple. It's mesmerizing. It features the Greek myths and monsters and gods, which I grew up listening cuz I listened to the Greek myths long before I went to school. And Cersei 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.

[00:04:49]But for you, Dominic, it was your first time reading it. And I I was a bit nervous. I didn't know what you'd make of it. But what did you make of it?

[00:04:57]Surprise us all.

[00:04:58]>> Well, as you know, I started reading it about a week ago.

[00:05:01]>> Yeah. We had to go to London to go for dinner with some friends and I texted you from the train to say I'm like 50 pages in and this is brilliant. I'm absolutely loving this.

[00:05:12]>> I was so pleased. I was so pleased.

[00:05:14]>> I love reading it. I think there's so much to unpick in this book. Uh 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. Meline Miller, born in 1978 in Boston, grew up in New York and Philadelphia, a massive reader, particularly of ancient literature, so like you, Tabby.

[00:05:38]>> Yeah.

[00:05:38]>> Her parents split up when she was young.

[00:05:41]And she said in interviews her father um thought she was reading too much. So he took her books away, which seems very harsh, >> terrible, >> right? But her mother read her the Iliad when she was young and took her on trips to see the amazing Egyptian and Greek artifacts at the Met in New York, >> which I did when we were on tour in New York. I spent >> I remember you see the the Temple of Dender. Is it that's um in in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and so she felt like you she as a girl she fell in love with Greek mythology in the ancient world. She loved the the vividness of it. But she also said in an interview, I liked the fact there was so much unfairness and injustice. Which is a slightly odd thing to say. Although you put in the notes that you like that too.

[00:06:20]>> Yeah, I totally get it. It's it's I think people forget maybe they don't but about the Greek myths. They're so entertaining.

[00:06:26]You know the mix up the tangles. They're quite Shakespearean in that.

[00:06:30]>> The cruelty of them. They're so cruel though and violent aren't they?

[00:06:33]>> But children love that. You know when when your when your world is quite sanitized as a child by your parents and older people that know better.

[00:06:41]>> You're suddenly given this whole world of people behaving very badly and doing terrible things and it's tantalizing.

[00:06:47]chopping children up into bits and throwing them into the waters or something.

[00:06:50]>> Yeah.

[00:06:51]>> So, she did classics inevitably at uh 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 getting on for a decade per book. She's written two books only.

[00:07:09]>> I know. Takes her a long time.

[00:07:11]>> So, The Song of Achilles is the first one. You loved that, didn't you?

[00:07:13]>> 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 Petetrois 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.

[00:07:48]>> 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 novels or novels that we would recognize, 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. which ancient retelling that I read, you know, I love this one that best cuz a lot of them miss the mark. I think, >> right, >> a lot of them are too modern. Anyway, let's get into the plot.

[00:08:26]>> So, Cersei, the issue with Cersei from the very beginning of the book is that she is an outcast. She's an outsider.

[00:08:31]She's on the margins. She's somebody, a daughter who is despised by her parents, despised by her family. She has to sort of as in so many stories of this guy, 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 Maline Miller is very clever about the way she introduces a series of characters. So, um, King Minus of Cree, the Minotaur, uh, Jason of Argonaut's fame, Adius, and so on. Have you got a crush on Jason Tabby? The way you're reacting to >> I had I had such a crush on all the Greek heroes when I was little. Perseus, Jason, Thesius, they were my favorites.

[00:09:14]>> Okay. So, take us into the world of Greek mythology since I love it so much.

[00:09:17]>> 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 Titanamaki 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 his chariot across the sky every day. And that makes the sun rise. And he and a beautiful Niad, who is the daughter of Oceananis, who is another Titan. She's called Percy. And they have three children. There is Pacifi, the future queen of Cree, and she turns out to be the mother to the minor to of Greek mythology. And then there's Percy's, and he's a necromancer. And then there's Aites and he's a sorcerer and he ends up becoming the king of Culkus. So this is you know home to the golden fle 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 Maline Miller translates it to Hawk. And she has this strange ugly thin voice. And she discovers after turning this nymph called Silla into a terrifying monster.

[00:10:36]So this is the skiller Silla of the Odyssey that the terrifying multi-headed monster that eats men off ships. This is because of a lover as Tiff. She falls in love with a mortal who she turns into a god. And he ends up going for the nymph over her.

[00:10:49]>> Yeah. He's also turned blue, hasn't he?

[00:10:51]>> 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 from >> So, maybe like the people in Avatar.

[00:11:00]>> Yeah. Well, that's true. They're vaguely attractive. I kind of get that.

[00:11:04]>> Um, and she realizes that she has some form of magic and it manifests through potions and herbs and she is a witch.

[00:11:12]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 Aya and surrounds herself with wild animals, lions and wolves. If you look up paintings of Cersei, she's often surrounded by lions. And she immerses herself in her garden and her spells and she sort of learns to master her witchcraft.

[00:11:37]>> So, she's stuck there on her island, isn't she? And you and at that point in the book, I thought, is this going to be quite dull and a lot of interfering with herbs?

[00:11:44]>> 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.

[00:11:55]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 Dedelus, the great sort of inventor and craftsman. And you hear about the story of Dedelus and Icarus who flew too close to the sun. We get into the whole story of the labyrinth of Cree. So it's her sister going to struggle to pronounce this properly. Tabby and I spent ages discussing pronunciation.

