Reviews with content warning for Suicidal thoughts - Great Circle

It’s not often that I’m prepared to identify a novel as being a personal ‘Book of the Year’ contender in July but I think I might make an exception for Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead’s epic novel.

For the last four weeks I have been utterly immersed in the life and times of pioneering aviatrix Marian Graves, following her from the fateful night in which her father – ship’s captain Addison Graves – opts to rescue Marian and her brother Jamie from the chilly waters of the Atlantic (and becomes a pariah in the process) to the equally fateful moment when a ‘sharp gannet plunge’ deep into the sea appears to mark the end of her effort to circumnavigate the globe from pole to pole.

Describing a book as dense and layered as Great Circle – which clocks in at 673 pages in its UK paperback form – is challenging, especially without giving spoilers. On the surface, this is a novel about a woman who wants to circumnavigate the globe and is presumed to have died trying. Marian’s fateful flight, however, doesn’t even begin until page 577. So, if this isn’t actually a novel about a woman flying a ‘great circle’, what is it?

The answer to that question is that Great Circle was, for me at least, many things.

In one sense, it really is a novel about a woman who wants to complete a ‘great circle’ around the globe. Marian’s fateful flight is the link holding the dual timelines of the novel together: the one thing that connects Marian to Hadley Baxter, the scandal-ridden starlet whose path to Hollywood redemption might be through playing Marian in a new biopic. In another sense, however, the novel is about circles more generally: specifically, the interconnecting circles of family, friends, lovers, histories, dreams, and possibilities that make up and intersect with a single life.

In an effort to understand Marian’s ‘great circle’, the reader must first meet her father and mother, and must understand their relationship to her father’s employer. We follow her brother Jamie, her childhood friend Caleb, and her uncle, Wallace. We see how Marian’s involvement with a bootlegger, Barclay Macqueen, has far-reaching consequences and how, like the planes she obsesses over, Marian’s life both soars and dives: into (and out of) marriage, into war, and, finally, into the unknown.

If all of that sounds baggy and voluminous, that’s because it is. But, for all its diversions and digressions, I don’t think one page of Great Circle is wasted. Indeed, as the novel progressed, I became wholly invested in the various layers and strands of the novel, and increasingly in awe of Shipstead’s ability to casually drop minor plot point or character from several hundred pages earlier back into the plot and blithely continue with the novel. By the time I reached the end of the book – and all the various dots had been connected – I felt as if I’d watched a quilt being made, each tiny scrap being gradually joined together until a finished object of immense beauty and togetherness emerged.

I’m aware that I’m gushing but I really did adore this novel. That said, I’m not saying it’s for everyone: some readers probably will find it too baggy or overly melodramatic. Others, I imagine, will find the frequent skipping of time, place, and narrator to be incoherent and disjointed. Still more might wonder what the point of Hadley’s narrative is. Certainly in the hands of a less competent writer, the sheer scope and scale of the novel has the potential to get dangerously out of hand.

For me, however, Shipstead has successfully combined a complex and ambitious narrative with vivid storytelling, memorable characters, and electric prose that leaps off the page. An epic in every sense of the word, I think I can say with confidence that Great Circle will be making an appearance on my Best Books of the Year list at the end of 2022.

NB: This review appears on my blog at https://theshelfofunreadbooks.wordpress.com. My thanks go to the publisher and to NetGalley UK for providing an e-copy of the book in return for an honest and unbiased review.

Content Warnings

danajoy's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I listened to this as an audiobook while doing a very menial work task and despite the length it felt like it flew.
Marian is such a strong and determined protagonist but her life really is dominated by struggle.

Content Warnings

nialiversuch's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

Content Warnings

sib_reads's review

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adventurous reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Content Warnings

jesshindes's review

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Great Circle tells two stories in parallel, hopping between the different narrative threads: the story of Marian Graves, a female pilot in the first half of the twentieth century; and that of Hadley Baxter, a Hollywood film star recruited to play Marian in the eventual movie of her life. It's a 600-page book but it still manages to feel compressed and efficient, as Shipstead drops us in and out of Hadley and especially Marian's lives at intervals ranging from months to years, deftly handling the story's lengthy timespan. This chronological scope is matched geographically: the characters' 'home bases' are Montana and LA but we are taken all over the world, from the UK to the tiniest Pacific atolls to the great white blankness of Antarctica. Shipstead conjures all of them in vivid detail, sometimes from the bird's-eye perspective of Marian in her plane but often at ground-level, down among the mud.

I loved this book. Shipstead is a hugely compelling storyteller whose characters I found it easy to care about and whose narrative and settings felt fresh. Her omniscient narration offers the reader frequent insights into even minor characters' experiences, so that you get the sense of a complex world peopled with complex characters each of whom is driven by their particular hopes and fears. It also means that as reader, you are often privileged to information that other characters don't have: for example, when Marian's twin brother Jamie runs away to spend a summer in Seattle, we see his experience in detail and in a way that Marian herself learns only a good deal later. This experience sits alongside the contrasting thread of Hadley's investigations into Marian's history. It's not an original plot (I'm thinking of AS Byatt's Possession as the obvious example) but Shipstead uses it to make a point about the way that we understand history - effective in a big, whole-of-the-20th-century, book - and also about the limits to our knowledge of others. Even the reader, one step ahead for most of the novel, must wait until the very end for the book - for Marian's narrative - to cede its last secret.

Content Warnings

nicoleamanfu's review against another edition

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adventurous reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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