vol 8 issue 5

Fellow readers, we approach the end! And yet, in at least one important respect, we have yet to really begin. Perhaps it’s the novel’s title, and perhaps it’s the publisher’s synopsis as provided on the back, but you likely cracked open Great Circle for the first time under the impression that you would be reading about the trials and tribulations endemic to undertaking the mammoth task of circumnavigating the globe. Here we are, with little more than 100 pages to go, and Marian is yet even to set off on that journey. For, as will now be apparent, Great Circle is actually about Marian’s whole life, her ambitions, and the lives and ambitions of those around her. (Plus, you know… Hadley.)

I think we should talk about Jamie a bit this week, since he has now left us. As we’ve discussed previously, his rise from bit player in the front half of the novel, to being the focus in some of the latter sections, comes as something of a surprise. Now that he has passed out of the text, perhaps we’re in a better position to discuss the role he plays within the novel as a whole. (For what it’s worth, I think we’ll do something similar next week, for Ms. Baxter.)

Let me start by saying that I love that Shipstead brings Jamie to the Maria Fortuna: sister ship of the doomed Josephina Eterna, the sinking of which he only barely escaped as an infant. This choice is the kind of unashamedly romantic literary gesture that puts some readers off, but — especially in the wake (pun unintended) of his death soon thereafter — there’s a sense of closure about it. In a way, Jamie has completed his own circle: from one disaster at sea, to another, he dies eventually as he almost did in the beginning: in an ‘incomprehensible world of fire and water’ (p546). When Marian learns of his death, one of her reflections — during an ensuing depressive episode — is that ‘She and Jamie had always been meant to wind up in the ocean together’ (p550). We must tread lightly here, so as not to cross into the material that yet lies ahead, but, what do we think to this idea of fate in the novel? Doubtlessly, it is a blurry line between Shipstead choosing to introduce the kismet of Jamie’s boarding the Maria Fortuna, and the idea that Jamie Graves was always destined to die at sea. I’m not sure, however, that I have felt the hand of destiny in any prevalent manner in the text. As I’ve written in previous issues of this newsletter, the novel feels to me to be far more interested in characters’ struggles within themselves, and against both personal inauthenticity, and those worldly forces that would make them betray their values.

There is, of course, the matter of Marian’s having always felt destined to fly. Yet, as we have seen, the plane and tutor that she was so baselessly confident the Universe would provide for her, in fact came at a heavy cost. But, back to Jamie: towards the end of his life we get some insights that feel important to me in understanding Jamie’s function in the novel. First, let’s take this passage:

After a week, Jamie went up with a bomber crew, but the XO was right. He didn’t see anything. They dropped bombs into the gray nothing just to conserve fuel. “Stupid motherfuckers,” the navigator said, and Jamie didn’t know who he meant, the Japanese or their own commanders or the bombs themselves. The thought struck him that, up in the air, they were no different from planes that vanished. Only their eventual return to Adak distinguished them. Being aloft meant being lost to everyone but yourself, and he wondered if that appealed to Marian. Or maybe she didn’t notice anymore. (p502)

This is a scene, not unlike others depicting Jamie’s time at war, characterised by dislocation and futility. There is a sense of placelessness to it: the plane surrounded by gray (sic), Jamie (and the rest of crew) unsure of their location and unconvinced about the purpose of their mission. Needlessly dropping munitions, simply to conserve fuel, is about the most destructive picture of purposelessness that I can conjure. Jamie ponders whether his sister enjoys the solitude of flight: the way in which it separates you from everyone else. I think this is Shipstead using Jamie as a counterpoint to Marian. We know him to be enormously principled, and that his youth in particular was characterised by feelings of great pain and dissatisfaction, born of his deep empathy for living things. In this way, Jamie is the more connected of the Graves twins. I don’t mean socially, necessarily (his modest success as an artist offers him at least some form of entrée to circles we find he has little interest in), but rather that his emotions, and his place in the world have always been more complicatedly entangled with the lives of those around him. This is how Jamie relates to the world: through people (and other living things) and through feeling. His sister, by contrast, is consistently engaged in attempts to free herself from entanglements. She will not be owned or owing; she will make her own way, alone if necessary, and will break any convention that would seek to hold her back. This is the truth of Marian, of course, though the novel sees her struggle with it, particularly throughout her marriage to Barclay.

Jamie enters the war out of a sense of obligation, which in-and-of-itself is not uncommon for him. But the only place he can find that accords in any way with his principles (to cherish life, and not to do harm), is as a documentarian. He has engaged in a form of this practice before, working as a portraitist. But, by contrast, his wartime work is impersonal, forcing him in to observing nothing less than what the worst in people is capable of bringing into the world. This brings us to the second passage I’d like to highlight: Jamie’s note to Sarah, which accompanies the sketchbook he sends her.

