Circling the Sun by Paula McClain

McClain is the author of The Paris Wife, a fictionalized biography of Hadley Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's first wife.  This book was hugely popular, especially with book groups.  It combined history, bohemian/artistic achievement and glamor, and marriage drama.  I'm not sure what to call what I'm calling "marriage drama."  

Something I read opined that with its publication, McClain succeeded in creating a new genre.  Another example would be Melanie Benjamin's The Aviator's Wife, which was also a very popular book group book. Circling the Sun is McClain's follow-up, and it's a fictionalized biography of Beryl Markham, pioneering female pilot from Kenya. I never read The Paris Wife, but I read more than half of The Aviator's Wife and I think Circling the Sun much more entertaining.

Beryl Markham was English; her father was a racehorse trainer. She suffered an early trauma: when she was very small, her mother moved back to England with her older brother.

In McClain's novel, Markham becomes close to a nearby African tribe, and makes friends with an African boy who becomes her lifelong friend and her partner in her horse training business.  As a child she was a tomboy; she loved to run.  One day, her joy in running led to her being attacked by a lion.

As she reached adulthood, her father became overwhelmed by debts exacerbated by currency fluctuations.  He sold up and moved to Capetown.  Losing the farm was hard for her. Her father offered to take her to Cape Town but strongly suggested she get married instead.  This set in motion a long list of events, including her getting her horse-training license at the tender age of 18, the first woman of any age to do so.

She mingled with the Happy Valley set in Nairobi, the folks who figured in The White Mischief story.  In fact, when the Prince of Wales famously visited Nairobi, she was there with her husband, Mansfield Markham.

I found this novel entertaining, lively, eventful and easy to read.  Many of the chapters were short.  I felt that McClain chose as her subject someone who was a pioneer and someone with an eventful and interesting life. 

However, as I suspected, McClain seems to have bowdlerized her subject.  This bothers me, and I can't quite put my finger on why.  After all, it's an entertainment; it's not history nor does McClain present it as history.  I guess I think that McClain presents Markham as having fewer lovers and more friends than her Wikipedia entry would suggest (I have no independent knowledge of the facts of Markham's life), and I believe that McClain did that to make Markham seem a more admirable character.  To me, that implies that succeeding in a man's world (by which I mean the world of horse racing) and writing West with the Night (a book which Hemingway seems to have greatly admired) are not sufficient to make her an admirable woman.

On the other hand, I admire McClain for having written The Paris Wife which interested so many people.  It's not just that you can't argue with success; it's that ( assume many readers were introduced to characters, places and ideas they would not have otherwise encountered.  And, if all a successful book club is, is an excuse to bring people together, that itself is an achievement and a worthy one.

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