Great Circle: A Novel

"‘Epic’ is the word. This is a book that really pulls off this immersive experience, creating a really richly imagined set of locations and characters and places. This is a book you feel like you can move through. You can see it, you can walk into the rooms. There’s an incredible tangibility about it that I find really powerful, and I don’t know how she does it. She has an incredible ability to make you believe in the reality of what she is describing, even in this exuberantly imaginative book. She’s swinging from the launching of a luxury liner for transatlantic voyages to show-pilots in western Montana in the 1920s and bush pilots in Alaska, to Hawaii in the 1960s and ’70s. And then, of course, there is this other narrative strand set in Hollywood in the here and now. Each of these brings you in, you live in it, and you want to see where you’re going to go next and then live in that one as well. That’s what’s so powerful about this book. I think what I meant by that is that this is a big book in terms of scale. It is long, but it shares with some of those really long books from the 19th century this feeling that you’re in it, and you just don’t want to leave. And I think for me, this is the sort of reading experience that mimics some of the qualities people are drawn to in television series. There’s this iterative quality to it. World building is what I had in mind; Trollope and Dickens are building these worlds that are densely inhabited. Once you’re in that world, you understand where you are and what its rules are, and you can just dwell in it indefinitely. Yeah, absolutely. The pressure part is funny. One’s basic experience is just of reading a lot of books and talking about a lot of books. For me that is a fundamentally enjoyable thing to do, although I acknowledge that maybe not everybody feels the same way. But I basically like reading a lot of books and talking about them and since for me, reading, particularly in this moment, is so cut off from anything else, it was an immense pleasure to be able to meet up with the other judges and connect with them. It’s funny, I have the impression that every year people are trying to come up with some statements about ‘the novel.’ I don’t tend to think that the novel changes on a yearly basis. I would say that I go back to this point about what are you looking for, versus what do you find. What I find is that there’s an incredible range of ways that people have of telling stories and an incredible range of stories that there are to tell. I think that it would be great to see an ever widening range of stories being told, and more kinds of people telling those stories, alongside what is obviously a very robust, flourishing literary sphere with great style, and voice and craft and talents. Long may it live. So that may be a way of saying, no, actually I don’t have a very specific answer about 2021. I would hope that there will continue to be a range of outlets that can represent a wide range of ways of writing, people who write and stories to be told."