Great Circle (2021) by Maggie Shipstead

Book Review

Great Circle (2021)

by Maggie Shipstead

   Great Circle is another 2021 Booker longlist pick, written by American author Maggie Shipstead.  At 569 pages, Great Circle puts the "long" in longlist but fortunately it's a fast ride.   Shipstead skips between past and present as she tells the intertwined tales of Marion Davies, a 20th century aviatrix with LGBTQ tendencies and Hadley Baxter, a contemporary actress who is enlisted to play Davies in a feature film after she gets terminated from her star-making Twilight-esque role in a YA fantasy franchise.  Also along for the ride is Jamie, Davies' artist-twin brother as well as a host of secondary characters- enough to fill two basketball teams.    

  Other than the late developing LGBTQ angle, it's hard to pinpoint the attraction of the Booker panel to this title as a longlist contender.  True, they love an epic work of historical fiction (See 2013, The Luminaries by Elanor Catton and the two wins by Hilary Mantel for her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.  It's nice to see a book on the longlist that can plausibly be described as a "fun read" or "page turner" but again, at 569 pages it had damn well better be.   I thought her depiction of contemporary starlet Hadley Baxter was particularly clever but even after I finished I was left asking questions about the relationship between the two characters.  I believe the idea is that the same actress would play both roles in a movie/tv version (which would be a movie/tv version of a book that is essentially about the process of making a movie based on a book...trey meta.)

  The short list gets announced next week on the 14th.   Excited to see who makes the cut!