vol 8 issue 2

Fellow readers, how was your week? It was super hot here in the UK on Friday (32°C / 90°F), and I got my Hadley Baxter on, drinking cold-brew coffee with almond milk. I hope you managed to stay comfortable no matter the conditions where you are, and that you’re having even half as good a time with Great Circle as I am.

So, what is there to talk about this week? Shipstead once again flexed her novelistic muscles a little in this span of the novel, giving us more colour and texture about Montana life, bootleggers, brothels, Hadley in a worm cave, and — of course — ‘An Incomplete History of Sitting-in-the-Water Grizzly’. The world of the novel grew another size or two, and I felt increasingly immersed within it.

In particular, this week, I felt the emergence of the theme of gender. That’s not to say that it was absent from the novel’s first 107 pages, but, as the Graves twins hit puberty, it becomes more prominent in the narrative. Where Marian & Jamie were once virtually indistinguishable, now their appearances are changing and their personalities are deepening: solidifying into who they are going to become. We find Marian, on the one hand, rueing this gradual cleaving from her brother:

It seemed to her that Jamie had an obligation to go along with her whims. He should have recognized her determination as immovable and done as she’d asked. She’d closed the scissors partly to punish him for his doubt she would follow through. (p109)

whilst, also, feeling that she still understands him intuitively:

She knew Jamie would come soon to console her. (ibid.)

There is also a wonderful little insight into Marian’s personality in this moment, when her brother cautions that Berit will punish them for Marian cutting her hair, and Marian replies ‘But she couldn’t glue it back on’ (p108). We witness Marian as she seeks for and finds new ways to express herself, free from what loose constraints her uncle has placed upon her, but also free from the expectations of others. Trout, at one point, admonishes her for being ‘obtuse’ (p.135), for failing to admit that things have been easier for him as a man than they will be for Marian. But, the reader knows well enough, Marian understands this perfectly. The act of cutting her hair short is certainly practical (allowing her access to employment she would otherwise be refused), but it is also an act of defiance.

Her hair was a declaration, not an admission. All things should be declarations, not admissions. (p114)

Declarations, of course, are for independence and intentions; admissions are for guilt and weaknesses. In this gesture, as elsewhere, Marian actively brings about the version of herself that she feels to be true. The cost of doing so, however, is that she begins to increase the distance to her brother. In turn, this jeopardises Marian’s sense of her place in the world. Her relationship to her brother has operated, to this point, as a kind of harmonising force.

People thought being twins made them the same, but it was balance, not sameness, she felt with him.

As the vitality of that bond is altered, it could spell uncertainty for Marian. Of course, this week’s reading alludes to this imbalance in the form of another metaphor: flying in cloud cover. Trout’s insistence that ‘getting right with the horizon isn’t easy’ (p199) could be read as shorthand for many of Marian’s struggles in the novel (not to mention Hadley’s, who we will get to shortly). When Trout tells her that ‘your inner ear is a liar’ (p198) he is counselling against listening to the voice in your head. Disaster awaits the pilot who ignores the instruments, and instead relies too fully on their faulty intuition.

‘The thing about flying,’ Trout said, ‘is that it’s unnatural. You’ve got to train yourself not to follow your instincts but to build up new instincts instead.’ (p177)

Happily for us, Trout also points out to Marian how this may apply in her life more widely, suggesting to her that she takes the same approach to accepting Barclay’s offer to pay for her lessons. Yes, her pride pushes back against it, but — Trout says (at p.179) — she stands to benefit if she can move past that, and take a longer view. This is advice that Marian seems to take, repeating it to Barclay herself (at p201), but all the while we are privy to her apprehension over the lack of clarity surrounding the true nature of her relationship with him.

This relationship too is rooted in gender. The first encounter between the two occurs in the inauspicious surrounds of a brothel… my apologies: a House of Virtue. The moment is rendered, by Shipstead (at p144), frozen in a wonderfully cinematic shot / reverse-shot fashion, where we are told one after the next what each of the two of them notice about the other. The location, and the manner in which Marian is dressed, are both inherently sexual, and it is difficult to read Barclay’s immediate impulse towards her as asexual (despite the fact that she is 14). As the narrative and the years progress, we are witness to Marian’s ambivalence around this. She is not un-attracted to Barclay — in so much as she presently understands these feelings — but she is determined not to be beholden to him (or anyone), and thus resents and fears the possibility that his helping her is conditional upon a physical or romantic relationship that is yet to emerge.

In one of Marian’s attempts to reconcile her confusion around this, she draws a comparison between her feelings towards flying, and Barclay’s feelings towards her:

‘You know how you said I was someone you needed to know right from the start? Even when you had no idea who I was?’ He nods. ‘It’s the same.’ Love, she means. Love sprung from nothing. (p209)

A little later, Jamie draws a comparison that sounds similar, but is actually markedly different:

She says, ‘I happened to catch his attention in a certain way, and once he has an idea in his head he doesn’t let go.’

‘So you have one thing in common, at least.’ (p214)

Jamie, of course, is commenting on obsession, rather than love. Which of them is closer to the truth (of Marian’s relationship with flying, or Barclay’s relationship with Marian), we will have to read on to learn.