[00:12:19]>> Yeah, I think I think this name might just come up in different iterations throughout the course of the episode.

[00:12:24]We're doing our best.

[00:12:25]>> We're doing all kinds of different pronunciations like ancient Greek, modern Greek.

[00:12:29]>> Exactly.

[00:12:30]>> But anyway, so her sister Pacifi had this monstrous child that I know Tubby thinks I'm showing off in my pronunciations.

[00:12:39]>> Yeah, massively. Massively.

[00:12:40]>> So, she has this uh child, the Minotaur.

[00:12:43]That stuff is brilliantly done. The stuff with the Minotaur.

[00:12:45]>> I We'll get to this. There'll be a lot more minor action to come in this episode.

[00:12:49]>> Taby's favorite Jason and Media. She has another brush with uh Silla who is her great antagonist really. And then towards the end of the book, probably the last third of the book, Adysius turns up and the relationship with Adysius is brilliantly done.

[00:13:02]>> Gloriously done >> and his wife Penelope and Tmicus his son. And through all this, she sort of discovers her power. She discovers her identity. She becomes a mother. She falls in love and she begins to reflect upon her own status as a god or goddess in a world of gods and mortals. So her identity and what it is really in some ways to be a woman I suppose is at the absolute center of this book. So, as we said, this is one of a series of books, Pat Barker or whoever, Natalie Haynes, writers who have reinterpreted the Greek myths. And the trick, as we've said, to getting this right is in the writing.

[00:13:44]Because basically what you have to do line by line is to pitch the writing at a level that is neither modern vernacular pros.

[00:13:53]>> No, no daddies here, >> right? No, there's no mention of pants, for example, as we add in a quart.

[00:14:00]>> No one in the world should use the word pants.

[00:14:02]>> Not well, unless you're describing underwear, I suppose.

[00:14:05]>> Nor sidewalk.

[00:14:07]>> That's tabby. You're alienating the American audience. I believe.

[00:14:09]>> Sorry. I love you guys.

[00:14:10]>> But equally, you don't want to be sort of archaic. Victorian archaic like J.R.

[00:14:14]Tolken at his worst.

[00:14:16]>> You alienate people, don't you?

[00:14:18]>> Exactly. All of that kind of thing. So, what as she said herself, I wasn't trying to write Cersei'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.

[00:14:29]You have to do it. You have to judge every sentence, every word so that it is simultaneously accessible, but also there is a hint of stranges to it and a hint of belonging to a world that is not our own. 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 climactic moments where Cersei encounters the great figures of Greek mythology, but then also makes it easygoing and natural and fluid and familiar. But let's get a little bit then into sort of the mythology behind the book because as we've already shown Cersei overflows with classical illusions and with Greek 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 fairly sidelined character. So we start with Helios. So Hessiad's theogyny, which is an ancient Greek poem, is the foundational myth for Cersei's lineage because that's when we discover that the Oceananid 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.

[00:15:53]>> So he's a Titan.

[00:15:54]>> Yeah. They're the people that ran Earth before um the Olympians came. So that was Cronis and deities like that.

[00:16:02]>> 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 Hessiod's myths, Helios banishes Cersei to Aya, the island, and he drives her there in his chariot. That is true to the myth and obviously carries over into Miller's book. So, a couple of other things um that are from Greek mythology that would be familiar to people or or 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.

[00:16:37]>> He's such a bore. All he does is moan to her. It's like the worst cliche of kind of boyfriend behavior.

[00:16:43]>> She turns him blue.

[00:16:44]>> Yeah.

[00:16:45]>> And he rewards her by falling in love with her love rival, Silla. And Cersei poisons Silla in revenge and Silla basically turns into this hideous monster that attacks sailors.

[00:16:58]>> Terrifying the way that it's described.

[00:17:00]These massive gray bobbing heads eyeless that loom out of this cave in the mist and stinking and foul. It's wonderfully visceral writing.

[00:17:10]>> Yeah, it is. And then we've got thesis of the minotaur obviously. So this is described by Ovid as indeed the story of Silleris. Cersei is not in those stories of the Minotaur. Um, so the classic thing about the Minotaur that people know is he's born to Queen Pacific. He's hideous. He's thrown into the labyrinth which is designed by Tedilus and then Thesius, the great Greek hero comes and with his thread and Ariadne, he kills the Minotaur, doesn't he?

[00:17:37]>> Yeah, exactly. But the focus here is on the birth of the Minotaur. Then we have Dedelus 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 Dedelus is so he's the famous craftsman imprisoned in Creit for his abilities. Here he sort of becomes Cersei's lover. He is a father worrying about the fate of his son trying to escape. And then we later learn of Icarus's fate. And this is when he flew too close to the sun and the wax on the wings that his father had made for him melt and he falls to his death. You know, we were talking about the cruelty of the green myths earlier. I remember reading this when I was about seven.

[00:18:16]>> I know. I actually >> and finding it I I it was the one myth that I hated most.

[00:18:20]>> I actually agree because he's stockpiling the feathers for years and years and years and years and years from the birds that come to his window. It's the time and the effort and they get so close. It's hard.

[00:18:29]>> But then it's the boy like, "Oh, look, daddy." And he's flying closer and higher and higher >> and then Deedler shouts to him. The wax melts.

[00:18:37]>> Yeah.

