I hate the never-ending day. The sun circles me like a vulture. I want a respite of stars... Circles are wondrous because they are endless. Anything endless is wondrous. But endlessness is torture, too. I knew the horizon could never be caught but still chased it. [loc. 441]
On New Year's Day 1950, pilot Marian Graves and navigator Eddie Bloom set off to circumnavigate the earth the hard way, longitudinally, passing over both north and south poles: a great circle, the longest journey possible on this planet. And in 2014, film star Hadley Baxter is trying to reinvent her career, and perhaps herself, by playing Marian in a biopic.
Marian and her twin brother Jamie narrowly escape shipwreck during the first world war, and are reared in the wilds of Montana by their melancholy, alcoholic uncle. Marian is determined to learn to fly, and makes a deal with a devil to do so. She runs bootleg booze from Canada, joins the Air Transport Auxiliary in Britain when the second world war breaks out, and goes missing at the age of 36, somewhere between Antarctica and New Zealand.
Hadley's drawn to her story, not least because her own parents vanished without trace on a flight over Lake Superior. Hadley, too, was raised by an uncle: Hadley, too, makes deals with devils to get what she wants. Not that she's sure what that is: she has been sacked from a major film franchise, very much in the Twilight vein, for having a relationship with her co-star and then blatantly cheating on him. (She has some trenchant words on the subject of real person fanfiction.) Her friend and neighbour Sir Hugo suggests that she might like to audition for the role of Marian, and she is fascinated. The film's based on a popular novel, but surely the novel is just another kind of fan-fiction? ('More than once, reading Carol's novel, I’d thought of the fan fiction Oliver and I had read about ourselves, the dollhouse feeling of it, the author gripping us so tightly we might have snapped in half.' [loc. 4512])
Hadley does discover many of Marian's secrets, but Marian -- as evidenced by her own, third-person, narrative -- is difficult to define, unknowable, perhaps even to herself. She is a surprising character, though not always a likeable one, and her sole ambition is to fly (higher, further, faster...). Hadley is easier to define and, for me, harder to empathise with, though she is capable of surprisingly philosophical insights. I'm not sure that her journey is as conclusive as Marian's, but I don't think Marian's would have worked as well without the contrast of Hadley's apparently shallow, sunlit life.
Beautiful prose, enough to make you want to go up in a small plane or out into the wilderness; a wealth of background information (aerobatics, geology, Native American myth, bootlegger economy); gender fluidity and diverse desires. I'm still thinking about this novel: the half-told hinted stories about the people who affect the course of Marian's life, and Hadley's unravelling of a layer or two of that life.
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