Maggie Shipstead’s latest novel, Great Circle, echoes of history. Of Amelia Earhart and the early days of flight, of tragedies like the sinking of the Titanic, of small-town bootleggers forging a way through Prohibition, of the Second World War and how it altered the entire globe. Yet, it also reflects upon the present, bringing a different twist to this work of historical fiction.
Great Circle unfolds slowly and deliberately, jumping back and forth across time to reveal two parallel stories. In the first timeline, Marian Graves and her brother Jamie narrowly escape drowning as infant passengers on an ocean liner in the year 1914. Raised by their uncle, an artist, in Montana, they have an unconventionally independent childhood. Marian in particular is unique, as she spends her days riding horses and tearing through books her father left behind. But it is The Flying Brayfogles, a pair of pilots who pass through the area showcasing their act, who change Marian’s life irrevocably. It is through this chance encounter that she first falls in love with flying and commits her own life to becoming a pilot. From here, the narrative follows Marian (and her family) across the years as she learns not only to fly, but to forge a life for herself, culminating in her greatest challenge: a journey to circumnavigate the globe.
In the novel’s second timeline, Hadley Baxter is a present-day actress cast to play Marian Graves in an upcoming film. She’s not just any actress, though; there is a striking similarity between the lives of these two. Like Marian, Hadley was raised by her uncle; in her case, after a bit of a different catastrophe, as her parents were presumed dead from a plane crash over Lake Superior. As Hadley prepares for the role of a lifetime, she learns more about Marian and about herself. And as the story progresses, the disparity between what really happened in Marian’s life and the film’s interpretation of her life is illuminated, leading to a dramatic conclusion.
This book is aptly titled, the term “great circle” meaning “the largest circle that can be drawn on a sphere.” Not only a reference to Marian’s ambitious goal to circumnavigate the globe, Shipstead pulls on this thread throughout with circular ideas of continuous journeys, life goals, and similar stories reverberating across generations. Throughout both timelines she places great emphasis on the lives and roles of women: the gender biases and assumptions that are made, as well as the effort that women like Marian and Hadley put forth to challenge these assumptions and live life on their own terms. She examines sexual relationships and sexuality at the intersection of power and control, pre-defined roles and expectations. She also explores a spectrum of love, from the obsessive to the unrequited and hidden varieties. Perhaps in the end, though, Shipstead most broadly considers how we create stories— our own and those of others; how we navigate our way through what we want and don’t want in an attempt to come into ourselves, and quite often learn these things as we go when it may just be too late to change course.
Similar in tone and feel to novels like Sarah Blake’s The Guest Book and Erika Swyler’s The Book of Speculation, Great Circle is sweeping in scope and does well in capturing and conveying a strong feeling of time and place. Shipstead’s writing is well-honed and fluid throughout. She creates beautiful subtleties with the images and emotions she conjures. Quite often a good, long book can draw readers into the world of the characters in a way many shorter books cannot. But a story can be too broad as well, too all-encompassing. While there were certainly parts of Great Circle that made the outside world disappear, enveloping the reader entirely in the fiction, there were also parts which were overworked, slowing down the forward progression and dissipating the illusion Shipstead works to build. The reader knows the entire time what they are reading towards: Marian Graves’s epic goal to circumnavigate the globe. Knowing this isn’t in and of itself a drawback, it does not lessen the reader’s desire to experience the event itself. However, the structure of the book, rather than helping orient the reader on their journey toward this end, becomes cumbersome, if not tedious, in how the sections are delineated.
All of this culminates in a push-pull effect—sections of the book which are a struggle to get through, followed by other sections which are riveting. The plot contains a few twists, some more surprising than others. The characters are memorable; however Marian’s is the preferred timeline of this reviewer, with her passion and grit drawing to mind the notorious character of Idgie Threadgoode in Fried Green Tomatoes. Yet somehow, despite these conflicting feelings, so much time is spent in the world Shipstead created that it is difficult to leave when the time comes. It is for this reason, along with the undeniable skilfulness of Shipstead’s writing, that I encourage readers to pick Great Circle up, give it a try, and see for yourself if it is a good fit for you.
Great Circle is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore. Many thanks to Alfred A. Knopf for providing me with an advance copy of this novel. All thoughts and opinions expressed here are entirely my own.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
Spanning Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles, Great Circle tells the unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost.
After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There–after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes–Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.
A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian’s disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian’s own story, as the two women’s fates–and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times–collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.