[00:18:37]>> And he falls into the sea and that's the end of him.

[00:18:39]>> It's heartbreaking. And then we get media and the golden fleece. So this comes from Jason the Argonauts. One of the most famous ancient Greek myths. The most famous surviving literary version comes from the 3rd century BC. And this is Appalonius of roads. So Jason steals the golden fleece from Culkus. He must face an undead army, terrifying fire breathing bulls and a dragon to do so.

[00:19:00]And then here, and it's also true in the Argonautica, Jason and Medadia sailed to Cersei's island to have ritual kind of purification, I guess, because they have brutally murdered Medadia's brother in their efforts to get away. And in most versions of Cersei's myth, she is sister to the king of Caucus, a powerful and very cruel sorcerer called Aites. But in this again, there's a much more human dimension in that he's turned into Cersei's little brother, who she adors and raises, and so his transformation is heartbreaking for her. But Jason and Media are pretty much the versions of themselves that we get from Appalonius.

[00:19:38]He's kind of a heroic meatthead. She is dark and infatuated and ruthless. And I've always been fascinated with the character of Media.

[00:19:46]>> She's a great character, Media. She She's always interested dramatists, hasn't she? But there's one story in particular that this is based on and it's probably the most famous story that there is from the ancient world soon to hit the big screen.

[00:19:59]>> Exactly. So, so you've got the Iliad, Homer, Homer's Iliad and then the Odyssey. Now, where the Homer existed, >> you know, historians still argue about this. Um, let's assume that he did exist. The Odyssey is probably composed towards the end of the 8th century BC and people think it may have originated in the Greek settlements in what's now western Turkey. It was an oral work. It wasn't written to be read. It was written to be read aloud, which is obviously different, to be recited to listeners. And it probably evolved over a fairly long period of time so that it only reached its final form in the 7th century, so 100 years or so later. How you translate the Odyssey has become quite a controversial subject in recent years. So um a scholar called Emily Wilson brought out a very controversial new interpretation where she basically said you know people have translated it in an archaic fusty formal way and that's she doesn't think that's how it was written to be recited. The beginning of the book is basically saying to the muses tell us the story >> tell us sing us the song >> right of what kind of man? A complicated man uh a manysided man? A man of twists?

[00:21:06]A resourceful man? An audacious man? How you translate that? It sort of conditions how you see Adysius. And as we will see, Maline Miller has obviously thought very hard about how to portray the character of Adius in her book because he's not quite as we would expect.

[00:21:22]>> And is it anyway probably the most complicated, the most three-dimensional of all the heroes of Greek myth. So, it's a fascinating thing in itself how the translation contributes, >> you know, to this interpretation.

[00:21:35]>> 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 he's 10 years at Troy and then he's another 10 years in the Odyssey getting home.

[00:21:56]>> Yeah.

[00:21:56]>> So he's left his uh wife Penelopey and their infant son Tmicus behind. He has a whole load of adventures in the Odyssey with kind of whirlpools and sea monsters. And there's the Cyclops, very well-known case, but also he meets a witch called Cersei in the Odyssey who turns his men into swine into pigs.

[00:22:16]>> And in the Odyssey, Cersei basically comes and goes quite quickly, doesn't she?

[00:22:21]>> Yeah, she only she only f 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 um temptation, supernatural temptation, >> but she in in most versions, she as with this version, she advises Adysius about how best to get home, how to avoid Silla and Caribbdus.

[00:22:45]>> She's always interested people, hasn't she? Because there have been different kind of adaptations of her and iterations over time.

[00:22:50]>> 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 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 Hessiad theogyny as I said. So this is a poem that describes the origins and the genealogies of the Greek gods approximately from 700 BC and she makes a very brief appearance. She's pretty passive but it establishes her as we said as the daughter of Helios and Percy and it also establishes her witchcraft which is the whole idea of her throughout the centuries. Well, I was about to say that's you can see why people are fascinated with her consistently because a sexy witch is always >> is always enticing.

[00:23:58]>> Well, because witches in Greek mythology, they're they're sort of overlooked, I think, because we think about the gods, don't we? The immortal power of the gods. And that's also something Miller plays with in this.

[00:24:09]>> Yeah. So, if you trace her through various kind of iterations, there's the Tleggony written by Yugammon of Sirene.

[00:24:14]I'm not massively familiar with Yugaman of Sirene.

[00:24:17]>> Don't like his work? God, he's like he's like Harry Potter. When I'm not reading other books, I'm listening to Yugon.

[00:24:24]>> Yugan. Yeah. Yug. I mean, >> he's a great >> It's like somebody shouting at Nigel Farage.

[00:24:29]>> Go.

[00:24:30]>> Yeah. Right. Anyway, um this is a lost poem anyway, so you're not listening to it. That was a lie.

[00:24:37]>> We have fragments of it.

[00:24:39]>> But basically, it's a story of Adius being killed by his son Tleggonus.

[00:24:44]>> It's the sequel to the Odyssey. And then Tmicus his son and Penelopey his widow travel to Cersei's island and Cersei marries Adicius's son. Wow, that's a twist. Yeah, who'd thunk it? Exactly.

[00:24:58]So, as we'll see, Magdalina draws on this quite heavily in in Cersei.

