Reading a Colum McCann novel can be like breathing at altitude, the thinness of the air inviting the brain to waking dream. Over a career now into its fourth decade, McCann has always been an explorer into the depth of things. His characters discover themselves in the distance they keep from the surface of life. Sometimes this is in the air, as with McCann’s fiction of the flight of Alcock and Brown from Newfoundland to Galway in TransAtlantic. Sometimes it is underground, as with the subway dwellers in This Side of Brightness, a novel that sharpened McCann’s eye for the lost and the overlooked. Always it introduces a kind of vertigo, the space between life and the dream a disputed territory of words and feelings. Twist plays this theme on a grand scale, its province the fraying infrastructure of a digitised world whose ties bind us all together.
Our guide to this fractured world is a narrator whose own life is in pieces. Divorced from his wife and distanced from his son, Anthony Fennell is a writer and critic scratching around for commissions (and the name is one of two publishing quips in the book, the other teasing the identity of an Irish writer who does sunbeds). One route of escape from a Dublin of troubled memory is the invitation to write an essay about the work of crews that repair breaks in the intercontinental cables that connect the global internet. Their ships sail from strategic ports to find, raise and splice these lines that are then laid back on the ocean floor. Fennell’s acceptance of his commission proceeds from a desire to escape, which is also a hope to begin again. This hope shapes all of McCann’s novels; what makes each different is the difficulty of the journey to confirm it.
Twist adds a baroque layer to the method in the mystery that attends the true identity of the ship’s chief, John Conway, who hails from Rathlin Island. Through Conway, the narrator meets the enigmatic Zanele Ombassa, a South African actress who finds fame performing Waiting for Godot in Brighton, against the wishes of the Beckett estate.
McCann loves unlikely circumstances, which his novels treat as a function of the unpredictability of the world at large. The pace of his prose carries the reader along, as does the sweep of his settings as Twist follows a course from Dublin to Cape Town to the west coast of Africa and back to London, with a flourish to the Americas in passing. McCann has made this worldliness the substance of his writing. It gives the books a volume that few of his contemporaries have achieved, even if the fictions needed to achieve it can be curious. This is particularly true of Fennell.
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Fennell meets his wife-to-be in a hospital emergency room and establishes their relationship by pretending to be her fiance and reading Oscar Wilde to her while she is semiconscious, which makes her background as a Chilean choreographer seem mundane by comparison. Later, Fennell reflects on the physical reality of a broken heart, the emotional devastation of loss leading to serious illness, on this occasion in memory of his sister’s sweetheart, who fell from a rooftop on a peacekeeping mission to Lebanon.
If this kind of camp quotidian can have a comic air, it tells us something of McCann’s desire to imagine Ireland as worldly in ways that are shaped by his own sense of what makes the world tick. McCann has experimented with this formula in many of his novels. TransAtlantic was a hymn to the possibility of peace between the two sundered communities in the North, a historical situation that has long resonated with him. McCann has spoken elsewhere of the resistance he initially felt when writing across the Border, and of the desire he has not to replicate the cultures of partition in his stories.
This extends to his novel Apeirogon, which brings Palestinian and Israeli characters together to explore what peace might mean in the direst circumstances. This was before the brutalities of the last year and more, and one risk for writing like McCann’s is the very uncertainty of the world it describes.
Narrating inhumanity, the work can begin to feel like a mime, as McCann’s inclusion of the North can sometimes seem; in Twist, for example, Fennell feels he might understand South Africa because he is from Ireland, which too had its troubles. The comparison feels a stretch, not because it’s not true, but because it’s not specific (and similar might be said for the description of Cape Town as dangerous in a way that might better fit a city such as Johannesburg).
The world, in McCann’s books, is a place of grand gestures, words buoyed up with emotions, the expression of which break the surface of the everyday. Twist is made of these moments, its oxygenated prose minutely alive to the smallest variations in pressure between place and character. This gives the novel a physiognomy that is its major grace, the prose humming with the pressure of the story, like so many small bones in a diver’s skull, deep underwater.
