Marian Graves and her twin brother Jamie get off to a rough start in life, with their sea captain father going to jail for rescuing them and himself instead of going down with the ship. Sent off to live with a drunken painter of an uncle, they grow up largely independent, wandering the hills of Montana. Marian’s path in life is sealed after she sees a barnstorming plan fly over her head one day while she’s wandering through the woods.
Determined to fly, Marian works desperately to raise the money for flying lessons, facing skepticism and derision from men all the way, until she meets a wealthy man willing to give her what she wants. Though Marian knows the cost to her will be heavy, she goes along with it just the same.
In a parallel narrative set many years later, a young actress named Hadley is making a mess of her life despite enormous financial success. Orphaned by a plane crash, she got into acting as a child while living with her neglectful uncle, a minor movie director. At present, she’s been starring in a series of successful movies based on cheesy fantasy novels, but her career is in jeopardy after she’s caught cheating on her boyfriend and co-star. In an attempt to change her career trajectory, she signs for a part in a biopic of the famous pilot Marian Graves.
Great Circle is nothing if not ambitious. The novel’s length and breadth are occasionally overwhelming, and Shipstead is clearly aiming for something epochal and grand. But the criss-crossing narratives and frequent time hops are often irritating to the reader. Marian’s story is far more interesting than Hadley’s and the comparably minor third narrative following Jamie’s art career and war service. Whereas Marian faces gigantic obstacles to achieving her dreams, in both the societal forces operating against women in the early 20th century and the more tangible problems caused by a tyrannical husband, Hadley’s biggest problem is that she keeps sleeping with men she shouldn’t and getting caught while doing so. Hadley is a uniquely unsympathetic protagonist, with her blasé attitude toward her own life eroding any natural instincts the reader might have to feel badly for her. The compressed nature of Hadley’s plotline contrasts poorly with the sweep of Marian’s, which takes her through the depression, WWII, and her post-war plan to fly around the war and pass through both poles, all while Hadley is still making one movie.
Not that Marian’s story is always compelling. Shipstead runs into pacing issues here as well, dragging out parts of the story in an attempt at giving her novel grandeur. The last part of the story, following the around-the-world flight attempt, is particularly tough to wade through. A 650-page novel is a fairly big ask to make of your reader, and though it has an intriguing central protagonist and many memorable events, Great Circle in its totality does not payoff on the reader’s investment in time and effort.