[00:25:02]>> Then there's a couple of other um appearances. She appears in Appalonius's Argonautica 250 BC. This is her uh cleansing media of her blood guilt for murdering her brother. She's in Virgil Zenid where the Trojans sail past, not the Greeks, but the Trojans sail past her ride and they hear the sound of men being turned into pigs.

[00:25:24]>> It's a really creepy passage. This is the first time that we see a genuinely frightening Cersei cuz up till now she's kind of been a bit passive, a bit eerie, and at one point actually quite wise.

[00:25:35]And then now suddenly she comes across as seductive, supernatural, dangerous, a disembodied kind of scream in the mist.

[00:25:42]And then she's in Ovid in the Metamorphosis. So now we're we're into AD. So we're well into the Roman period.

[00:25:48]And she is this sort of scary evil sorceress, isn't she? In Ovid.

[00:25:53]>> Yeah. And that kind of sets um the image of her that then carries over into say the Renaissance where she come becomes symbolic of sexual temptation and female power, emasculating female power. And it's also an allegory against greed and desire. I.e. if those men hadn't eaten her food, they wouldn't have become swine. I'll tell you who would agree about the sexy witch is the prefflites because the prereffites they love a sexy witch and they can't get enough of Cersei. So there for example every teenage girl's favorite painter John William Waterhouse loves her >> but you know actually I have a sweet connection cuz when my dad was away when I was little he would send me postcards and a lot of them were John William Waterhouse cuz they're kind of beautiful women looking very romantic and I got all the Cersei ones and so I love love love them. There's one of her poisoning Silla's pool looking very witchy.

[00:26:41]There's one of her with her elbows on a table looking out into the distance in an orange robe. And that's very much Miller's Cersei, I think, slightly lonely, slightly pensive.

[00:26:49]>> So really, Meline Miller is only the latest of many retellings of the story.

[00:26:54]So, you know, we've talked before about um stories that kind of are built on stories. Well, 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.

[00:27:07]Cersei is the, you know, we're meant to empathize with a hero here. Cersei is the main character. And actually, one of the things that she does, Madam does a lot, is to play with there's lots of in jokes about the other versions, aren't there?

[00:27:21]>> 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 Adysius. The boy who sang it was unskilled, missing notes more often than he hid. Yet the sweet music of the verses shone through his mangling.

[00:27:40]>> And this is Homer, right?

[00:27:41]>> So she's making fun of her mythos. Yes, exactly. And then later, Adysius tells her that in India there were ants the size of foxes which dig up gold among the dunes. That's a reference to Heroditus. And he also tells us, I love this bit about the people in the far north who believe in a serpent that encircles the world, devouring its own tale. And that is the Midgard serpent of Norse mythology. Yeah. So, there's the jokes, but also I think what's really clever about the writing, the writing is full of foretellings and prophecies. And what that allows her to do is to throw forward to stories that we will recognize from Greek mythology. So, right quite early on in the book, Hermes, the kind of trickster god, messenger god, he tells her, "A man called Adysius will come to your island." So, from that point onwards, we the readers think, "Ah, I know all about Adysius." 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 were able to see things that were not present at the fall of Troy, >> uh, the death of the deedless. Yeah.

[00:28:48]>> Yeah. Death of the Minotaur, all of those kinds of things. So, she's able to weave in different sort of versions of re, you know, reality. There might be prophecies, there might be flashbacks, there might be people telling stories.

[00:29:02]So that we get a very textured account of the kind of cultural imagination of the Greeks. I guess >> 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.

[00:29:19]So as we said, this is the guy that stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind because he pied 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.

[00:29:54]>> 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 merc and the depths there is the world of the gods divinity I guess immortality.

[00:30:29]She just feels that I'm a creature. I'm I'm a a being with a beginning and an end >> who has found herself in this world of darkness but I my true destiny maybe lies elsewhere.

[00:30:41]>> Yeah. And it's interesting because as a child when she grows up in the halls of her father Helas and he's lives in Paul's build 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 cuz he's so blazing. So, you can see that she's sort of searching for something even at this point. And then in chapter 8, 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 are on the other, and Cersei is somewhere in the middle.

[00:31:25]>> Exactly. So where exactly she fits um is the question that runs through the book, and I guess we'll discuss that after the break.

[00:31:37]Hi everybody. Welcome back to the book club. Now, before we get into the story of Meline Miller's Cersei, actually, we have an exciting announcement, don't we, Tabby?

[00:31:45]>> Yes.

[00:31:45]>> So we have a new newsletter. It's called book club notes and it lands in your inbox every Saturday. It is completely free and 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.

[00:32:02]So, if you have strong views about a book, write in, tell us if you disagreed. Particularly if you disagreed with Tabby, uh send those thoughts in. I would like to see more comments along those lines.

[00:32:12]>> And it's about time there was one person who did do that. So be the first.

[00:32:18]>> Be a trailblazer. I dare you.

[00:32:20]>> So if you want to sign up for more of this Merry Banther, you sign up at the bookclubhq.com.

[00:32:26]So that's the bookclub hq.com.

[00:32:29]You just put in your email address absolutely free and we'll send you the newsletter every Saturday. All right. So Cersei um I described her very ungalantly as a sexy witch.

[00:32:39]>> So ungallant. Reflects poorly on you.

[00:32:42]>> I meant it as a compliment. Right.

[00:32:44]You're going to tell us why Cersei is so compelling as a character or why does she speak to you particularly cuz you I mean of all the characters we've talked about apart from of course Kathy in East of Eden.