Twist is all drama, a wired-up story of what it means to bend yourself into new shapes, and be broken. The work of repair is there too, but as a process, and not a remedy. So the novel rolls across continents on seas of emotion that find their form in those glorious passages of writing at which McCann excels, whatever the sometimes unlikely nature of the craft. His description of the ship at dock in a storm is masterful, as is the fine balance he finds between speech and thought, the outer voice a halting version of the inner.
In Twist the vessel for all this is the Georges Lecointe, a cable repair ship that operates from Cape Town. The historical figure of Lecointe was a Belgian mariner and scientist – that nationality connects Twist to that other narrative of Europeans in Africa, Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. That book exposed the depravity of King Leopold’s possession of the Congo, even as it indulged some of the racist attitudes it critiqued. Twist draws the aftermath of these destructive legacies in scorched villages and angry waters, the ship’s crew in search of a cable broken by the outflow of the great river in flood. McCann layers these histories like sediment in the present, the ship probing and scanning like a writer in search of a story. The crew is subject and audience, Fennell trying to find a rhythm that matches their routines. He is seasick before he leaves, and suffers storm and loss. He survives by stripping each moment down into a scatter of words he alone knows how to reassemble, becoming engineer and captain, navigator and deckhand.
The theatre comes from McCann’s ability to make each of these moments a little tragedy, the accumulation of which creates an atmosphere that few writers achieve. The effect is something like looking at a painted stage. On close inspection the figures and the subject can be overwhelming. A few steps back and the panorama opens out, the colours finding common form.
In This Side of Brightness, McCann used this style to shine light on the marginalised and the poor. That book was a study of race and violence that tunnelled beneath the gothic high-rise of the American dream. Twist has a similar interest in the depth of the human condition in its attention to the ocean. There is a beautiful scene in This Side of Brightness where a character finds momentary relief in a shower of water; in Twist there is diving. Both Conway and Ombassa are freedivers, risking the depths without oxygen tanks. McCann is brilliant on the physicality of this moment between life and death, when the brain and the body are at their farthest limit. His lyrical passage of a boat trip out to the diving spot is perfectly observed, and quietly humorous in its description of the middle-aged narrator’s attempt to fit in.
Twist is a surprising, electric book. McCann has a peculiar way of generating tension in his characters and his settings, which he applies to his stories in ways that make them hum with unexpected frequencies. Late in Twist the narrator writes of Conway’s “undersong”, and the word is resonant of much of McCann’s fiction, all of which has surface and depth. McCann’s long-established lyric prose has its place in Twist too, each clipped sentence the compact picture of a world he draws in concert with each of his character’s intimate histories. His challenge in all his novels has been how to make a style of this technique. In Twist, Fennell dives deep and surfaces with a new sense of the horizon before him. A book of constraints, of ship’s cabins, failed relationships and broken lines, Twist is also a book of gathering, retrieval and repair. Powerfully, too, it is a book of forgiveness, even in its unwinding.
Further reading
If there is one book of McCann’s to start with it is TransAtlantic (2013). A sweeping series of stories that connect Ireland with America over a century and more it includes a vivid pen portrait of Frederick Douglass, the formerly enslaved author and activist who visited Ireland in the fateful year 1845 and who now has a statue in Belfast to mark his time there. McCann is a various and inventive writer, as he is in Thirteen Ways of Looking (2015), which comprises a novella and three stories, each of which is a study in empathy. And perhaps McCann is best known for Let the Great World Spin (2009), which won a National Book Award and tells the story of Philippe Petit, the high-wire walker who crossed the space between the World Trade Center towers in 1974.
McCann is also generous in sharing his ideas about his work. Earl and Mary Ingersoll’s Conversations with Colum McCann (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) is a useful record of his evolving ideas. Eoin Flannery’s Colum McCann and the Aesthetics of Redemption (Irish Academic Press, 2011) is an excellent critical introduction.
