vol 8 issue 6

Fellow readers, if you’re reading this it can mean only one thing: you have completed Maggie Shipstead’s novel Great Circle! You are now free to start recommending it to anyone and everyone you know, or whom you pass in the street. That only applies if you enjoyed the book. But, judging from the tenor of the correspondence I’ve received from you over the last six weeks, I’m going to say that most of you did!

Sometimes in the final week of the summer read-along, I find that my notes focus on looking at the book as a whole, and fail to do enough analysis specific to the final section of the novel. I’m making that statement at the start here, as a way to try and focus my efforts. Luckily, I think Maggie Shipstead helps me out a little in Great Circle, by bringing to the fore some thematic work here in the final ~100 pages. So, let’s dive into it.

In its final stretch, Great Circle reveals itself more than ever to be a book interested in those two essential, contradictory characteristics of circles themselves: completion, and endlessness. We learn the end of Marian’s story, and the fact that she continued beyond it, to another ending altogether. And we learn these things in part through Hadley Baxter — herself both a woman in the middle of her own story, and also a continuation of Marian’s. Perhaps it will help us to try and tweeze apart these twin themes, to the extent that they can be separated.

First, let’s talk death! It’s all over this final section of the novel. Following Jamie perishing at sea last week, the loss of her brother affects Marian profoundly. She feels emptied out of all feeling, unable even to grieve for Ruth. In this frame of mind, at one point she gives voice to something that may also have occurred to the reader:

Sometimes she thinks she has invented the flight as an elaborate suicide. Sometimes she thinks she is immortal. (p595)

In truth, Marian’s flight also serves another purpose that has a link to Jamie. At one point, Marian dwells upon the artworks made during her brother’s later life:

he’d believed in his art, in a true relationship between three-dimensional space and printed maps, in the possibility of accurately saying I am here. (p603)

We might see Marian’s flight similarly. At least to begin with, it is partly a way for her to reassert control: she will draw a circle about the whole globe, and in doing so prove that there is nothing within it that could stop her. As it transpires, of course, Marian ultimately chooses an alternative path. She rescinds her attempt to assert her fearlessness in the face of everything, acquiescing instead to the reality that all of life cannot be contained and controlled. Again, in terms of her brother’s similar struggle:

She thinks of Jamie painting infinite space, knowing infinite space could not be painted. (p632)

Whilst it lasts, this desire for completion is mixed up inextricably with the question of death. ‘Does that mean I wish to die?’ Marian asks herself at one point. And whilst she is quick to deny it, she nevertheless attests to the fact that ‘the pure and absolute solitude in which we leave the world exerts a pull’ (p588). It is tangled too, of course, with her grief for Jamie:

I catch myself thinking that if he could die, if he could endure it, so can I, though obviously I have no choice, and it’s not something anyone endures. In fact it’s the opposite.” (p631)

Here we see the confusion in Marian’s mind between wanting finality, and wanting to endure. This liminality is a recurring question towards the end of the text. It is rendered in terms of both geographic and temporal location — for example, in this formulation by Marian (which also echoes the final note Jamie sends to Sarah, as discussed last week):

I look forward, and there is the horizon. I look back. Horizon. What’s past is lost. I am already lost to my future. (p619)

The same liminality is at play in a more metaphorical sense, with respect to the question of life & death:

Where is the border between life and oblivion? Why should anyone presume to recognize it? (p629)

Ultimately, Marian manages both finality and continuation. The gap in the circle (as pictured on the Map of Marian’s Flight, pp4-5) remains open, and — we learn — is also closed. I love the end to Marian’s story. I feel as though Shipstead renders it with a prose register detectably more poetic than elsewhere in the novel, allowing her heroine grace where earlier we have seen her struggle. These struggles have been both external (war; Barclay) and internal (the desire to prove herself; to live by her own code). The resolution to Marian’s life and story finds her at relative peace, and it is something she attains by relinquishing her attachment to ideas about herself. She is, to her core, first and foremost, a pilot. Until she is not. And then she is a shepherd. Just like Sitting in the Water Grizzly, she does not decay after her supposed death. She is Marian Graves, then she is Martin Wallace, until she is Alice Root. She completes her circumnavigation without fanfare, in the company of her childhood friend. And in so doing, ‘she returns to another beginning, closes another circle’ (p670).

This is the point at which Marian is no longer interested in a single, complete circle. Shipstead allows her to move past the alluring simplicity of that concept, to find something more complicated and more truthful:

She dies twice, the second time forty-six years after the first. She dies in the Southern Ocean; she dies on a sheep farm in the Fjordland region of New Zealand. (p661)

The reader is assisted in discovering these revelations, by Hadley Baxter. In the close of the novel Hadley’s function is revealed to be twofold. Firstly, she is the means by which we discover the truth of Marian’s later life and double-death. Secondly, Hadley embodies a continuation of that same story. Fittingly, the version of Marian she is bringing to the screen is revealed to Hadley to be inaccurate in important ways, leaving Hadley with knowledge of the undiscovered complexity. This is confirmation of her doubts about the possibility of using fragments to discern the whole. As we have witnessed her express this to Joey:

“I think sometimes people hope if they amass enough scraps eventually the whole picture will become clear.” (p648)

Earlier in the novel, Shipstead seemed to be setting up a direct contrast between Marian’s headstrong desire for self-fulfilment, and Hadley’s lackadaisical lack of direction. In the end, however, the comparison resolves into something quite different. These are two women searching for a form of escape, for both of whom peace may lie in relinquishing the need to instantiate a specific version of themselves. Though it lies outside the bounds of the novel, the hope for Hadley is that she can find in Marian’s example the bravery required to move beyond the self-image she feels both attached to and ashamed of.

I think Hadley already has the capacity for this evolution, and that it’s discernible in moments such as her earlier comment to a Vanity Fair reporter: “I’m not sure love is something you find […] I think love is something you believe” (p560). In the moment, Hadley means this cynically: love as delusion. Her salvation will be decided, in part, by the question of whether she can make the leap toward seeing the hope in this same sentiment. With Marian as her example, the spark for finding a new life for herself — and establishing a new relationship with herself — lies in changing what she believes about herself. She is Katie McGee; she is Katerina; she is Marian Graves. She is a troubled, self-destructive movie star… until, perhaps, she is not.

Let’s wrap things up with the briefest of notes:

• Look out for the TV adaptation of Great Circle, which has been optioned by Picturestart, but has no production timeline yet as far as I’m aware. (Send me your casting ideas!)

• EE forwarded this story about recognition for the female pilots of the Battle of Britain;

• AF wrote to say they thought this was the most enjoyable summer read-along yet, and that they forgive me for last year.

So there you have it; another Sipped Ink summer read-along has come and gone. I’d like to thank you all for participating. Whether this was your first time joining in, or you’ve been with us in previous years, I sure hope you enjoyed this novel, and that the weekly newsletter brought you something of interest. As always, I have enjoyed receiving your thoughts on the book, and photos of you reading it in exotic locales — my thanks once more to everyone who sent such things. The archive of all these weekly newsletters will remain up alongside archives for the previous seven volumes. (I do plan to do some work on the site soon, but if things disappear it’s only temporary.)

Whatever you read next, I hope it’s at least half as enjoyable as Great Circle. If you would like to stay in touch, you can always write to me at mail@sipped.ink. If you think you might miss receiving an email from me each Sunday, I also write a weekly personal newsletter (which often includes some book stuff) — you can subscribe to that here.

Until next time!

✌🏻

— Adam