[00:32:54]>> Um she is the one who really speaks to your soul. Am I wrong?

[00:32:58]>> Well, she's very like alike to me which is obviously always compelling in and of itself. I just think that she in a very original retelling that still honors all of the stories and the myths and the figures that I've grown up loving. She is the most original and interesting part. So, she's, as we've said, a formally muted perspective, but she's a mysterious figure in and of herself in the Odyssey because she is sorceress who can harness animals to her will and turns men into pigs. Here though, she is almost human and the whole story is rooted in her emotions, her psychology, the things that she's feeling. And so, it's interesting as well because it's obviously that of a woman rather than the man after whom the Odyssey is named.

[00:33:41]And rather than coming across as dangerous and lascivious or lustful the way that she often comes across in the in the Odyssey, she's complex and very human. And so the the whole story delves into totally new emotional landscapes.

[00:33:54]You know, insecurity, loneliness, a growing sense of what one is able to achieve and what one is able to do, a growing independence. And it's only through the reactions of the 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 cersy very human Cersei and then a mortal encounter with her and we realize that she's got this divine luster to her and she's got these incredible eyes and she is not immortal 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 >> 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 in fiction.

[00:34:44]>> Yeah. In many ways, it's a coming of age story.

[00:34:47]>> 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.

[00:34:52]>> Yeah.

[00:34:52]>> 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 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.

[00:35:19]>> And also the other gods because they are just innately divinely confident in exactly who they are and what they are because they are born magnificent. They don't have much curiosity. They want to be entertained, but they are not entertained by watching and listening and observing. Maybe Hermes to some degree. Cersei is she watches everything. She's also very trusting, which none of them are.

[00:35:40]>> She has pity. She has an innocence to her. I think she feels guilt at times.

[00:35:46]She doesn't she so she's not as cruel and as uncaring as the other gods are.

[00:35:51]And also the other gods are kind of static.

[00:35:54]>> Yes. Yes, they are they are one thing >> frozen in time >> and then they're frozen emotionally, psychologically. Their identity is fixed >> kind of in and of themselves like you are the god of wisdom. You are the god of beauty. That's your thing. You can't change. You can't grow.

[00:36:09]>> 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 witchcraft. But this is actually gained not it's not innate or 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.

[00:36:37]>> It's earned and it's delicate.

[00:36:39]>> Exactly. You I said messing around with herbs and you said something very nice which is Yes.

[00:36:44]>> That's the dynamic of the center of the podcast. So the witchcraft um the Greeks called it pharmarmacaya, didn't they?

[00:36:49]From which we get pharmacy.

[00:36:51]>> Pharmacy. The funny thing as I mentioned about the messing around with herbs and of course that's part of it but actually Meline Miller is 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.

[00:37:05]>> 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 that she's fascinated by the fact that it's bound to Cersei's will. So there's almost an element of magical realism when Cersei practices her magic because it's never like, oh, a lightning bolt shot across the sky, a golden aura descended. It's sort of >> things gradually happen >> and we know that it's because Cersei is practicing a great degree of self-control and and artistry to make it happen. 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.

[00:37:50]>> So far as 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? Mhm.

[00:38:06]>> Anyway, so to go back to um the issue about her working at things. So there's a nice line where she's talking about Ariadne of Thread Fame. And >> she's watching Ariadne dance and improving her dancing.

[00:38:20]>> 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 er and nectar. Their excellence is already bursting from their fingertips.

[00:38:34]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.

[00:38:58]>> 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 Pacifi.

[00:39:10]And she comes across her witch's cupboard. And she realizes that because her sister is so lazy in her divinity.

[00:39:18]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 be collected hap-hazardly, 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." 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 it enriches it. I think it's it's wonderful. It's very personal. So, you don't get a lot of that, say, in the Odyssey, which is kind of describes great sweeping events.

[00:40:15]>> Yeah, absolutely right. You don't get the texture in the Odyssey. Now, that actually brings us very neatly to Adysius. 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 Adesius. 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 Adysius's defining qualities are of course his cunning and his cleverness, but also he's got this kind of sardonic rye wisdom. So in the reading we did right at the beginning when they're talking about what the Trojan war was about his answer ah let me see if I can remember the list vengeance lust hubris greed power what have I forgotten I guess vanity and peak >> there is a sort of dry slightly cynical worldweary awareness of the darkness of human nature in Adesius when you first encounter him in the book he's a very appealing character isn't he >> cuz you get the sense that a bit like Cersei um with her divine compadres that he sees things that no one else does. He sees the weaknesses in men. He's still not the outandout 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.

[00:41:44]>> You do. Adius, the sardonic side of him, he only ever sees the the bad in people.

[00:41:48]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.

[00:41:57]>> We realize later that he's actually sort of been in love with his own meth all along like all the other heroes. So, Telmacus 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 Adysius. 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.

[00:42:22]And I found that really interesting because you get the sense of this struggle in Adysius in um the Odyssey of the call of home and half and family and then the lure of fame the likes of which Achilles won. Adius chooses the former.

[00:42:37]That's why he's so desperate to go home.

[00:42:40]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 Teluggony, we get his different ending where we're where in home is a mirage and he's unsatisfied because he's frightened that he will be forgotten. His myth will be forgotten.

[00:42:59]And actually, he's become addicted to wondering and stillness and restfulness and home and hearth is no longer enough.

