GREAT CIRCLE – MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD – REVIEW

A great circle is the largest circle that can be drawn on any given sphere. It exists, in other words, at the extremes, far from the central heartbeat of the shape, constantly pushing at boundaries to make sure it is not dipping inwards, breaking the plane. In this novel, we follow two women built in the same vein, Marian Graves, a daredevil female aviatrix, and Hadley Baxter, the troubled former child star playing Marian in the film of her life.

For a novel devoted to the air, obsessed with the magnetic pull of soaring above the clouds, there is an overriding sense of melancholy. Yes, you may fly high, but always, there is the lure of a crevasse, of ocean depths, of dark spaces ready to suck you down.

Those dark spaces are even more noticeable in word and deed. There is child abuse, coercive control, alcoholism, and suicide. Throughout the novel in fact it is people, not earth or sky or air or cold or wind that really break people. Men, women, and the wars and betrayals they create are the only thing that break us so deeply that even navigators can’t find a way through.

For all that her route might be deliberately, neatly round, Marian is a character full of contradictions and squiggles. Her assertiveness about her destiny is in constant conflict with her pliability in company. She realises, early, during a marriage her husband was more desperate to make than she was to avoid, how much of her behaviour is predicated on not wishing to argue. Even consistencies, where they are to be found, are often in asynchronous places. The Graves family, we are reminded, are very bad at saying goodbye to one another. And, time and again, we will learn that they are bad at saying goodbye to life, that they cling to it at the cost of reputation and pain.

Ironically for a twin, Marian’s life revolves mostly around a love of splendid isolation. She thinks it’s travelling and experiencing things that will set her feee but, on her honeymoon, realises she is more confined than ever. Only in the inscrutability of the Alaskan landscape does she relocate something of herself, of the spunky, determined character the reader is constantly hoping will triumph. It never quite will. Even with those people who truly care for her, her brother, and more than one lover, Marian keeps them at a distance. She herself is a circle in this – for what is a circle but a shape consisting of all points in a plane that are at a given distance from a given point. However close you try to get to Marian, whatever angle you approach from, you will find it hard to get to her centre.

In both timelines, the novel is full of characters prone to melancholy and with a talent for self sabotage. They want to think of their rebellions as abstract retributions against others. Instead they hurt themselves.

At one moment, as if to drive the point home, amidst an Antarctic storm, Marian fights the nagging fear that they might be dead. In purgatory or oblivion. Instead, she reasons, she and Eddie are “the speck of imperfection that proves life”. It’s an able summary of most of the characters. There are no heroes here and many have more than specks of flaws.

The split structures has its advantages. Although Marian’s was, overall, the more absorbing timeline, because you know about her disappearance, her tale makes you root harder than you might otherwise do for Hadley, hoping she escapes the same fate. At times too, the author switches up the question. Might disappearance, an escape from the glare of lights and cameras, be kinder for this troubled young actress?

The dual timeline also allows Maggie Shipstead to meditate on the the difficulties of acknowledging and reconciling the different versions of people. Hadley gradually learns secrets of Marian’s life that are at odds with the at once under and over dramatised version of events that the film seeks to tell. Even within each timeline, readers are invited to consider the ways people can be at odds with themselves. At one point Marian quips that she lives in a house with three men, all of them Barclay McQueen. Her brother, Jamie, the painter, knows best of all how different people can will different versions of themselves into the same body. Think happy thoughts to be painted as happy. Frown to show the future your sadness. Decide how you want to be remembered. Except, as the Hadley timeline reminds us, that isn’t always true.

Great Circle revels in little ironies and nods like this. On the historical, it enjoys pointing out that Stalin training Germans fighter pilots in the 1930s might not have been his wisest decision. Short term benefits can lead to later issues. On the personal side are too many to mention but there is one standout. Bannockburn, the great battle of Scotland’s temporary liberation, is also the name of Marian’s marital prison. It is, after all, an able summary of a relationship that ruins her life while also enabling her to fulfil a desire and destiny to fly that might otherwise have been impossible. The plane, dangled so often as her escape, is the most constricting of her manacles.

The result is an unsettling but profoundly beautiful novel. Exhilaratingly paced and full of beautifully painted characters, Great Circle will take you under its wing and let you fly.