New review: The Death of Mungo Blackwell, Lauren H. Brandenburg

Note: I received a free proof copy of this book in exchange for a review.

The Death Of Mungo Blackwell is the perfect read for dreary winter nights. It's a book full of warmth, wit, growth, and eccentricity from the central characters. Reading this book felt like snuggling into a warm blanket; perfect, sweet escapism into the countryside.

Charlie Price, his wife Velveteen, and their son Gideon, leave their lives in the city (never specified) and move to a small town called Coraloo. Charlie used to be extremely senior in the world of finance but a bad judgement left him fired and without income. In Coraloo, he becomes a 'picker' - he looks for items of potential value in markets and resells them online.

The market is owned by a family called the Blackwells who provide the heart and soul of this book. Most welcome him, but one of them - Shug - stands out in his hostility. The Blackwells often act out their family stories - or 'histories', as they insist - and also hold funerals of family members before those members actually die.

The point of the story is to show how Charlie, Velveteen and Gideon, a family who had everything and who quickly get reduced to nothing, start again and find themselves in the process. Their individual stories are handled with care and compassion, gently guided by various members of the Blackwell family.

This story is fun, vibrant, sweet, and quietly remarkable. It's hard to put it in a genre but I would put it on a bookshelf next to the brilliant "The End of Mr Y" by Scarlett Thomas.

New review: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

As soon as I finished Circe I thought about how great it would be to have Penelope's side of the story during The Odyssey. Luckily, one of my greatest friends had an answer for me - one did indeed exist, written by none other than Margaret Atwood.

It's no secret that rich, noble women were used as tools in marriage contracts throughout history, but the use of Penelope in this story puts paid to the idea that Odysseus and Penelope necessarily married for love. Theirs is touted as one of the greatest loves of all time - the weary hero who spends ten years after a ten year war in Troy trying to get back to his wife, the woman who is separated from her husband for twenty years, not knowing if he is alive or dead, surviving only on rumour.

Some of this is true. But as for their love - well, Penelope (at least, in this retelling) is only fifteen when she is married off to Odysseus. In Atwood's version, Odysseus and Penelope do have great affection for each other, but not necessarily reaching the great heights as shown in The Odyssey. 

But that's not the point of Atwood's story. The point is how Penelope had to defend her home for nearly two decades - including her maids, the ones who were so callously murdered by Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey. This was justified then because they were disloyal to Penelope and Odysseus and ingratiated themselves with the suitors, but Penelope spins a different yarn. She shows more of their humanity - the fact that these maids were teenagers, therefore used and abused by the suitors. She asked them to ingratiate themselves with the suitors, who were eating Penelope out of house and home, in order to find out their true minds. After all, they were spewing out declarations of love all day and every day to Penelope, when all they wanted was her property.

Penelope tells her story from Hades - she is already dead when the story begins. The maids have their moments, too, and show their side through the medium of a traditionally Ancient Greek dramatic chorus line. It's a very clever book, considerably deep in spite of its brevity. What's particularly clever is at the finale of the book when Odysseus is represented by an attorney, a whole moment that resonates in the #MeToo era, despite being written over a decade before the Weinstein story broke.

Saying Margaret Atwood has written a brilliant story is like saying the Pope is Catholic but just because something is obvious does not make it any less worth stating. I definitely recommend this if you are looking for a different angle on a well-known epic story, most particularly one that humanises otherwise fairly 2d characters from the original.

New review: Circe by Madeline Miller

The first thing I need to say about this book is that it is a must-read. It is an epic in every sense of the world.

Most of what we know about Circe comes from the story of a man - Odysseus. She is the beautiful, powerful witch who lives alone on an island and has a habit of turning men into swine (Homer clearly was having fun there). However, when Odysseus leaves Circe's island, so does all knowledge of her and what happens next.

Circe is nothing if not an origins story, but it's so much more than that. It's a Greek myth in its own right, and opens up a whole world of possibilities in retelling and recreating Greek myths about the women who feature in them - why not a story on Medea? Medusa? (Margaret Atwood wrote one about Penelope, Odysseus' wife, and the maids who were hanged - I'll review that in the future).

Circe is the daughter of a nymph and Helios, the sun-god. However, she is frequently derided by her own parents and her kin - she's not beautiful, she sounds like a mortal (shock, horror), and seems to be wholly ordinary for a divine being. However, she soon (and kind of accidentally) discovers the power of pharmaka - witchcraft. After committing acts of witchcraft on a rival for her love, who transforms into the monster Scylla, Circe is banished in perpetuity.

She doesn't stay alone for long - for a divine being, anyway. However, she gets raped by a visiting crew of men once they realise she's alone, and this episode starts to turn her into the witch she's known as, transforming men into swine when more show up and reveal their true intentions.

We know what happens when Odysseus shows up, so I'll gloss over that, but what's interesting is what comes after. Odysseus is shown to be more cruel and careless than he appears in The Odyssey. The same goes for Athene (who used to be my favourite goddess, but not so sure if she is anymore, after this novel!) All this is to say that Circe's life does not stop after Odysseus leaves - far from it. There are also many interesting crossovers with other heroes and stories - Circe's sister creates the Minotaur; Jason and Medea take refuge on her island; Hermes and Circe are lovers for a while... the list goes on.

What Madeline Miller has created here is an intensely rich tapestry of stories based around one of the most enigmatic and interesting women of antiquity. This novel is truly a triumph, both in depth and in breadth. I don't say it lightly when I say this is my favourite novel that I have read this year.