Twist (2025 Releases Today)
By Colum McCann
Random House, 256 pages
★★★★
“Everything gets fixed. And we remain broken.”
Colum McCann is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors. If I were to ask you if you had any interest in reading about underwater fiber optic cables, I suspect that you would think I was joking. Nope! McCann’s latest novel Twist is indeed about cables and it takes some mighty good writing to stoke interest in such things. But, like the communication cables hugging the ocean floor, Twist is also about hidden things lurking within the human psyche.
Twist centers on two men who, in very different ways, are broken. Our narrator is Irish journalist Anthony Fennell. He has been a respected writer, but has grown bored and stale. Few know what a mess his personal life is. His ex-wife and son live in South America and he hides his pain in insularity and perhaps too much booze. As much out of escapism as burning interest, Fennell takes an assignment to write about crews that repair cables by dragging the ocean floor with a grappling hook to find broken cables, repair them, and lower them back to the ocean floor.
Where better for a broken man to go than the ends of the earth? Fennell’s journey begins in South Africa where he boards a ship captained by another Irishman, John Conway. But if you think Fennell and Conway will bond, you’re wrong. Conway is suspicious, taciturn, avoids the limelight, and projects a get-it-done attitude toward a job he seems neither to like nor hate. About all Fennell learns for quite some time is that Conway is dating Zanelle, a South African actress who is fast becoming a famous celebrity. Fennell has connection issues of his own, but he can’t help but wonder why Conway has chosen to leave “Zee” and sail away for an indeterminate time along Africa’s west coast. Why indeterminate? The ship can’t leave one spot until it actually finds all of the broken cables. It is a task akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Currents are strong in many parts of the ocean floor, cables get snagged on bottom formations, and all the crew knows are the approximate coordinates of where the cable was originally laid. Undershoot and you miss it; overshoot and you miss it. Either way, you must turn about and try again until you snag something not much larger in diameter than a heavy-duty garden hose.
Readers of McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) will recall that tightrope daredevil Philipe Petit is used as a metaphor. If you think of fiber optics as a bundle of thread-like wires, you can infer that McCann has a thing about life on the thin edge. Petit hovered over 1360 feet into the air surrounded by empty space; Conway searched for a cable in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes he even free dives to fix a cable, a skill requiring extraordinary breath control. Precarious odds doesn’t even begin to get it. Conway has an exacting job to do and Fennell has a lot of time to think. He is like the elusive cable in that much of the time WiFi is unavailable, unreliable, or access is tightly controlled. But Fennell does get enough online time to make inquiries about Captain Conway and learn that he's not who he says he is.
The ship makes its way slowly up the coast fixing cables that could literally leave much of Africa, the world’s least-wired continent, cut off from the world. The mission continues, though Fennell leaves the boat to pursue a bigger mystery that consumes him as he dives deeper and drifts further away from discovery.
The title Twist takes on various meanings, cable kinks, disconnections, unexpected revelations, twisted minds…. The novel has been compared to various other dark mysteries but to my mind, McCann has given us a new take on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Fiber optics as high-falutin’ literary fiction? Bet on it. Cables can be fixed once you find them, but can lost men be repaired?
Rob Weir
#Twist #NetGalley
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