Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

As a reader I am inspired by stories that set my imagination afire, bring chills to my spine, tears to my eyes, and comfort in this baffling world. Great Circle is that kind of novel. 

As a genealogist, I am fascinated by the hidden stories of my ancestors. I can never learn enough to fully flesh out the details of their lives. What it was like to leave their homes and reinvent themselves in a new land? What lead to the seduction that left them unmarried mothers? How did they face the devastation of a child drowning in the canal they had to pass every day? I only know that they survived, for a while, and then they died, taking their secrets with them. As someday, I will, too.

Life throws us into despair--all of us. We give in and give up, or we resist and struggle to the surface of the water, take another breath, and reinvent our life in the after-world. Sometimes there is freedom in reinvention. Sometimes it saves us.

Great Circle is one of those massive reads that sweep us across time and history, a long journey into character's entire lives. They are orphaned or neglected and unprotected by unreliable adults, and make their way as best they can. They lose loves and are loved by monsters. Dreams are fragile and come with a cost. Again and again, they must reinvent a life with a new name or in a new place or with a new love or the end of a love.

First, there is the story of orphans Marian Graves and her brother Jamie who run wild with neighbor boy Caleb, their adult caretakers unreliable. When barnstormers pass through, Marian becomes obsessed with the idea of flying. Caleb cuts her hair so she can pass as a boy to earn money towards flying lessons by secret moonshine deliveries.

Barclay was a criminal, and he was rich, and he was used to getting what he wanted. And he wanted Marian from the first time he saw her as a girl. She entered into a dreadful bargain: he would pay for her flying lessons, and she understood the unspoken agreement that someday she would be his.

Trapped into an abusive and controlling marriage, Marian escapes, disappears into Alaska, reinventing herself as a bush pilot. When WWII broke out, she volunteers for the British Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying warplanes. She meets Ruth, who becomes her great love, and Ruth's gay husband Eddie. But it is Caleb she still turns to when broken.

After the war with its many losses, Marian is offered financing to fund her dream of flying around the world, pole to pole, she only trusts Eddie to be her navigator. After Antarctica, they are believed to have been lost at sea.

Then there is Hadley, also an orphan and abused by her uncle, who became a beloved child actress, and has a breakdown at age 20. Now, she has a change to reinvent herself in a movie about Marian's life, based on the journal Marian left behind at Antarctica before she disappeared.

Hadley goes on a quest to learn about Marian, discovering the truth of what happened on that great circle trip from pole to pole.

Marian's story gives Hadley a sense of freedom and control. And, and it can free us, too, showing us how to live with courage even in the darkest of times. How we must know what we want, and to always work for our dreams.

This past year has been a horror show of death and fear of death, political clashes and unimaginable chaos, outbreaks of hate and violence. We know full well the disappointments and pain of this world.  

A story can help us to heal. To know we are not alone, that there is a way to get through the hell and live into a moment of joy and moments of grace that can be enough to live on. This is the gift of literature. 

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Great Circle
by Maggie Shipstead
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pub Date May 4, 2021  
ISBN: 9780525656975
hardcover $28.95 (USD)

 from the publisher

An unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost—Great Circle spans Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles.

After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There--after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes--Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.

A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fates--and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times--collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.

Victim or Opportunist? Beryl Markham's Remarkable Life

Biographical fiction is an interesting genre consisting of one person's imagined probing into the lives of real people. The incidents and dialogue, the reflections of the characters, their emotional life revealed in the work, are not to be considered "truth" but interpretation.

I have been reading many of the NetGalley biographical fiction books about writers and historical figures. There have been so many of them available! The genre has grown wildly over the last decade.

Circling the Sun by Paula McClain will be a best seller. Her previous novel The Paris Wife was well received. The novel is written in the first person voice of Beryl Markham, who was raised in Africa and was the first female horse trainer and the first aviatrix to cross the Atlantic. She was friends with Karen Blixen (Isak Dineson) and her lover Denys Hatten Finch--who was also involved with Beryl.

