As I was reading Colum McCann’s “Twist,” news broke that northern European nations were on high alert after concluding Russia was behind recent sabotage of Baltic Sea fiber optic cables. Although many people assume satellites are responsible for our connections, most internet traffic is actually transmitted via cables running across the bottom of the ocean. This is exactly what the narrator of Colum McCann’s new novel learns as he sets out on a ship fixing a similar break off the coast of Africa
McCann’s fiction is often connected to real life — “Let the Great World Spin,” which won the National Book Award in 2009, is partially based on Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers — but this new novel is particularly prophetic. Told with McCann’s incomparable prose, “Twist” opens a window into an obscure way people on earth are connected, told by a man who is himself fairly broken.
Anthony Fennell is a 48-year-old Irish novelist and playwright, blocked, drinking too much. McCann shares his Irish heritage and vocation with Fennell, but the fictional writer is far less successful. Fennell is so depressed and directionless that when an editor sends him on this assignment to join the repair ship, he puts his stuff in storage before heading to South Africa. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want to return.
He’s supposed to find a richer meaning in his story about the cables, their breakage and repair. He does have a gift for insight. Describing when this takes place, roughly now: “it was a time of enormous greed and foolish longing and, in the end, unfathomable isolation.”
In Cape Town, Fennell meets Conway, another Irishman, the charismatic head of mission — not the captain, exactly, but in charge of getting them to the break and leading the repair. It’s a highly specialized and delicate operation, described in vivid detail. They must find the broken cable on the floor of the sea —it’s just the size of a garden hose — then bring the ends to the surface and reconnect the glass tubing with extreme precision. Conway and his crew wait until a cable breaks then go to sea, sometimes being away for months, to reach and repair one or more breaks.
As his bosses want a reporter on board, Conway grudgingly welcomes Fennell, taking him to drink with his freediving buddies. He even introduces him to his partner Zanele, a beautiful Black South African actress. All these relationships are a little bit prickly. What isn’t is Conway’s relationship with his crew, a multinational group of men who universally admire him.
Soon enough, a cable is broken, by a terrible flood in the Congo. “A hypnotic flume. There was no taming it. Huge whirlpools studded the surface. Pirogues were sucked under. Giant barges were sent in a complicated dance,” McCann writes in one of his bravura descriptive sweeps.
The ship will be away for about a month, with extremely limited communication — it has to carry its own satellite dish. Fennell is given a privileged spot, and spends his first few days there, violently seasick. When that passes, he meets and introduces us to the members of the crew and the operations. He finds clarity being free of drink — there’s no alchool on board — and in the sublime beauty of the sea and sky.
He spends time with Conway, whose centeredness and leadership he admires. He’s also taken with the ideal relationship he observed between Conway and Zanele — although he seeds it with retrospective doubt. Fennell is telling this story looking back from a few years in the future, and drops in several hints about an incident or incidents that will be significant. Without saying too much, one involves Zanele, who went to England to appear in a play.
This is about midway into the journey, and Fennell begins to go a little off the rails. “Maybe that’s why sailors went mad at sea,” he says. “Once you figured it out, there was nowhere to be. On a boat you were locked into its limits. We were yearning for more than the boat could give.” Although he started out saying he was “eager to dwell in the story of a repair,” he begins dwelling instead on Zanele and Conway. He uses his more than his share of the internet connection to investigate Conway’s hidden past and obsessively hunts down pictures of Zanele. It’s so bad he has to be cut off.
Throughout the book I caught delightful allusions to James Joyce and Don Delillo, and an obvious one to Samuel Taylor Coleridge; I’m certain there are many more. I was unsettled, however, by Fennell’s smart riff on “Apocalypse Now” — it’s a way of smuggling in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” Both feature a man journeying up a river past hostile natives to a white man who’s gone mad in the jungle and dies saying, “The horror, the horror.” Chinua Achebe called out Conrad’s racism back in the 1970s in a seminal work of postcolonial criticism, and it’s frustrating to me that 50 years on it remains central to a white writer telling an African story.
That said, McCann seems to be trying to invert and undo the Conrad narrative. The Congo river, which in his book floods out, is what Conrad’s Marlow traveled up. Fennell’s journey doesn’t start in London but begins in South Africa and moves north. It is January, hot in the southern hemisphere: “I had to stop to mop my brow. I was already turned inside out, unbalanced.” As a reader I am torn. I wish it didn’t need the Conrad skeleton at all. McCann has written a beautiful novel set in, and off the coast, of Africa — something few writers with his privilege and prestige have done.
When the repair ship’s journey is over, Fennell stays ashore in Accra, Ghana, in a condo by the sea. He is trying to write, but also, waiting for an answer to the deeper questions driving him. He’s still trying to figure out who Conway is, and what happens to him and Zanele next. “Twist” is gorgeously written and sad and inspiring, a destination hard to imagine from the journey’s start.
TWIST
By Colum McCann
Random House, 256 pages, $28
Carolyn Kellogg is a writer and editor in Los Angeles.