Technically this belongs to the United States Navy, and it’s not mine to give. But I don’t want to send it to Washington, and I don’t want to carry it around anymore. Would you keep it for me? Maybe I want to leave something with you so I have an excuse to see you again—yes, I do—but really the reason I’ll come back is because I love you, and what I’ve left of myself can never be reclaimed. (p531)

I find this enormously sad, in that it denotes Jamie’s understanding of what entering the war has cost him. It feels as though he also understands that leaving the note itself is futile — a gesture made too late. He at least makes his admission of love for Sarah, but immediately undermines his own suggestion that he could reclaim himself, or any sense of a life made whole, by returning to her. A few pages later we find him in a still darker place, contemplating the futility of another missive, this time to his sister:

What could he tell her? That the war had crushed and smoothed him into a different substance entirely, something hard and flat? Apparently he was a person who could watch men drown and feel no pity. He’d been present for every minute, every second of his own life, and he hadn’t known himself. He’d thought he could paint the war and not belong to the war. He’d fancied himself an observer, but there was no such thing here. (p544)

Of course, Jamie’s exasperation and depression here distort the truth for him. He was not, all along, the man he ends up as. He had not been pretending throughout the rest of his life to care about the world and its inhabitants. The obverse: his experiences at war have corrupted the person Jamie was, into something else. Something, ultimately, that he could not live with. And thus, we might return to our question of destinies, and ask whether some force ultimately takes out of Jamie’s hands a decision he was moving towards. Destiny, the ocean, Maggie Shipstead? Take your pick. But, by the time death arrives for Jamie Graves, he has been moving in its direction for a while.

This is already quite long, and I’ve not so much as touched upon the events in Marian’s life during this week’s reading. Quickly then: just as she did as a girl, as a bootlegger, and — after an interval oppressed by Barclay — in Alaska, Marian has managed to find her place amidst the war. It has changed her, perhaps, but not broken her in anything like the way it has her brother. She has learned, or discovered, something new in herself: a passion for women. Marian is unfazed by the mere fact that it is ‘expected for girls to like men’ (p519), shrugging off Ruth’s (somewhat needy) entreaties as to Marian’s experiences. And, characteristically, she also does not let her new attachment to Ruth adversely affect her when the war forces them apart:

It wasn’t that Marian didn’t miss Ruth. Rather, she took her missing and sealed it away. Her natural inclination was to carry on, to think of other things. (p537)

It is not until her brother’s death that Marian allows any of her wartime experiences to really get to the core of her. And then, of course, she is distraught. The loss of Jamie is so fundamental that she feels as though ‘[f]light itself should have been revealed to be an illusion’ (p549). Reconsider this encapsulation of their relationship, from early in the novel:

People thought being twins made them the same, but it was balance, not sameness, she felt with him. (p152)

Without Jamie in her life, what is next for Marian? She once feared that ‘[w]ithout him she was like a too-light canoe, at the mercy of the current’ (p102). If true, we will have to read on to see in which direction the current sweeps her.

This week, it is my pleasure to include a wonderful contribution from one of your fellow readers; SS sends this, regarding their mother-in-law:

The woman in the photo is C’s mother, who was French. It was taken in 1951 by C’s father, in Saint-Dizier. However, C’s mother actually learned to fly right at the end of WWII, after the Americans had arrived in France. She was from a large family, and some of her older sisters were only really interested in going out dancing with GIs, but Madeleine only wanted to fly. She started in gliders, and then, probably shortly after the war, learnt to fly small aeroplanes, and flew when she could until she moved to England in the late 40s. She was born in 1924, so would have first flown a glider as a late teen, or perhaps when she was 20.

SS also asks a question, to which I invite your replies:

[I’m wondering] whether you might be slightly overplaying the “literary” merits of the book, and whether it seemed a strange choice to make the Booker shortlist? But then, I wonder whether this might just be because the writing seems so effortless, and an expectation that a “literary novel” should be a more “difficult” read (see Marlon James) and not so enjoyable and a page turner! I’d certainly be interested in knowing whether other Sipped Ink readers feel the same.

So, there you have it, a good question, and a timely one. You can send your thoughts on the above, and on the novel in general to mail@sipped.ink and I will include some of them here. I will actually be writing next week’s newsletter (covering the final section of the novel) in advance, and scheduling it to send to you on Sunday, whilst I’m away in Norfolk. But, never fear, should contributions arrive after that, I’ll put together a wrap-up email for the following Sunday (when I will actually be away again, in Kent… but you let me worry about that).

Until then, I hope that you enjoy the conclusion to this wonderful novel. I will see you back here in seven days’ time, to talk about the whole darn thing.

✌🏻

— Adam