I enjoyed reading about Beryl's childhood in Africa. Her family left Britain for Kenya where her father farmed and trained horses. The family split when Beryl was four years old. Her mother and brother returning to England, leaving Beryl with her father. She grew up in exquisite freedom, hanging with the natives, unschooled, unkempt. Beryl's first language was Swahili. She learned to hunt with the local native boys. She dealt with a lion attack.

As Beryl came into her middle teens British expat social pressure prevailed; she "came out" and met their neighbor, an alcoholic war veteran who decided to marry her. And at age 17 she married Jock Purvis. It didn't work out. McClain's Purvis is overly sensitive and has little patience to teach Beryl how to be a wife.

She is 18 when she leaves Purvis. Determined to be self supporting she trains to become the first women horse trainer. She becomes involved in a 'friends with benefits relationship', and then falls in love with Denys who is with the married Blixen. She and Denys snatch moments together.

Beryl finds herself pregnant and goes to England to seek help. A friend finds her a "protector" who will pay for an abortion with the expectation that Beryl will be his mistress. Still married to Purvis and in love with Denys, totally without means of self support, she acquiesces. Sadly her new duties include wife swapping.

Her later marriage to Mansfield Markham was also a failure. He kept their child and sent Beryl packing.

McClain's portrayal of Beryl as victim was interesting. Her inability to form lasting relationships could be interpreted as a natural outcome of her mother's abandonment and her father's willingness to marry her off ASAP.

Here we are half way through the story and you see where things are going. Beryl can't make a good decision, she has little power over her own life, and men rule the world. This is not the Beryl I expected to read about: The convention-defying, pioneering spirit with a masculine independence who didn't believe in boundaries. Reading about Beryl online she appears more self-determined. She is quoted as saying she had causal sex with numerous men because there was nothing much else to do out in the bush. And yet she is supposed to have rejected the advances of Ernest Hemingway when they were out in the bush!

I wanted to read Beryl's book instead of McClain's. Not that McClain's book is "bad", but because I wanted to know how Beryl saw herself.

McClain's book starts and ends with Beryl flying across the Atlantic. This 1936 event, the most important achievement of Beryl's life, frames the story which is really an extended flash back over her life. That is just too bad. I would have liked to read the flight story in its entirety: Beryl remaining awake for 21 hours in a time before auto-pilot; the long cold hours flying blind; the crash landing in Nova Scotia; painfully recalling Denys's death in a plane crash. What was Beryl imagining as she plunged earthwards? What was her joy and satisfaction of surviving and finding fame? Days after her success, her flight trainer Tom Campbell Black died in a plane crash. After that she lost interest in flying.

McClain shows Beryl liked to read, including poetry. Some biographers contend that Beryl did not like to read and had no patience to write, suggesting that her memoir was actually penned by journalist husband No. 3, Raoul Schumacher. In 1942 West with the Night was published  and sold well. Then it was forgotten. When it was reprinted in 1983 it brought recognition--and much needed income--to the aging and impoverished Beryl.

Circling the Sun is an enjoyable read. Today's women will like this softened version of Beryl.

To learn more about Beryl Markham:
http://scandalouswoman.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-many-lives-of-beryl-markham.html
http://www.adventure-journal.com/2013/04/historical-badass-aviator-beryl-markham/
http://clutterbuck.blogspot.com/2005/02/beryl-clutterbuck.html

I thank the publisher for a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Circling the Sun
Paula McClain
Random House-Ballantine
$28 hard cover
Publication Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 9780345534187

+++++

An interesting article on the genre by Slate Magazine states,"...a flood of what amounts to biographical fan fiction has swept conventional literary biography out of the way." Talking about Vanessa and Her Sister, which I reviewed last year, the article suggests that the difference between biography and novels is that the novelist can "sift and sort through evidence to make a character out of the remains of a person. But only novelists get to throw out everything that doesn't fit."