vol 8 issue 4

Fellow readers, please accept my apologies for the lateness of this issue of Sipped Ink. It has been impacted by my having been engrossed by an… eventful F1 British Grand Prix. Nevertheless, I am here, and I have notes for you — we are ⅔ of the way through Great Circle and, my goodness things are shaping up.

Our milestone this week — again, more by luck than judgement on my part — has fallen at a very interesting point in the story. Having been presaged by the pocket biography of Charles Lindbergh, war has dawned. As I did when first reading the novel, you may also have found yourself doing the maths when Marian is born in 1914, and predicting that her status as a female pilot would take her into a complicated relationship with the events of World War II. Narratively speaking, it represents a unique kind of force, set to bend and shape the lives of many of the novel’s characters. But that’s all for next week. In the meantime, for our purposes, the week’s reading has encapsulated an evolution in the dilemmas we found both Marian & Jamie afflicted with last week.

So let’s start there. In last week’s newsletter we talked about the manner in which Shipstead had set up parallel predicaments for the Graves twins. Jamie was heartbroken after his commitment to his values (amongst other factors) had brought an end to his romance with Sarah Fahey. Marian was trapped in a complicated, abusive marriage to Barclay Macqueen, forbidden to fly and increasingly pressured to get pregnant.

This week, we saw resolutions — of sorts — to both of these situations. Marian finally found courage enough to (literally) take flight, and wrestle back control of her life from Barclay. She is aloft once more, though not entirely free, forced to live under a pseudonym in remote Alaska. Only when she learns that Barclay has been jailed, and later killed, does the ballast on Marian’s life begin to lift away. ‘“I need a real end to it, an agreement of some kind. I can’t feel as though I owe him anything”’ she had told Caleb (p361), and (perhaps) he has helped to provide one for her.

Jamie, for his part, almost stumbles into confronting his own complicated history with Sarah. When they are reunited, there is first a momentary suggestion that they may have grown toward one another. Quickly, however, we find that (to even his own surprise) Jamie has grown beyond Sarah. He is dismayed not so much by her conventional life, but at her expressed dissatisfaction with it, in combination with her refusal to accept any semblance of responsibility for claiming anything else for herself. This seems to be a catalyst for Jamie, to recognise an evolution in himself: he is no longer a young boy, angered and terrified by the injustice of the world. In Sarah he sees the results of complacency, and can feel emboldened with the life he has begun to build for himself. The clash results (in our final sentence of the week!) in Jamie letting go of his emotional attachment to Sarah, and — more importantly — to his idea of what his life with her could have been.

Another way of looking at all of this, is through the lens of the cohesive self. Both Graves siblings have been working to actualise the versions of their lives that they feel to be true: to find harmony between their inner selves, and their outward lives. Shipstead surrounds them all the while, with counterpoints. Whilst Jamie is seeking, in his portrait paintings, to find ‘the tidal zone where a person’s inner and outer selves wash together’ (p380), his model in one instance is an example of a fracturing of self. Due to be sent abroad, and married to a man she has not met, she expresses her dissatisfaction, in part by renouncing the name by which her grandmother calls her:

“It’s my Japanese name,” she says. After a pause, she adds, “I don’t like it. I’d rather just have one name.” (p381)

Consider also Marian’s experience in Alaska. It is a place of exile for her, and as such not somewhere that she can truly belong. Whilst she certainly finds a way to be there temporarily, she remains a perennial visitor. ‘You can’t become an Alaskan. It’s just not possible’ she ruminates (p396), knowing that her true place is elsewhere, or perhaps, nowhere. Tellingly, Shipstead offers in contrast a picture of Marian’s happiness that is unattainable, impossible:

The impulse to flee persists; the horizon beckons. If she could just go farther, live nowhere, possess only an airplane, and if that airplane never needed to land, then maybe she would feel free. (p375)

Nevertheless, once free to leave Alaska, free to shed her own assumed name, we now find Marian — like Jamie — at another turning point. As we move past this epoch in the characters’ lives, released from the burdens we found them struggling under last week, the Graves twins will now take their next steps into futures that stand to be shaped by new, larger forces outside of their control. In preparation for this, perhaps, we find Shipstead introducing with sharper focus the idea of boundlessness. Jamie, in his paintings, is experimenting with techniques that increase the sense of space and depth. So much so, that he has started to think of the space itself as the subject:

“I struggle with the same thing in my paintings. Everything I want to paint is too big, and so I’ve started to think what I really want to paint is the too-bigness….” (p440)

Like his sister, Jamie is pursuing — in his own way — a manner of encompassing as much as possible. Or else, he is exploring the limits of his ability to do so. Marian’s expression of the same drive is to always chase the next horizon. Even on her brief return to the Montana cabin in which she grew up, she does not pause to dwell upon the past: her eyes are always and only on the next journey, and on what lies ahead. As their journeys continue, let us remind ourselves of the Map of Marian’s Flight, which immediately precedes the text itself. Specifically, perhaps we should keep in mind the section missing, at the bottom right, from the otherwise Great Circle.

No Hadley analysis from me this time around, as I think her narrative was comparatively stagnant this week. Perhaps things will pick up for her in the week ahead; who amongst us could possibly say? Well, the three people who have been in touch to say they’ve already finished the novel could say, if it wasn’t for the fact that they live in constant waking fear of breaking the golden rule of the Sipped Ink read-along!

For my part, I will see you back here next Sunday, to discuss the novel up to p551. I have faith that you will enjoy the penultimate week of reading. Until then, remember: ‘Tea is plants’ (p370).

✌🏻

— Adam