Maggie Shipstead’s Booker Prize long-listed novel, Great Circle, is an impossibly wide-reaching piece of historical fiction that totally defies any effort to summarize briefly. The novel’s twin threads focus on two women living totally different lives: first, there’s Marian Graves, an orphan who survived a great tragedy in her infancy and grew up to become a boundary-defying aviator whose historic transatlantic flight ended in her disappearance and presumed death, then in the present day, there is Hadley Baxter, a starlet who’s become tabloid fodder after her starring turn in YA mega-franchise, who’s just been tapped to play Marian Graves in a new biopic. The chapters about Marian are narrated in third person, and span basically the entirety of her life from birth, beginning with her and her twin brother, Jamie, being orphaned after her father is sent to prison for cowardice when he saves himself and his children from a fatal sinking ship (of which he is the captain), and their mother perishes in the disaster. Marian and Jamie are sent to live with their ne’er-do-well artist uncle in Missoula, Montana, where Marian discovers her passion for flight at the age of 12 when traveling pilots come to town and she sees a biplane in flight. Marian’s singular dedication to becoming a pilot animates every decision she makes in her young life, eventually forcing her into harsh sacrifices that enable her to pursue her passion with significant personal cost.
Marian’s narrative is the story of a young woman defying convention and resisting the social structures that confine her freedoms as a woman in the 20th century, and in many ways we see Hadley struggling against the same social phenomenon in the present day. Playing Marian Graves in a prestige biopic is a chance for Hadley to resurrect her career, after media backlash surrounding various antics that caused her to get fired from her job on the Twilight-esque series that made her personal life fodder for tabloids. Hadley is recovering from an affair with her ex boyfriend/co-star’s married agent, and her sex life is a mess of hurt feelings, betrayal, and insecurity. While Hadley is presented as sort of a Lindsay Lohan type party girl, it becomes clear that she is dealing with much more complicated traumas that connect her with Marian in alarming ways, principally the loss of her parents in a plane crash. By the second half of the novel, Hadley begins investigating Marian’s mysterious disappearance and discovers a shared sense of purpose with this historical figure that she never could have imagined.
The novel takes on the many phases of Marian’s life with staggering detail, interspersing narratives about her brother Jamie’s life, as well as chapters on loosely connected historical topics, such as Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and an indigenous legend about a gender non-conforming hunter in what’s now the state of Montana. Jamie is a crucial figure in the narrative, as a sensitive animal-loving artist, his gentle demeanor is a stabilizing element throughout the jet-setting Marian’s wife. Jamie is a fascinating and well-developed character himself, who grows into a young man struggling to stick to his strong convictions and artistic sensibilities in a harsh world thrown off-kilter by the onset of the Second World War. Marian and Jamie lead separate lives united by their early trauma (partially informed by their young mother’s suicide during the shipwreck as a result of post-natal depression), but also by their desire to push back against gender conformity and the strict social mores of their time that greatly limit expression and exploration.
Marian’s commitment to her career as a pilot leads her into an abusive marriage with a bootlegger who pays for her flight lessons in exchange for her total devotion, and also into Europe during WWII to fly dangerous combat missions on the Western Front. Flight represents many complex contradictions in Marian’s life, as it forces her into situations that rob her of her autonomy, but also clearly represents her only chance at true freedom. Through all of the deep struggles and traumas that Marian lives through, flight is her only escape, a way for her to surrender to her instincts and steer a massive machine across borders both physical and metaphysical. Marian is an incredibly conjured heroine, whose sexuality, desire for independence, and resistance of gender conventions make her an essential and unforgettable character in the historical fiction genre.
Great Circle is an ambitious novel with a great number of threads that Shipstead somehow knits together in fascinating ways. The novel is chock-full of fascinating historical detail and transporting vignettes of life in another time. Marian and the many people with whom her story intersects throughout the novel feel so true to life, and Shipstead’s staggering talent for characterization is fully on display in this epic that feels both intimate and wide-reaching. While Hadley’s chapters are not nearly as gripping as Marian’s, the connections between the two women feel essential to the points that Shipstead is trying to make, rather than if she had just written the novel without the Hadley plot line at all. This novel is riveting achievement that feels like a testament to the merits of the fiction form, and a moving meditation on non-conformity and resistance.
Further Reading: Maggie Shipstead’s first two novels, Seating Arrangements and Astonish Me, are similarly well-written and imagined.