Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead

 For my last birthday, I was lucky enough to be given a book subscription from Mr B's Emporium in Bath. (Thanks to my son for this incredibly generous present!) Each month, I receive a beautifully packaged book, chosen for me by one of their booksellers after an initial consultation about the kind of books I like. What I should have done, of course, was to have written some notes about each one as I finished it. I didn't do that, so now I'm playing catch-up.

The Great Circle was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and also for the Women's Prize for Fiction. It's a novel about Marian Graves, a (fictional) early female aviator - a contemporary of Amelia Earhart. It's a huge novel which is fitting, because the peak of Marian's flying career is her attempt to fly the Great Circle - to circumnavigate the globe.

Marian's profound love of flying is at the heart of the book, but it takes in much more: set mostly in America, it takes in a good deal of the twentieth century. The story starts, not with a plane, but with a ship: the Josephina Eterna. The owner's wife, Matilda, is given the job of launching the ship - but she is perturbed: the ship is named after her husband's mistress, and also, no-one has explained to her exactly what she has to do. The captain, Addison Graves, tries to help her, but the bottle misses its target: a bad omen. A few years later, the ship sinks. Many passengers are lost, and Graves takes the blame, though the fault was really the owner's. As a result, he spends several years in prison, and his two children, of whom Marian is one, are sent into the care of his kindly but rather feckless brother.

When he comes out of prison, he briefly comes to see his children, but then fades away again, leaving behind him crates full of his belongings - books and mementoes of his travels. Marian is fascinated by the accounts of explorers and travellers - especially those who go to the far north - and so the seeds are set for her love of adventure. As a teenager, she has a flight in a plane which is part of a travelling show, and she is hooked. She gets to know an older man, wealthy but ruthless, who will finance her flying if she will marry him. She makes the deal, but eventually needs to attain freedom, and flies north.

And so her story continues, taking in a stint in Britain during the war taxi-ing planes for the RAF. 

But there is also another, secondary heroine, a film star called Hadley. Her story is contemporary. She is something of a lost soul, caught up in various scandals. She is playing the part of Marian in a film, and becomes fascinated by her. Marian's great circumnavigation ended, apparently, in disaster: Hadley's own parents died when she was young in a plane crash. Clearly, there are parallels.

I do see the need for this parallel story - I think. It provides a way of exploring what happened to Marian, and makes it into a mystery story with all the tension and suspense which that entails. But I didn't like Hadley as a character. She's selfish, shallow and uncaring - or so she seems to me - and I didn't like being in her company. But she takes up a relatively small part of the book - and from other reviews that I've read, other readers don't have the same reaction to her as I did. So don't be put off by my dislike of Hadley - you probably won't feel the same about her, and anyway, there is so much more to enjoy in this book. The prose, for one thing - it is beautifully written. Here, for example:, is the first paragraph:

I was born to be a wanderer. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave. Some birds fly until they die. I have made a promise to myself: My last descent won't be the tumbling helpless kind but a sharp gannet plunge - a dive with intent, aimed at something deep in the sea.