[00:43:06]>> Yes, he's a very dark character. He turns out in this book to be a very dark character. It's it's not that he's traumatized by the Trojan War. It's that the Trojan 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.

[00:43:27]>> Yeah.

[00:43:28]>> That the war satisfied. And once he got home to Penelopey and Tmicus's 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 idealized him. I think she fell in love with him basically and that she realizes there was another side to him that actually with all her abilities that she had never really seen. I guess >> yeah because also the way that Penelope transforms in the book reflects that. So when we first hear about Penelopey from Adysius is telling 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 battle of wits and then almost as a joke with herself, she takes him to bed. And we discover the reason that she turns his men into pigs is actually it's a justification. It's it's a form of self-defense. But we'll get to that. So in a sense, by writing the book, by telling her own story, Miller is kind of wrestling control away from the men who tell the story of Adysius and make it about Cersei and imbue her with a brand new agency. 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?

[00:44:55]>> Because it is a male-dominated world.

[00:44:57]Yeah.

[00:44:57]>> Cersei is trapped within the world absolutely where people are in a thrral 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 when men visit they treat her as a sex object.

[00:45:14]They see her as no more than that.

[00:45:16]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 Thesus's girlfriend. Media is doomed in part because she ties herself to Jason, who what did you describe him as? A meatthead.

[00:45:32]>> A meatthead hero. And also because she emasculates him by taking control herself and enabling his escape. Yeah.

[00:45:39]Even Pacify who, you know, she shares the cold arrogance of the gods and she doesn't earn much of our sympathy. But then even she says of her husband, King Minus of Cree, Minus does not want a queen, only a sering 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 terrible indictment of child birth and again it is a pretty monstrous baby. The lips of my sister's wound parted and the thing slid forth. It thrashed like a fish on her hook and muck flew across our faces. her belly is slaughteryard 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 with unnatural strength. So you can I mean the in just incredibly raw, fleshy, horrible pros.

[00:46:41]>> Yeah, of course. and the minotaur.

[00:46:43]Actually, that scene really does live in the mind.

[00:46:45]>> Oh, doesn't it? It bites off her fingers.

[00:46:48]>> Pacifia, she has to be cut open. She's has a cesarian section, hasn't she?

[00:46:52]Which is described in kind of visceral detail. Then the minotaur is effectively pulled out.

[00:46:58]>> Everybody else is absolutely horrified by this creature. But its mother, >> yeah, >> will not hear a word against it. The pros 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 Dedelus built this structure in which pacifi concealed herself so that she could be penetrated by a bull. I mean that is that's quite hardcore stuff. And in the Greek myths >> I mean we'll find out. It's a family fetish.

[00:47:28]>> There is a lot of bull and and cow action generally. If you're into that, this is the book for you. Definitely.

[00:47:33]The violence of the book reflects the world of Greek mythology. So when Prometheus is being punished, I think this is the first moment of the really visceral violence quite early on.

[00:47:41]Prometheus is punished and Cersei watches. They all watch and the gods, they are sadists. They love watching this kind of thing.

[00:47:49]>> Cersei is horrified by it. A blooded strip tore from his back. She that's it's one of the fewers, 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 pros, the descriptions of blood and fat and flesh and meat. I mean, they recur throughout the It's a book that is for all that it's about gods and and and ethereal things, it's really anchored in kind of earthly realities.

[00:48:24]>> But I think that's also very clever because what Maline 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 we all know about the eagle and the liver and it's just an image in your mind and 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.

[00:49:01]The bloody beak, the shredded organ regrowing only to be ripped forth again.

[00:49:05]It really hits home.

[00:49:06]>> Yeah. And now you mentioned cow action.

[00:49:09]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.

[00:49:16]>> Beastiality.

[00:49:17]>> 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.

[00:49:30]>> Impregnates them.

[00:49:31]>> Yeah. He impregnates them. They give birth to calves. When the cows themselves are old, he cooks and eats them. And then he has sex with the calves and they in turn give birth. And so the cycle continues. That is how he makes new ones. He turns into a bull and size their calves, then cooks the ones that 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.

[00:50:08]And actually the the worst example of this is when sailors arrive on her island and she welcomes them in. She's genuinely kind.

[00:50:18]>> Well, and she's lonely as well. Yeah, she's lonely and she thinks she perhaps has created a sort of idealized portrait, do you think, of human beings?

[00:50:27]>> 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.

[00:50:32]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 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 Maline 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-defense. 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 fel witch proving my power with sty." So that is the Cersei that we kind of have from classical literature and you can see the relished takes in her retribution for this terrible crime in the description of the transformation.

[00:51:20]His rib cage cracked and began to bulge.

[00:51:23]I heard the sound of flesh rupturing wetly. The pops of breaking bone. His nose ballooned from his face and his legs shriveled like a fly sucked by a spider. He fell to all fours. He screamed and his men screamed with him.

[00:51:34]It went on for a long time. 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, as there's a line that um 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.

[00:52:07]>> The Greek myths themselves are full of rape, particularly with Zeus. Zeus is constantly transforming into other animals to impregnate mortals. You know, again, there's more bull action. Let's Zeus turning into a bull to lure pretty maiden. And this is one insight among many into the heartlessness of the gods.

