A review by definebookish
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

emotional reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

5.0

This was a surprise – a Booker-shortlisted epic that hit somewhere between a documentary about Amelia Earhart and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and I loved it.

Great Circle is the story of fictional pioneering aviator Marian Graves, who becomes obsessed with aeroplanes in childhood, flies Spitfires during WWII, and eventually vanishes during an attempt to fly around the globe via both poles. Fifty years later, young actor Hadley Baxter is cast in a Hollywood biopic about Marian, and finds herself compelled to dig deeper into the unanswered questions about her disappearance.

I don’t often read novels this long – I baulk at the commitment, and naturally gravitate towards tauter, sparser storytelling – but Great Circle enthralled me. It’s vast by nature, spanning decades as well as the globe in its 600 or so pages. It captures the kind of energy I associate with America in the decades before WWII, and England during it; the chapters set between 1909 and 1950 feel dynamic, frenetic with change, at times precarious. It feels cinematic, which isn’t always a characteristic I enjoy in a novel, but here it’s exhilarating.

While this is very much a book about Marian, it puts her less under a microscope and more a wide-angle lens. So we’re introduced to secondary characters in the years prior to her birth, and sometimes we leave adult Marian for months at a time to follow her twin brother at pivotal moments of his life. Hadley’s chapters make up a lesser part of the narrative, but I loved them. They reminded me of the actors’ scenes in the movie adaptation of The French Lieutenant's Woman, in reverse – making Marian feel more like a real historical figure rather than a construction.

In fact, I’d have liked a few more of Hadley’s chapters, and perhaps a little less of the secondary character bottlenecks. Absolutely not less of the book overall, though. There’s a passage where Marian’s brother, an aspiring artist, talks about trying to capture the impression of infinite space on a (relatively) tiny canvas, and I think Maggie Shipstead has done that. 
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