Another haphazard Booker shortlist lacks literary competence

The Booker used to be more enthusiastic about the historical novel than it now is. Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle (Doubleday, £16.99) is about an imagined woman pilot who makes her way in the first years of aviation and is thought to have died in a daring feat of navigation from Pole to Pole in 1950. It’s an enjoy-able example of a genre that was popular in the 1990s: the historical novel interspersed with a present-day story — this one about a film star who has made a PR mess, loses her role in a series of teen movies and tries for redemption through a film about the aviator.

The best of those novels tended to show events of the past reaching out and shaping present lives. Great Circle is crisply written, with a gift for the striking phrase and an ability to depict characters memorably. Shipstead’s take on the form, how-ever, does tend to reverse things and stress how current concerns such as LGBT, global warming and vegetarianism were also prominent in the past.