Maggie Shipstead, ‘Great Circle’ (2021)

 

This is the eighth of the thirteen Man Booker longlisted titles I have now read. When I blogged my reactions to the last one I finished (Mary Lawson's Town Called Solace), I prefaced my blogpost with this paragraph:

This is the seventh of the thirteen Man Booker longlisted titles I have read. My thoughts on some of those are blogged here (specifically: Damon Galgut's The Promise, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This). My review of Bewilderment by Richard Powers is forthcoming in The Guardian, and with two of the titles I feel my critical objectivity is too compromised for disinterested reviewing: Nadifa Mohamed's The Fortune Men (since Nadifa is a colleague of mine at RHUL, and an excellent one at that) and Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual (Francis is a friend; I read the book in draft, and am even thanked in the acknowledgements. Cool, eh?). That leaves six: A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam, Second Place by Rachel Cusk, The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris, An Island by Karen Jennings, China Room by Sunjeev Sahota and Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead.

So, last-be-first, this leaves five. Is Great Circle good? Is it! 

No, seriously: is it?

My two immediate take-aways from reading Great Circle: 1, Shipstead is a very talented writer, and 2. Great Circle is a mess. That latter isn’t necessarily a bad thing, actually. Mess can be creative, can work to its own aesthetic effectiveness, the whole Les Murray ‘Quality of Sprawl’ thing. But I’m not sure the sprawl, here, actually does work towards effective aesthetic ends. Indeed, since one governing aesthetic principle of this enormous novel is that of an arc returning to its origin point to make a circle (not a mediocre circle neither, but a great circle), I’d say that ‘2.’ tends to vitiate the effectiveness of Great Circle as fiction.

The title refers, as a preliminary note informs us, to global topography: ‘put a blade through any sphere and divide it into two preface halves, the circumference of the cut side of each half would be a great circle’. The main import of this is that, back in 1950, pioneer female aviator Marian Graves attempts aerially to circumnavigate the globe along one such great circle, starting and finishing in Aukland NZ and crossing both poles. She almost makes it, but in the end disappears in Antarctica and is never heard from again.

Marian is one of the novel’s three main characters, although most of her chapters are devoted to her growing up in Depression Era America, learning to fly, engaging in bootlegging, surviving world war, and shagging a lot of people, not all of them happily, and from an alarmingly early age. Another significant chunk of the narrative is devoted to a second character, Hadley Baxter, who grows-up a spoiled child actor (first on TV as the star of Katie McGee, an iCarly-esque hit, then a Twilight-style movie series called Archangel). She also has lots of unedifying and worryingly-early-years sex, does Hadley, and then she sabotages her own career out of, basically, boredom; after which a producer persuades her she’ll get an Oscar if she plays Marian Graves in a biopic.

These two narratives, Marian's and Hadley's, constitute the bulk of the novel, although there’s also a cameo by a Trans character called ‘Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly’, a Native American who lived 1790-1837. Born biologically female he persuades his tribe that the gods have remade him as a biologically exact man called ‘Gone-to-the-Spirits’, and even takes a wife: but someone watches him washing in the river one day, ‘and saw that Gone-to-the-Spirits had breasts and no cock, though he claimed to have been fully transformed into a man’ [105]. This provokes mockery in the tribe, leading to a new name ‘Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly’. He may or may not have magical powers. Bears pop up from time to time in the other two narratives.

These elements are bundled together with a pitchfork, swapping from storyline to storyline in jarring and irregular ways, and more to the point shifting tonal gear within storylines. One major flavour in the stew is High Melodrama: Marian’s mother gives birth to her on the USS Josephina, which ship is then torpedoed, Lusitania-like, by a German u-boat, with Marian’s father—the boat’s captain no less—leaping into a lifeboat at the last minute with his baby in one hand and a pistol in the other. The narrative succession of adventures, scrapes, bonking, pantomime villains and eccentrics is all fine and good—moonshine! sex! Japanese soldiers bayonetting hospitalised men in a Red Cross tent! Night Witches! (‘Russian girls in old biplanes—they fly over German lines at night and drop bombs by hand. They cut their engines and glide in—whoosh in the dark, like a broomstick passing over’ [454])—if you’re in the mood for all that, it’s dandy. But it seems to me that Shipstead’s real skill, actually, is for a more dialled-down, cooler, and arresting sort of prose. The 21st-century Hadley Baxter strand has lots of leering, celeb-gossip, casting-coach and debauchery stuff in it, but the sections in which it really hits home are more carefully and precisely pitched. For instance (‘Mitch’, here, is her legal guardian, a film producer):

Once, when I was fifteen and on hiatus from Katie McGee, my dirtbag friend Wesley and I liberated Mitch’s Porsche in the middle of the night so we could drive out to the desert to drop acid and watch the sunrise. We’d had visions of lying on boulders under the starry sky, but it was freezing and windy and we ended up sitting in the car with the heater on. Once the drugs kicked in, I didn’t like how his face looked. I kept trying to focus on anything but him, but his horrible face kept looming closer and closer, gray and papery and blank, as though someone was shoving a wasp’s nest at me. Dawn had been a red slit, night sliced open with a scalpel, with the bristly silhouettes of Joshua trees raising their clubbed arms against it. [160]

Lovely writing! Shipstead is especially good on night-time light effects as correlatives of a kind of existential dolefulness. Here she is with a different feller, in Las Vegas:

When we were fucking, he murmured my name in my ear while my face was in a hot pillow darkness, and I found I was crying. Outside, the desert faded purple and then black, while someone turned up the dial on the city, lit up that tangerine net, ready to catch some unseen circus performer falling from the sky. [370]

But this kind of thing is too easily swamped by all the more rumbunctious saga-adventure gubbins. Hadley’s parents died when she was very small—the light aircraft they were piloting crashed into Lake Superior. Again with the melodrama, and the over-obvious threading of linkages between Hadley and Marian, of which this novel provides many too many. The story also piddles around for far too long: not until the final hundred pages do we get to Marian’s big cirumglobal flight. The whole novel, if you’ll excuse the phrase in this context, lifts off the ground at this point, which only leaves the reader wondering why she had to wade through so much material to get here.

The slow predawn glug of fuel into the tanks, the walkaround, the checking of checklists, the coughing start of one engine and then the other, the roaring run-up and the heavy acceleration into lift … The city spreads to the south as they rise; bays and inlets eat away at the log northern finger of the North Island. Farms gridded off by belts of alders and eucalypts pass below, low green mountains, the shore with its wide ruffles of surf. Then water, only water. …

Light winds. Harmless clouds strewn loosely as spilled popcorn. Eddie moves between his desk and the cockpit and the Plexiglas astrodome, taking his sights and making with calculations with the leisurely assurance of a tennis pro lobbing balls. He traps the sun in the sextant, hands up notes with course adjustments, plucking first Norfolk Island out of the empty blue, then Nadi in Fiji, then Apia in Samoa. Lagoons like turquoise amoebas. The bits of land scattered across the Pacific are so sparse that the existence of each island seems startling, perplexing, almost worrisome. How did this wind up here all alone? What will become of it? [525]

A mess, tonally and structurally, with many, many lovely bits and pieces. Liver Meringue pie. A Hungarian goulash with melted marshmallows and hundreds and thousands sprinkled over the top. That time in Friends when two pages of Rachel’s cookbook stuck together and she accidentally made beef trifle. You might wolf it down. Joey did.