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. As a result, it lacks the momentum of discovery of consequences, and the present-day strand, which begins promisingly, runs out of steam. Still, it’s a professional piece of work.
Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This (Bloomsbury Circus, £14.99) concerns the interaction of virtual engagement and real life. In the first half, a person much like Lockwood, famous for a single utterance on Twitter, makes various short, irreverent observations in the style of Twitter while on a publicity tour. In the second half, her sister has a baby, who dies — something which the characters’ usual affectless ironic mode of behaviour proves inadequate for. I quite liked some of it, but it only works if you’re convinced that all this happened in real life without adornment, which is not much of a claim for aesthetic worth.
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