Spectator Books: the Greek myths, reimagined

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Spectator Books leaves its dank burrow and hits the road. Sam travelled to the southern Peloponnese to catch up with the Orange-prize winning novelist Madeline Miller, where she was hosting a reading weekend at the Costa Navarino resort. Madeline’s first novel, The Song of Achilles, retold the Iliad from Patroclus’s point of view. Her second, Circe, takes on the great sorceress of the Odyssey. She talked about how — as a classicist as well as a novelist — she approached reworking these canonical stories; about taking liberties with Circe; and about how the 'rape culture' of Ancient Greece speaks to us in the age of #metoo.

Spectator Books is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes of Spectator Books here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before you start listening to this podcast, a reminder that we have a special subscription offer.
0:04.8	You can get 12 issues of The Spectator for £12, as well as a £20,000 Amazon voucher.
0:10.1	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher if you'd like to get this offer.
0:20.5	Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast.
0:23.5	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editorate of The Spectator, and this week we're taking the podcast
0:27.8	on the road.
0:29.1	I'm in the Costa Navarino Resort in the Peloponnese, and I'm joined by a very appropriate guest.
0:35.0	It's Madeline Miller, who is the author of the Orange Prize winning
0:38.9	The Song of Achilles, and its new bestselling and also Orange shortlisted follow-up,
0:45.0	CERC. Madeline, hello, I should say welcome, but you're really welcoming me to your reading weekend.
0:51.1	Thank you. Thank you for having me.
0:53.0	I might start by just talking about the classics
0:55.8	and what it was that led you to start thinking, you know, I want to take these old stories and
1:01.1	use those as the basis for my fiction. So I have a master's in classics and that's sort of where
1:07.9	my academic background is. And I plan to go off and teach
1:13.0	classics. And at the same time that that was happening, I was also developing my writing. And at
1:19.4	that point, I actually had planned to be a contemporary fiction writer. I had written sort of a
1:24.6	terrible contemporary novel that I had written in college that was sort of, you know, this is the old Anne Patchett talks about how you have to turn on the faucet and let the sludge come out before you get to the good water. That was my sludge for sure. It had never occurred to me to write about classics, even though I spent all my time doing classics and then the rest of my time doing writing. And finally, what sort of brought it
1:45.0	together for me was actually theater, which is the third thing that I love. I co-directed a production
1:50.5	of Troilus and Creseda, which is Shakespeare's adaptation of the Iliad. And I just fell in love with
1:57.2	being part of the storytelling. It was the first time that I could really get my hands in
2:01.1	and sort of shape how the actor, who was playing Achilles or Odysseus or Agamemnon, was delivering
	...

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