[00:52:24]And I think one of the greatest parts of this book is the way that she writes the gods because she imbuss them with all the recognizable traits from the myths, but it makes them even colder and even more frightening because with all the ridiculousness of their behavior in the myths, you forget how terrifying the gods would be.

[00:52:42]>> 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. Um, it's shone like light upon the waves, dazzling to blindness. There's a sense that to gaze upon the gods in any conceivable way, even to engage with them, you know, you're opening your mind to unbelievable terrors that will overwhelm and destroy you. But the gods themselves, here's a brilliant detail. I thought this was really cleverly done. The gods themselves live in constant fear. They live in what's called a great chain of fear with Zeus at the top. They hate each other. They hate themselves. They live in dread of being punished by Zeus.

[00:53:24]Zeus himself is frightened of being overthrown.

[00:53:27]>> It's why he's terrified of the Titans.

[00:53:28]It's why he's terrified of Cersei because he's never seen her kind before.

[00:53:32]But they also delight I mean, let's be honest, we all have an element of Shard and Fer in us. They delight in the suffering of one another.

[00:53:39]>> They do. So, um, when Silla, so this is Cersei's great love rival. When Cersei punishes Sila 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.

[00:53:58]>> This is like us with the other Gohanger presenters.

[00:54:01]>> It so is actually in particular very cruel towards the other goal presenters.

[00:54:06]>> I know I've still got a foot in both camps. You however you've been on Mount Olympus for years. They literally call me this the Zeus of the >> They most definitely do not Dianisis maybe.

[00:54:18]>> I'd say Dianisis.

[00:54:19]>> You make Mary with the grape >> completely.

[00:54:21]>> 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 off offerings a miserable man or a happy man and man is more likely to be happy if they have fire.

[00:54:51]>> Yes. Exactly right. Exactly right. So set against them are the mortals. So the first mortal that we meet is Glos who is turned into this blue bloke and he lets himself down by falling in love with Silla. He is the selfishness and vanity and heartlessness of humanity, isn't he?

[00:55:08]Because basically becoming a god has brought out the worst in him. There are mortals like Jason who's obsessed with his own legend. There is >> they're the worst.

[00:55:16]>> They But Dedelus, for example, he's much more attractive, isn't he? He's clever.

[00:55:21]He makes things. He loves his son. He grieavves his son Icarus when he dies.

[00:55:26]And so actually, Dedelus is quite an admirable character. Andus 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.

[00:55:42]>> And also the value of of working for something to become really good at it.

[00:55:47]Um and then another mortal who epitomizes this is Telmakus and this is Ad's son on Ithaca. Again, this is Tom Holland in the movie, and he's a very different hero from the trai traditional hero of Greek mythology. He inherits none of his father's brilliance, cunning, or charisma. Instead, he's like Cersei. 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.

[00:56:20]>> You know, no matter how lorded and renowned he is, he knows the real suffering caused by war and heroic ambition. So he says he made a life for others and 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 Adesius or these other heroes of Greek mythology he values genuine quiet and peace over glory.

[00:56:42]>> Tammicus does >> Tamicus 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.

[00:56:59]Famously, Achilles chooses the former through glory in battle, but then he dies. Um, and in the Iliad, the glory of this trumps all, but not interestingly in the in the Odyssey because when Adysius encounters Achilles in the underworld, he sort of bemons his choice. He says, "Don't give me consolation about death. Glorious Adysius, I'd rather slave on earth for another man than rule down here over all this breathless dead." And so Telmakus embodies the other choice, the choice that he turned down. And this is um Hikia. And he gets value and meaning from small daily pleasures. And his relationship with Cersei, he doesn't care about glory, riches, and fame. And Cersei loves him for this. And so therefore do we the reader.

[00:57:37]>> That's so interesting because he's an unique character.

[00:57:41]>> He's a very ung Yeah. Very unreek and very un Roman, which is probably why that myth was never really taken up.

[00:57:47]>> The myth of um Tmicus killing his father and all of that.

[00:57:50]>> Exactly.

[00:57:51]>> Because he's not a dram a glamorous or dramatic character. He's ordinary. 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, 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.

[00:58:24]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 at last finally, you know, a character that that actually >> captures what it is to be human in a way that the others don't.

[00:58:38]>> 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."

[00:58:47]and we hear of um Ariadne's death and she's killed for some slight that no one remembers by Arteimus and her life means nothing despite watching her dance and see how much she cares about that one thing her life counts for nothing. Um 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 realize this and basically answer the question >> that she asks Prometheus at the very beginning. Why would you basically risk eternal suffering to help mankind?

[00:59:31]>> And you would risk it precisely because being human is worth more than me, God.

[00:59:35]Because the fragility of it.

[00:59:37]>> Yeah. the fragility of it, the fact that it is so brief and then you're gone is precisely what gives it a um a power and a dignity to your life and a and a beauty to your life that is denied you if you're immortal. And actually for her >> um it's the experience of parenthood as well is of love of the love of a mother.

[00:59:58]>> 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.

[01:00:14]>> Completely she does. I think this is really really powerful. The final quarter of the book she has a son called Telegus who is her son with Adius.

[01:00:21]>> Yeah.

[01:00:21]>> The description of her birth of of the experience of child birth is again very visceral, very raw. You know there's nothing romantic or idealized about it at all. And she struggles as a mother.

[01:00:35]She finds it very difficult.

