Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other and Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle

 

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo shared the 2019 Booker Prize with The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, which I read earlier this year. It follows the lives of 12 characters, mostly black British women, over four overlapping decades. In the first part, we meet Amma, a theatre director, her daughter Yazz, and Dominique, Amma's former theatre group partner. Carole, who works in banking, her mother Bummi, and her school friend La Tisha round out the group.

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Shirley is a teacher whose mother Winsome is retired in Barbados, and she has worked for several years with her colleague Penelope. Finally, Megan/Morgan is a non-binary social media influencer whose relatives Hattie and Grace lived in the early twentieth century in the north of England.

Evaristo's eighth novel is thus essentially a series of pen portraits that form interconnected short stories, and I believe there is sufficient world-building here to call it a novel. Some characters were more interesting to read about than others - Carole was definitely one of my favorites - but together they form a diverse chorus that allows Evaristo to explore weighty contemporary themes like identity, racism, and sexism with levity. Evaristo is frequently described as an experimental author, and much of her prose reads like verse or a play script. She excels at dialogue that accurately captures the way people speak.

Despite having followed the Booker Prize for several years, I haven't read or enjoyed the majority of the recent winners from the 2010s, but 'Girl, Woman, Other' is now one of my favorite modern winners. I also highly recommend the recent BBC documentary 'Imagine,' which chronicles Evaristo's career to date.

So far, I've only read one book from this year's Booker Prize shortlist, Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle. Her third novel tells the story of Marian Graves, a female aviator who went missing in 1950 while attempting to circumnavigate the Earth from north to south, beginning and ending in New Zealand, while Hadley Baxter, a scandal-hit Hollywood actress, portrays Marian in a biopic of her life in 2014.

The story focuses primarily on Marian's life in the early twentieth century, with several parallels to Hadley's life gradually revealed. Marian and her twin brother Jamie are orphaned after a shipwreck in 1914 and relocate to Montana to live with their uncle Wallace. Marian becomes obsessed with aviation during the interwar years, and the passages describing her flights are truly immersive. Hadley's storyline felt like an unnecessary distraction or forced coincidence at times, but its significance in the overall structure of the novel becomes clearer near the end. The discrepancies between the film's interpretation of Marian's life and what actually happened to her are particularly intriguing.

Shipstead reveals in the afterword that the original manuscript was 1,000 pages long, and while it has been cut down to a little more than half of that length and remains a little baggy overall, it is still a truly epic piece of historical fiction that comes close to living up to its lofty goals. The winner of this year's Booker Prize will be announced on Wednesday, November 3rd, and I will be rooting for 'Great Circle,' hoping to continue a trend of Booker Prize winners I enjoyed reading and mentioned in my predictions post in July before the longlist was announced, such as Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart last year.

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