Vivid flights

From the start, the writing voice is compelling, both being extremely assured and able to pack in huge amounts of information in a few words. Early on, we hear from one of the two protagonists that,

My parents had left me with a neighbour in Chicago [when the parents’ Cessna crashed into Lake Superior], but their last will and testament left me to Mitch. There wasn’t really anyone else. No other aunts or uncles, and my grandparents were a combination of dead, estranged, absent, and untrustworthy.

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This sentence made me laugh, as well as slow down my reading pace, to take on board all I am being told. Shipstead’s style is compact, and would be wasted if read inattentively. 

There are two storylines running in parallel, one in 2014, and one in the early half of the 20^th century. The protagonist of the contemporary storyline, the child orphaned by her parents’ Cessna crash, is Hadley, a moviestar who has fallen from grace, and is reinventing herself. The other storyline is of the Graves twins, not precisely orphaned, but effectively so. Their mother, the strange and beautiful Annabel, is on a ship with their father, captain of the ship, Addison Graves, when an explosion goes off, causing her to vanish and Addison to save the twins himself, but then be imprisoned for 9 years. In those years, the baby twins are left with Wallace, Addison’s only brother, much like Hadley’s Mitch. 

The story of Marian and Jamie Graves, the twins, growing up in Missoula, is a beautifully drawn one. Each is a compelling and attractive personality. Marian runs somewhat wild, is almost fey, and absurdly independent for a young lady of her age and class, and develops a passion for flying planes. Jamie takes after his uncle Wallace, self-teaching to become an artist. Wallace meanwhile, sinks into gambling debts and drinking, and leaves the twins to bring themselves up, largely.  

A rich cattle rancher/bootlegger falls madly in love with the teenaged Marian, and much of her early adult life (even late adolescent life) is shaped by his support as well as control, which she draws on as well as resists simultaneously. The gifted, artistic Jamie goes his own way, trying to find himself first in Seattle, then with Marian’s help, in Vancouver. The twins remain close emotionally, but not in proximity. They also have a wonderful friend in Caleb, a childhood friend, who seems more zen, more centred, more serene, and more self-effacing than possible, but whom the reader can eagerly suspend disbelief for, because he is such an attractive character too. In fact, Maggie Shipstead is extremely good at creating attractive characters.   

That said, the parallel Hadley storyline, is much less interesting. For the first half of the novel or more, she comes across as shallow, spoilt, pretty spineless (particularly compared to the likes of Marian, Jamie and Caleb, who are so self-sufficient, hardy, independent, capable, gifted). But of course, the storylines begin to converge because deprived of her stardom with Archangel, Hadley considers a new role playing Marian Graves in a movie directed by a rival of her previous director. Naturally, Hadley begins to take an interest in the mystery that surrounds Marian’s life. She comes into contact with a descendant of the Graves who shares with her relevant documents and even artefacts, which creates that direct connection between the two storylines.  

The second half of the novel mostly deals with how Marian and Jamie served in the war – Marian as a pilot of course, and Jamie as a navy combat artist. There is a lot of wonderful detail throughout the book of how women pilots were sidelined in so many ways, for so many years, despite their considerable contributions and outstanding exploits and explorations. The war years are perhaps not as compelling reading as the growing up years of Marian and Jamie, but by this stage, one is so heavily invested into these characters, it is all terrific reading. Not to mention the Hadley storyline hardly gets a look in, in this war-section of the novel, which is all to the good. That storyline of ambitions for fame and personal angst of the super-rich and super-privileged would be only annoying if interspersed with the heft and magnificence of the Graves storyline. Both Graves twins are not only exceptionally talented, but exceptionally courageous and high-principled. Jamie has some marvellous travels in wartime, but it is Marian who is the truly intrepid traveller, pilot, and adventurer. The last great adventure is Marian’s attempt to fly across the world north-south, over the poles, which at that time had never before been done.  

Much of this novel focuses on flying exploits of the 20^th century, particularly that of women pilots, the journey they attempt, the records the break, the trails they literally blaze. Here’s a sample of Shipstead’s luminous writing about Marian’s time in Alaska, when she flies planes to make a living:

“With the money she’s socked away, she buys her own plane, a high-wing Bellanca, and goes into business for herself. For a while, she flies out of Nome, lives in a ramshackle cabin near the airfield. Muskoxen wander past her outhouse, ancient-seeming creatures, haloed by their own frozen breath, their thick coast swinging around their ankles like monks’ robes. 

The price of gold has gone up, and she flies geologists to the fields, bring engineers to build the dredges and men to work them. With the seasons, she flies cannery workers and miners in and out. She flies to the reindeer herders, passing low over the swirling brown galaxies of their animals. 

People pay her in gold dust, in pelts, in firewood, in oil, in whiskey. Plenty often they try not to pay her at all.  

Plenty often she goes north over the Brooks Range, up where trees don’t bother trying to grow. In Barrow, at the Territory’s northernmost tip, seal and polar bear skins dry on stretches outside the houses, and staked dogs howl at her plane. Once, out of curiosity, she flies beyond the whale-rib gateway that marks the extent of the coast and out over the loose northern jigsaw of spring ice that the planet wears like a skullcap, flies far enough north to see where the jigsaw begins to fuse into one immense ice quilt, ridged high where the currents have forced the pieces together.

A dizzy feeling to being so far north.

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If one dared say so, Shipstead’s writing is almost exotic. But so spare and crisp is her style that one could not ever claim she is romanticising. Nevertheless, there is huge romance in the writing, in the landscape she depicts with such vivid images, with the very names of planes and places she conjures up by recounting them, with the wildness and remoteness of both pilot and horizons she sketches so deftly. This is a book, which being almost 600 pages long, lasts satisfyingly, because it just cannot be read quickly. The density of the writing slows the reading pace; there is just so much to not just devour, but relish. So many beautifully crafted details to linger over. For once, a good book which does not finish too quickly! And there is that marvellous combination of slightly folksy writing, “plenty often”, ”socked away” balanced with the lyricism and elegance of the backbone of the writing. A very worthy shortlisted candidate of the 2021 Booker.