The Peregrine in Great Circle: A Symbol of Freedom, Identity, and the Human-Machine Merge
What the Peregrine Is and Where It Appears in the Novel
The Peregrine is the name of Marian Graves's airplane, a surplus Dakota (DC-3) she acquires for her attempt to fly around the world pole-to-pole. The name evokes the peregrine falcon, the fastest bird in the world, and connects directly to the novel's epigraph—Rainer Maria Rilke's poem from The Book of Hours, in which the speaker wonders, 'am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?' The falcon is a creature of the air, swift and solitary, and Marian's plane carries that same spirit into the mechanical realm.
The plane is more than a vehicle. It is the instrument of Marian's defining ambition, the object that carries her across oceans and continents, and ultimately the thing she must sacrifice to survive. When she abandons the Peregrine over the Southern Ocean, she abandons more than a machine—she abandons the identity that the plane helped her build.
The Peregrine recurs throughout the novel in several distinct registers: as a physical machine in Marian's flight sequences, as a lost object in Hadley's imagination, as the title of the film about Marian's life, and as a subject of conspiracy theories in the present-day narrative. Each appearance shifts the plane's meaning, from instrument of freedom to symbol of loss to artifact of representation.
The Peregrine as Freedom and Constraint
Marian's relationship with the Peregrine embodies the novel's tension between freedom and constraint. The plane gives her the ability to traverse the globe, to see 'rubble and rivers and elephants on red dunes,' to experience the world from a perspective few humans ever achieve. In her final logbook entry, she writes that she was 'born to be a wanderer' and 'shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave.' The Peregrine is the means by which she fulfills that wandering nature.
But the plane also constrains her. In the same logbook entry, Marian notes that her course 'was distorted by necessity: the indifferent distribution of islands and airfields, the plane's need for fuel.' The Peregrine cannot fly in a straight line; it must hop from fuel cache to fuel cache, its route dictated by geography and mechanics rather than by desire. The freedom the plane offers is always bounded by the plane's own limitations.
This tension becomes literal in the flight itself. When fuel begins leaking from the left wing, the plane that was supposed to carry Marian to freedom becomes the instrument of her potential death. She considers diving into the sea—a 'gannet plunge,' as she had promised herself—but pulls up and decides to continue. The plane's failure forces her to make the choice that defines the rest of her life.
The Peregrine and Identity
The Peregrine is inseparable from Marian's identity as a pilot and as a public figure. Her fame is built on her flights; the plane is the visible symbol of that fame. When she decides to abandon the plane and disappear, she is also deciding to abandon Marian Graves herself.
The moment of abandonment is striking in its emotional complexity. After she jumps, the narrative observes: 'The Peregrine flies on, oblivious to its new independence, the imminence of its watery end. A pang. She looks away.' The plane, now pilotless, has its own 'independence'—a strange mirror of Marian's own new independence from her former life. She feels a pang of loss, but she looks away. She has already decided that she 'prefers to hide, to cease being Marian Graves entirely rather than face what she has done to Eddie.'
The plane's fate—sinking into the Southern Ocean, never to be found—mirrors Marian's own fate as far as the world knows. The public believes she died in the crash; the plane's disappearance becomes the physical evidence of her supposed death. In reality, she survives, adopts new identities (Martin Wallace, then Alice Root), and lives out her life in New Zealand. The Peregrine, meanwhile, remains at the bottom of the ocean, a monument to the self she left behind.
This connects to the theme of identity and reinvention. Marian's ability to become someone else is made possible by the plane's disappearance. As long as the Peregrine is lost, her old identity is lost with it.
The Human-Machine Merge
The Peregrine also represents the merging of human and machine that is central to Marian's experience of flight. In the novel's early barnstorming scenes, Marian's first flight with Trixie is described in terms that blur the boundary between pilot and plane: 'The stick and throttle and rudder pedals in Marian's cockpit moved as though manipulated by a ghost.' The plane seems to have its own will, and Marian is along for the ride.
This merge becomes more explicit in the film sequences. Hadley, playing Marian, must embody not just a person but a person-in-a-machine. When she takes her flying lessons, she is learning to merge with a plane herself. In the final scene of the film, the camera cuts to 'a shot of the Peregrine from above, submerged, its shape sinking into blackness'—the plane as a body, sinking like a corpse.
