Colum McCann’s breakthrough 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spin, was set on the day in 1974 when the acrobat Philippe Petit walked across a high wire strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. McCann’s bravura account of the wire-walk forms the centrepiece of that novel, which relates the interlocking lives of different New Yorkers who are touched by Petit’s thrilling but benign assault on the Manhattan skyline.
In his new novel, Twist, McCann is drawn to another type of wire and another obsessive, boundary-pushing hero. The wires, this time, are the undersea cables that carry data around our hyperconnected planet. And the hero, John Conway, is an engineer and free diver who travels the world, repairing them when they break.
McCann’s subject is timely. Experts have been warning for a while that our globalised lives depend on these links to a degree that few of us have considered. To travel around the world, our voices and digital data are only briefly airborne before 1.5m km of fibre optic wires transport them across the sea floor, where they are prey to hostile actors and natural disasters. Over the past two years, there have been multiple instances of underwater cables being damaged in the Baltic by ships linked to Russia or its allies.
The novel is narrated by a fiftysomething Irish journalist and novelist, Anthony Fennell, who’s got himself an assignment to write a long feature about Conway’s cable repair vessel, the Georges Lecointe. He travels to Cape Town to join the ship then sails with the crew up the western coast of Africa to the site of a cable break. McCann/Fennell lets us know early on that Conway will be the puzzle at the book’s heart, and that it won’t be an easy one. “Others have tried to tell Conway’s story,” he writes, “and, so far as I know, they got it largely wrong.” Physically gifted – he can hold his breath for eight minutes – Conway is charismatic and secretive, with a few mysterious blanks in his CV. He’s also in a strained relationship with his South African partner, a beautiful actor-director called Zanele who is preparing to stage an unauthorised production of Waiting for Godot. While Fennell and Conway sail north to repair the cable, Zanele is in the UK, on a path towards an unexpected kind of celebrity.
One touchstone for the book is, of course, McCann’s own Let the Great World Spin, where a single act of physical virtuosity links different threads of story. “What I needed was a story about connection,” Fennell tells us, as he takes the assignment at the novel’s opening, “about grace, about repair.” In fact, while Philippe Petit’s story fits that bill, the one Fennell ends up with is much less graceful and restorative. The other, more determinative influence on the book is Heart of Darkness. McCann pays overt homage to Conrad’s novella, and the shape of his plot is clearly indebted to it. A boat sails on an uncertain voyage towards the Congo. On board, an introspective narrator speculates about the motives and character of an ambiguous, inspirational and possibly sinister individual.
There are some excellent things in this novel. The account of the journey and the observations of the work on board the ship feel as if they must be rooted in McCann’s own reportage. We are on board for days, among the polyglot, multi-ethnic male crew. The book is full of wonder at the difficulty of their work, at the scale and beauty of the natural world – and full of anger at humanity’s capacity to wreck it. As they trawl the bottom of the sea for the broken cable, they pull up forms of sealife that may be entirely new, yet nowhere is free from human-made rubbish. And much of the digital content pouring through the cables is vacuous, spiteful and wrong. As Zenele’s show in the UK gets caught up in a moment of digital infamy, McCann forces us to contemplate how all these phenomena are connected.
At his best, McCann evokes physical activity in an intense, cinematic way. There are passages of extraordinary vividness. The depths of the ocean; freedivers plunging to the sea floor on a single breath; out-of-the-way cable relay stations on Africa’s west coast; sea sickness; extreme weather; an internet outage that paralyses part of Cape Town: these are all evoked with a power that seems to persuade you that you’re either a participant or a witness. And the novel builds to a bravura climactic escapade: part Philippe Petit, part Mister Kurtz, part Theodore Kaczynski.
I loved the thoughtful, essayistic inquiries into nature and the environment, and the consciousness-raising voyage towards the broken cable. But I have to confess that I’m not entirely in sympathy with all McCann’s aesthetic decisions. As a narrator, Fennell can’t compete with Marlow, because he’s a spare part on the Georges Lecointe, where Marlow is captain of his steamboat. There’s an occasional note of portentousness in the prose, and a fondness for eye-catching lines that I would file under “Kill Your Darlings”: “A moment dolphined up”; “The early choices in any story present vectors that can spray in dozens of different directions, a rorschach of possibility.”
Like Heart of Darkness, Twist lingers after you’ve put it down. Conrad’s novel joined the shockingly unexpected dots between the trophies of modern European culture – car tyres, piano keys – and the horrors of the Belgian Congo. Twist makes the most of the ironic juxtapositions between the ephemeral trash that spills into our smartphones, the eternal trash that spills into our oceans, and the patient, heroic, highly technical grunt-work required to keep all those spigots flowing.
• Twist by Colum McCann is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