OK, a little bit of Hadley. There were another couple of moments related once more to the idea of Hadley’s lack of focus and determination, in contrast to Marian’s abundance thereof. When reminiscing about the comparative shabbiness of her (relatively wealthy) parents’ home, she thinks:

I don’t know if they wanted to live that way of just didn’t want badly enough to change. (p184)

This is almost certainly part self-recrimination on Hadley’s part, as she ponders the extent of her plan to ‘wait for something to happen’ (p188) and replays ‘the default dream of everyone in Hollywood’ (ibid.): to win an Oscar. In a neat reversal earlier in the week’s reading, we see Marian — defensive in the face of Barclay’s entreaties — (unconvincingly) try a similar attitude on for size:

‘But what do you want for yourself? Beyond this ambition to “help out”?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing. The usual things.’

Where Hadley’s languor feels like a deeply ingrained aspect of her overall cynicism, this moment of coyness for Marian comes off as comically out of character. She knows full well, and in the fibre of her being, precisely what she wants, and so, her attempt to deflect from it rings entirely hollow.

Shipstead deepens Hadley somewhat this week, by offering the reader more insight into what lies beyond her cynicism: a profound lack of self-confidence. Her therapist-mandated picturing of a glowing tiger may seem an ineffectual solution, but the problem is real and evident. ‘What was I capable of? I didn’t actually know’ (p192) she thinks at one point, before relapsing once more into picturing someone else’s ambition. Contrast this with Marian’s confidence, not only in herself, but in the correctness of her chosen path:

She would also need a flying teacher and an airplane, but she did not doubt those would materialize. (p110)

In this week’s section of the novel, Shipstead begins to offer each of them a sense of some progress, and she artfully choses similar phrasing in both cases. Elated by the predicted materialising of her teacher and airplane, Marian thinks to herself:

She was going to learn to fly, and then she was going to go to work as a pilot. A force was pressing up from under her. Lift. It was lift. (p181)

Likewise, one of Hadley’s chapters ends with Sir Hugo almost literally dropping a script in her lap, and saying:

This will be a very good role for you, my dear. This will elevate you. (p192)

How will each of them cope with the opportunities presented to them? Will Marian’s manic ambition, or Hadley’s bent for self-destruction, prove ruinous? I think you know how to find out.

Some notes from fellow readers, and this week AB sends word of an interesting start to their reading:

Even by my own usually-a-bit-behind standards I’ve got this read along off to a particularly chaotic start because…I…was sure I had ordered the book, but…I hadn’t.

Last Monday lunchtime I nipped out to the local bookshop who were - according to a hand written sign in the window - closed for a stock take until Wednesday.

Sign be damned, a man with fantastic eyebrows came to the door but he hadn’t heard of Great Circle and they didn’t have it. He did take a few minutes to explain to me that it was a aero/nautical term, I think for fear that I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

JD tried to trick me into revealing spoilers:

Mildly triggered by the amount of child abuse/negligence/general misery so far… it’s gonna get more upbeat right? It’s not like the main character is gonna crash into the sea and die…. right?

No dice JD, I’m like a steel vice of plot information. The only way to find out the answer to your question, is to read on! (Or, possibly, to revisit p195.)

SS was worried about Hadley’s reading habits:

I have a “thing”, quite visceral about people reading books in the bath, so you can imagine my horror when about 5 pages after Hugo tells her “don’t be careless with it,” Hadley starts reading Marian’s book in the bath! Aagh!

And, on the flip-side of that coin, to be honest, it kind of looks like MC may have burned their book!

→ Remember: you can always get in touch via mail@sipped.ink

Let’s round this thing out with some miscellaneous bullets:

• This wouldn’t be my read-along newsletter if I didn’t take every opportunity to be pedantic. As such, I have to point out that the chapter titled ‘An Incomplete History of Marian’s Fifteenth and Sixteenth Years’, should read ‘…Sixteenth and Seventeenth Years’, given that it covers the period after she turns 15 and 16, respectively.

• This short piece by Maggie Shipstead for LitHub, covers the work that goes into building a believable-feeling fictional world:

Great Circle, especially, was a research nightmare. The bulk of it is historical, and it takes place in roughly a bajillion different settings. (Okay, not really a bajillion.) As I wrote, I was continuously frustrated by how often I had to stop and look things up. Sometimes the most mundane questions — when would a house in Missoula, Montana, have gotten electricity and indoor plumbing? — were the hardest to answer. But the tiny, obscure technical questions were pains in the butt, too. Aviation, as a subject, seemed like an irresistible pedant magnet. I was haunted by the specter of the readers, usually men, who come to book events seemingly for the express purpose of standing up and offering corrections, having their know-it-all moment in the sun.

• In closing, here’s an image from the first time I read Great Circle, and felt inspired to fire up Microsoft Flight Simulator. They didn’t have a Steerman in the game, but this is a shot of a biplane I took out over Missoula, MT just to get a better sense of what Marian’s lessons might look like.

And we’re done: two weeks in, and four to go. Listen, I’m not naive: I live with one fellow reader and, last time I checked, their bookmark was on p270. A little bird has also told me that another one of you has almost finished. I can’t be mad at it; the book’s too darn good! Just don’t go spoiling anything for the others, or you’ll face a court-martial, and exile from the Sipped Ink read-along FOREVERMORE. Regardless of whether you’re reading to schedule or not, I hope to see you back here in your inbox next Sunday, to talk about the novel right up to, and including, p332.

For now ✌🏻

— Adam