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A Novel
by Colum McCann
Book Reviewed by:A propulsive novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean—from the New York Times bestselling author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin.
"Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken."
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world's information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.
Fennell's journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.
When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?
Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times.
With his always elegant prose, Colum McCann is one of those rare writers who successfully arcs back and forth between the wide-angle perspective of global and societal concerns and its opposite, the sharply focused close-up on individuals and their specific and complicated human lives. His novels expand and contract in an almost breath-like manner. Like his free-diving characters, McCann is willing to risk plunging into the depths in the hope of better articulating what exists in the dimmer reaches of the human heart: "Our lives, even the unruptured ones, bounce around on the seafloor. For a while we might brush tenderly against one another, but eventually, and inevitably, we collide and splinter." Throughout the novel, McCann emphasizes that life is built on cycles of rupture and repair. At sea, without the usual distractions and escapes, it becomes harder to avoid facing one's demons. Fennell's path to wholeness is crooked and incomplete, but he is ultimately able to take tentative steps toward change and reconnection. Others may not be as fortunate. Some breakages cannot be mended and some actions cannot be understood. As Conway notes, inevitably, "Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken."..continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Danielle McClellan).
Much of Colum McCann's novel Twist takes place on a cable repair ship sent to locate and fix a breakage in the underwater cables conveying the globe's digital information pathways.
For many of us, perhaps because of the metaphorical terms used for internet storage and connection, such as cyberspace and the cloud, when we imagine the path of the world's information superhighway we look to the sky, perhaps envisioning some kind of literal cloud of information crackling above us, or at least high-powered satellite connections. However, on a bit-for-bit basis, even the most advanced satellite technology cannot begin to compete with the good old-fashioned Submarine Cable System, which is made up of hundreds of cables placed across...
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