Hadley's own experience of flying the Cessna echoes this merge. After her lesson, she reflects: 'I must have slipped back into being Marian Graves because, for a second, I felt free.' The freedom she feels is not just the freedom of flight but the freedom of becoming someone else, of merging with a character who is herself merged with a machine.
The Peregrine as Representation
The Peregrine's meaning shifts again when it becomes the title of the film about Marian's life. The film is called Peregrine, and in it, the plane is recreated—or rather, represented—by a fake plane crashing into a fake ocean. The real Peregrine is lost forever, but the film's Peregrine is endlessly reproducible.
This blurring of reality and representation is central to the novel's exploration of the public vs. private self. The public knows Marian through her flights and her logbook; the film presents a version of her that is shaped by the filmmakers' choices. Hadley, as the actress playing Marian, becomes a kind of surrogate Peregrine—a vessel for a story that is both true and invented.
The novel also gestures at the conspiracy theories that surround the Peregrine's disappearance. Hadley reflects on 'the handful of wannabe sleuths who post blurry old photos online they claim are of Marian and Eddie in Australia in the 1950s or of the Peregrine refitted as a cargo DC-3 in the Congo.' These theories treat the plane as a kind of holy relic, something that might still exist and might still reveal the truth. But the real Peregrine is at the bottom of the ocean, and the truth of Marian's survival is known only to a few.
The Peregrine and Incompleteness
Finally, the Peregrine is bound up with the novel's theme of incompleteness and the elusiveness of truth. Marian's flight was meant to close a circle—to bring 'the end to meet the beginning.' But she doubts whether 'anything can be completed,' and in the end, the circle is not closed in the way she imagined. She survives, but she does not complete the flight. The Peregrine does not complete it either; it sinks into the sea.
The plane's disappearance means that the story of Marian's flight can never be fully known. The logbook ends with her final entry; the plane is never recovered; the truth of her survival is hidden for decades. The Peregrine becomes a symbol of everything that is lost, unknowable, and incomplete.
Hadley's reflection on the sunken plane captures this: 'I thought of the Peregrine and how no one would ever find it. No one would ever know where to look.' The plane is a secret that the ocean keeps, just as Marian's true story is a secret that she keeps.
Study Questions
1. Why does Marian name her plane the Peregrine, and how does the name connect to the novel's epigraph?
The name connects to Rilke's poem, in which the speaker asks whether they are 'a falcon, a storm, or a great song.' The peregrine falcon is a bird of prey, swift and solitary—qualities that Marian embodies as a pilot. The epigraph's uncertainty about identity ('I still don't know') mirrors Marian's own uncertainty about who she is and what her flight means. The plane, named after the falcon, becomes a physical manifestation of that question.
2. What does Marian's decision to abandon the Peregrine reveal about her character?
Marian's decision to jump from the plane and let it crash reveals her willingness to sacrifice her public identity for her private survival. She chooses to 'cease being Marian Graves entirely' rather than face the consequences of her actions, particularly her role in Eddie's death. The plane, which had been the symbol of her freedom and ambition, becomes the price of her new life. Her ability to let it go—despite the 'pang' she feels—shows her pragmatism and her capacity for reinvention.
3. How does the film Peregrine change the meaning of the plane?
In the film, the Peregrine becomes a representation rather than a reality. The fake plane crashing into a fake ocean is a stand-in for the real event, which no one witnessed. The film's title claims the plane's name for a work of fiction, blurring the line between Marian's actual story and the story that is told about her. This shift reflects the novel's broader concern with how public narratives distort private truths.
4. Why does Hadley think about the sunken Peregrine when she dives into the ocean in Hawaii?
Hadley's dive connects her physically to the imagined underwater world where the Peregrine rests. She imagines 'ships and airplanes and bones being eaten away to nothing by rust and by tiny nibbling things'—a vision of decay that applies to the plane as much as to human remains. The dive is also a moment of emotional release for Hadley, who has just learned that Marian survived. The Peregrine, sunk and unrecoverable, becomes a symbol of the story's incompleteness: Hadley will never know the whole truth, and neither will anyone else.