"Great Circle" by Maggie Shipstead

Photo by Keven Rutherford //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cape_Cod_biplane.JPG

Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction

Two interleaved narratives tell the birth-to-death bildungsroman of Marian Graves (and her twin brother Jamie, and her childhood friend Caleb Bitterroot), a young American girl who loved flying and disappeared on an attempt to fly around the world, over the two poles, in 1950, and the current story of the wild child actress who plays her in the biopic. It's a big book, full of incident and humour and packed with details that create such a sense of authenticity that I googled Marian to see if she was a real person. 

I was captivated by the story of Marian and her brother and Caleb; when they were in peril, my heart was in my mouth. I was enthralled by them. And the counterpoint story brought humour and lightness to the book.

Enormously readable and great fun.

One tiny quibble. I don't think rugby was played at Eton in the 1940s.

Selected quotes: (pages refer to the 2022  paperback published by Penguin in the UK)

• "Water was always on its way somewhere bigger." (p 51)
• "White water was shouldering at the bumper the way Wallace did when his Cadillac got stuck in the mud." (p 52)
• "I reeled like a charred and tottering cartoon knight who'd just been flambeed in dragon's breath." (p 184)
• "box-hedge eyebrows" (p 188)
• "There are always a bunch of these rich kids floating around LA, riding on fortunes they didn't earn as though on litters born aloft by the ghosts of their ancestors." (p 191)
• "I'm told girls dream of being wives, but wifedom seems an awful lot like defeat dressed up as victory." (p 319)
• "Different moods sweep through her gaze the same way the leaf shadows blow across the floor." (p 382)
• "The Days were wearing dress shirts and chinos so tightly tailored they looked like superheroes' unitards." (p 387)
• "Knowing what you don't want is just as useful as knowing what you do." (p 392)
• "Muskoxen wander past her outhouse, ancient-seeming creatures, haloed by their own frozen breath, their thick coats swinging around their ankles like monks' robes." (p 394)
• "The Bellanca gets wrecked and patched so many times it's a jumble of spare parts flying in formation." (p 395)
• "Both of us aiming our words in the same direction like we were driving down a road somewhere." (p 419)
• "So many years up in the north trying to freeze her heart solid and let the wind erode it down to nothing." (p 482)
• "He'd been present for every minute, every second of his own life, and he hadn't known himself." (p 544)
• "Time stopped and started again, stuttered as though it were yet another machine running out of fuel." (p 556)
• "Theater actors play multiple parts both to save money and to show off." (p 557)
• "We don't always notice beginnings. Endings are usually easier to detect." (p 558)
• "Almost no-one has more than a few scattered data points, but they connect the dots however they please." (p 571)
• "She understands now this place, vast and lifeless, might as well be death itself." (p 627)
• "Where is the border between life and oblivion? Why should anyone presume to recognize it." (p 629)

December 2023; 670 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God