Colum McCann is best known for gently non-linear novels that centre on historical moments rather than a particular protagonist. Let the Great World Spin and its cast of characters orbits an infamous highwire walk between the Twin Towers. The first non-stop flight across the Atlantic provides the leaping off point, narratively and thematically, in TransAtlantic.
McCann’s eighth novel also features historic moments and big themes, but limits itself to one narrator. Anthony Fennell is an Irish writer of novels and plays whose “minor successes” have given way to “drinking heavily, breaking covenants, [and] refusing my obligations to the page”. When he is offered an assignment to write for an online magazine about the vessels that repair the network of intercontinental cables that enable modern hyper-fast communication, he accepts it to “get out in the world” again.
Fennell is flown to Cape Town, where a repair vessel, the Georges Lecointe, and its crew is waiting for the next break.
The allusions to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness begin on the first page, when Fennell writes of his Kurtz, the chief of mission of the Georges Lecointe: “others have tried to tell Conway’s story and, so far as I know, they got it largely wrong … his was a lantern heart full of petrol, and when a match was put to it, it flared”. Like Kurtz, John Conway is besotted by a dark-skinned local, an actress named Zanele, and is doing the bidding of a company based in Brussels … until he snaps.
Without the extensive foreshadowing and literary allusions, the early part of the novel would be as aimless as our narrator. It could be weeks or months before a cable snaps. Fennell trundles around Cape Town, waiting for a call from Conway. It’s fair to wonder just how much this online magazine is paying Fennell for the article. In what world would either writer or publication agree to cover the incidentals for such a story?
In the acknowledgements section, McCann thanks the crew of a real-life cable repair boat and its chief of mission, Didier Mainguy (now there’s a name for a protagonist!). He thanks others who taught him about diving, and people in Soweto and Gqeberha. It’s clear McCann put in the work for his story over months and years, but when it comes to translating it through the fingers of Anthony Fennell, he seems to have forgotten how much failure and finances are intertwined.
When a cable finally breaks off the coast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, disrupting internet traffic for much of the continent, the Georges Lecointe and its ride-along journalist set off. As they journey up the west coast of Africa, Fennell tries to get to know the crew and their routines, but he struggles to set people at ease. The internet doesn’t help: the crew has limited access, but Fennell has been given free rein.
When they reach the break, the painstaking process of fishing up the cable and repairing it is disturbed by news from Zanele. She is in the UK to perform a climate change-inflected Waiting for Godot with an all-female cast. On the fourth night, she is violently assaulted by a man in the audience. The story is picked up by media and the online commentariat, giving Fennell another internet wormhole to spelunk until his privileges are revoked.
Meanwhile, Conway has no choice but to continue with the repair and remain with the boat until it reaches port in Ghana. He seems accustomed to such sacrifices. “Let’s just go fix this fucking thing,” he says.
And they do. But then, as the Georges Lecointe enters Accra harbour, the crew can’t find Conway. He’s disappeared.
It is left to Fennell to play detective and reconstruct Conway’s final acts. Unfortunately, once on dry land Fennell also needs to write his piece on cable boats, which takes him more than three weeks and causes the merest ripple when it is published online.
While Twist aspires to the tautness and propulsion of a thriller, McCann’s Fennell is not the writer for it. You could fill a tortured Moleskine with the maxims he peppers at the end of paragraphs.
“The past is retrievable, yes, but it most certainly cannot be changed.”
“At a certain stage our aloneness loses its allure.”
“They were rupturing. They were part of the broken things. We all are.”
It’s no wonder everyone he meets starts looking for the exit. Our floundering scribe’s search for Conway is further disrupted by the arrival of Covid-19. While it can be tiresome to return to pandemic times in fiction, it is this section of the novel where McCann comes closest to his previous peaks. You can feel the pull of other stories, other experiences in this Big Historical Moment. But no, he has committed to one narrator and his version of Apocalypse Now for the internet age.
Sadly, Twist just isn’t twisted enough to do Conrad, Coppola or our current moment justice.
Twist, by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury, $36.99), is out now.