[01:00:37]>> Um, she finds him very frustrating at times. Wonderful lines. I did not go easy to motherhood. I faced her as soldiers face the enemies sword up against the coming blows. I love that. I think it's really well done.

[01:00:48]>> I know. I know. I totally lots of mothers must feel that way.

[01:00:51]>> Of course. Exactly. But in the car 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 >> pulls against you, >> pulls against you, wants to go out into the world. And this is absolutely what Telegus wants to do. He wants to go out into the world and become something different. And we know that he is going to leave her because this is foreshadowed by Athena, isn't it? By the goddess Athena. Athena just sort of she she lands on the scene and and I love her appearances because it's just what you hope Athena will be. But she's terrifying because she's got it in for um Telonus because she has heard a prophecy that he will kill Adysius who she loves. She's he's sort of the one thing living that she loves cuz he's so brilliant and clever and cunning. And so Cersei must strive even harder to protect her son. Her magic reaches new heights driven as it is by her love of her son. But ultimately her son will leave her. Maybe we won't spoil it completely and say exactly how he leaves her. But the scene where he leaves her forever I found very very moving when she's saying I she thinks like she can't bear it. She she wants to to press him to set him into my skin.

[01:02:09]>> Oh yeah. 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. Um, and she's come to realize at the end of this book that mortality and the delicacy, the vulnerability of being human, that those are the things that make life worth living and are so so much more valuable than the kind of fixed certainties of the immortals, which actually are so sterile and empty and hollow and and give her nothing.

[01:02:50]>> Yeah. and also that there's sort of an inevitability to prophecy and the gods put so much st 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 telmakus and he tells her it'll 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 realization she chooses to be immortal um by trying to do the reverse spell that she did in Glalos at the very beginning to turn him into an immortal. So the story comes full circle. Whether or not she achieves it, we never really know. It's sort of open-ended, but she sees a vision of herself as a human woman growing old Telmacus and it's lovely and it's very moving and it's melancholy, but it's also full of joy. I think >> it is agree completely. It's a really it's a we've talked a lot about the the the the violence and cruelty of it. I should say if you haven't read it and you might be sort of put off by that it's not a traumatizing read at all I wouldn't have said. I mean there are there are dark things in it but it's actually a beautiful book and I found it particularly at the end really really moving book. I don't want to make a habit tabby of um bursting into tears at the end of these podcasts Mrs. Doway style.

[01:04:10]>> This is a safe space.

[01:04:12]>> You adopted precisely the same uh tone >> slightly patronizing >> slightly patronizing tone at the end of the Mrs. just episode. I've never quite recovered from it to be honest.

[01:04:22]>> So, we both love this book. So, I think the question both of our minds must be what next from the brilliant Meline Miller. Well, she has said that her next book will be either about Shakespeare's The Tempest or and fingers crossed for this one in my case, The Anered by Virgil. But given that it took her 10 years to write the Song of Achilles and I think seven years to write Cersei, I think it might be a long time coming.

[01:04:41]>> I think it should be The Tempest.

[01:04:42]>> No, keep it in the ancient world.

[01:04:44]>> No, you don't. Don't be a onetrick pony.

[01:04:46]>> No, be a one trick pony. Well, on that we disagree. Okay. What are we marking this in? I think we're clearly marking it and looking at your different options. Tab is giving me different options. I think absolutely terrifying minotaur babies is surely the one.

[01:04:58]>> Yeah, terrifying minor babies it is. All right, you go first, >> Mr. Weepy.

[01:05:04]>> You're like Echo. You know, the myth of Ekko >> gone >> who cries over um narcissists.

[01:05:10]>> I mean, if 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, Tubby. I'm going to give it nine out of 10.

[01:05:21]>> I actually I'm pretty pleased with that.

[01:05:23]>> Um I 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 >> and The Interminable Slog that was East of Eden. Um but uh I really really love this book. I would recommend it to anybody. I've actually been telling like friends of mine and stuff, oh, I read this book and you would never normally read it, but it's brilliant. Um, I deducted a point I've deducted a point for no good reason really. I think possibly because >> the callousness of the gods.

[01:05:57]>> No, I think it's I mean I I do have the callousness of the gods. I don't know. I I've just done it for out of willful capriciousness.

[01:06:04]>> Fair enough.

[01:06:04]>> So, there you go. What about you? You're going to give it You're going to give it 11 presumably.

[01:06:08]>> I'm giving it 10 terrifying mindless babies out of 10. Um, it's richly written. It's joyful. Cersei 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 roots them on the inside and on a relatable perspective. Um, and it's my fourth time reading it and I I'm sure that I will read it again.

[01:06:33]>> So, Tabby, next week something a total change of tone because we are doing >> we're doing the 39 steps by John Bucken.

[01:06:40]Then we've got My Brilliant Friend by Elellanena Ferrante, Brave New World by Eldest Huxley, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, Rebecca by Daphne Demorier, Lolita by Vladimir Nubboff.

[01:06:52]All of these, by the way, was sent in by people in the newsletter. So, this is where you have your say.

[01:06:57]>> You know, when you read them like that, it does sound quite a daunting amount of reading.

[01:07:00]>> I know, but but that's the wonderful thing about this show that you don't have to have read the books to enjoy our takes.

[01:07:05]>> Exactly. We will see you next time for more Sexy Witches with John Bucken.

[01:07:08]Bye-bye. Bye-bye.