Spanning more than a century (and some 600 pages), moving between contemporary Hollywood, Prohibition-era Montana, wartime London, Alaska, Seattle and New Zealand, Maggie Shipstead’s accomplished and ambitious third novel Great Circle boasts two memorable heroines.
One is Marian Graves, the talented and fearless aviator who develops a lifelong passion for flying in childhood, dreaming only of a life in the skies. She is a character so real that I twice googled her to check. (She is not.)
The other is Hadley Baxter, a witty and masochistic film star and teen idol who, 60 years after Graves’s disappearance, is playing Marian in a Hollywood movie about her final journey: a wildly daring and possibly fatal circumnavigation of the globe, taking in both North and South poles.
These two young women have quite a bit in common. Both experience the loss of their parents in babyhood and are billeted out to respective dissolute and neglectful uncles. Marian’s mother dies in 1914 when Captain Graves’s ship, the Josephina Eterna, which floats at night like “a jewelled brooch on black satin”, explodes into flames and sinks due to its illicit cargo of weapons. Marian and her twin brother Jamie are bundled into a lifeboat by their father, who then abandons them to the care of his alcoholic brother.
Hadley’s parents die in a plane crash and she is taken in by her hard-living film producer uncle — the two of them, from Hadley’s early teenage onwards, often passing each other in the hall following wild late-night escapades. Both young women are remote and unimpressed by life, and demonstrate the sort of recklessness that often stems from early loss.
Marian’s adolescence is measured out to us via her burgeoning skill at handling aircraft. After initial flying lessons paid for by a benefactor named Barclay, she has by the age of 15 learnt to land a plane on skis on a snowfield, by 16 to land in the dead of night and soon after that to loop-the-loop. “I felt like I was a fixed point, and I was using the controls to make the rest of the world turn around me. I was literally the centre of the universe,” she tells her brother Jamie.
Hadley’s maturation is filtered through her handling of fame. Her old-head-young-shoulders show-business wisdom is winning on the page. When you’re a movie star, people see “the sum of the characters you’ve played: someone who’s time-travelled, who’s saved civilisation . . . who’s been rescued from terrorists by her father, Russell Crowe. You take on weight and consequence. It’s like the dance of a thousand veils, except with every role you’re putting on another veil.”
Most novelists have their limits and cut their cloth accordingly. Shipstead is a writer who can vividly summon whatever she chooses, taking the reader deep inside the worlds she creates. As three grand pianos are hoisted by cranes on to the Josephina Eterna, “dangling in nets like stiff-legged beasts”, you half catch yourself pointing and exclaiming from the shore. When that same ship goes down, you almost feel like an extra deckhand, scrabbling for safety, or a hapless waiter circling the dining room with steaming bowls of consommé.
Hadley’s social media meltdowns, following a trio of sex scandals, are navigated rigorously — and although the territory is not unfamiliar, the tone of murderous humiliation, accompanied by a sort of rueful whole-body shrug, rings true.
In scope and style, Great Circle is a wild departure from Seating Arrangements (2012), the taut comedy of manners set over three days at a high-octane New England wedding, which made Shipstead’s name. In this latest work, Shipstead moves us round the globe with ease; she also takes us smoothly through history. She can give a crisp outline of 1933 in nine paragraphs, from Amy Johnson’s famous flight across the Atlantic, to the new German chancellor who makes speeches as though his own words are “punching him in the jaw”. Her writing is confident and knowing; her descriptions of light and air sometimes beautiful.
The novel’s separate strands, in the main, are carefully held. Shipstead gives us villainous bootleggers; the tentative awakening of love between two female taxi-pilots; the thrill of Spitfire engines; slick Los Angeles culture with its legions of therapists and personal trainers where “We purify ourselves for life as though it were the grave.” We see Marian’s horrific early marriage to pantomime villain Barclay descend from eye-watering sharp practice into monstrous abuse, which almost breaks her. Though it was a mistake, to my mind, to make him quite so horrible. I wasn’t sure he was survivable.
In this novel, flying is presented as an exhilarating, all-consuming obsession as well as a metaphor — not for something as simple as freedom, but for transcendence. Both heroines share a desire for visceral experience that does not wound, or if it wounds does not kill, or if it kills does not equate with failure. Sometimes flying even seems to represent the opposite of sexual assault. Yet fearlessness in Great Circle is presented as a terrific strain, because of the constant fuel it demands: disgrace, loneliness and danger. It’s a sort of tyranny. Identity for many of this novel’s characters is troubling, something that needs to be thwarted or overcome.
Could the flight from self be the true life’s work of its heroines?
Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead, Doubleday, RRP£16.99/Knopf, RRP$28.95, 608 pages
Susie Boyt’s new novel ‘Loved and Missed’ will be published by Virago on August 26
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