"Twist" by Colum McCann

 

Distinguished author Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin, Thirteen Ways of Looking, among many others) takes up the story of an enigmatic seeker of sense and connection in our fractured modern world. In describing his hero, Conway, he achieves such subtle effects that I felt the need to go back and reread his early descriptions: a man with a focus on something so distant as to remove him from his current surroundings; his calmness and non-committal approach and way of speaking; an unwillingness to display or discuss his inner self. This introduction indicates we’re unmistakably in the hands of an accomplished master of fiction.

Conway directs the repair of undersea cables which house the fiber optic filaments which form the infrastructure of the internet. We view his story from the first-person narrative of Fennell, a journalist with a debilitating, haunting history. He’s left the scourge of alcoholism behind as he boards Conway’s ship (at p. 29 of the hardcover edition):  “I, too, have known those sorts of days when I have put on the Prufrock smile when really all I had was the remnants of a wrecked life. ¶ But I am getting ahead of myself. I was still, at the time, eager to dwell on the story of a repair.”

McCann goes to some trouble to equate the internal workings of this ocean-going vessel with the organic internal functions of humans: after introducing the ship’s engine room crew (p. 75): “They moved among the propulsion engines, the water pipes, the boilers, the generator, the filters, the fuel strainers. There was something human about it too: the mysterious workings of the viscera, the liver, the kidneys, the heart.” And two pages later, he looks at a cross section of cable, surprised that they run parallel in perfect concentric circles — no twisting. “At the inner core, protected by several layers, lay the glass tubes. The conduits of the light. The xylem and phloem.” Thus the cable parallels the internal conduits of plants which carry water and nutrients back and forth.

With a faint Ishmael-and-Ahab echo we sail along the west coast of Africa, hunting a break in an undersea cable. Conway worries about Fennell, who is a freelance journalist, and keeps him at a distance. He views him as an interloper who worrisomely  seeks to publicize — what? Conway’s own history features heart-rending ruptures, and a murky past he wishes to keep hidden. At length Conway, with a singular personal approach, vandalizes a cable beneath the Mediterranean, near Alexandria. It turns out that there are dummy devices — decoys, or dress rehearsals, maybe, anchored to submerged cables all around Europe and the Middle East. We are left in the dark about these mysterious sunken packs; did Conway install them, as seems quite likely?

In his Epilogue, McCann encapsulates one feature of modern times with beautiful, blunt brevity (p. 218): “Nobody could quite understand why the plot would be so  intricately counterfeit, and why someone would go to the great difficulty of diving all that way just to hide something that was likely never to be seen. It triggered speculation across the internet: everyone with an opinion, of course, the obscene certainty of our days.”

These personal and multinational energies drive Twist’s narrative. McCann brings us along with a style that propels, but reveals nothing that would soften or dull the drama inherent. Even as Conway seeks an elusive undersea rupture to repair, he and the great love of his life have rent themselves asunder, and neither we nor Fennell can really tell the depth of Conway’s loss or loneliness.

There are plain lessons here, and it doesn’t take a deep reader to find them: the internet provides the infrastructure that assures “the obscene certainty of our days”; there is not a square inch of the planet that doesn’t bear the imprint of humankind’s traditional effluent industries; there’s no telling what another person thinks, or suffers, or desires. In sober reality, Fennell realizes an ultimate, concluding truth: “Mine has been a lifetime of dropped connections.”

It’s a sombre book, built around a high-stakes adventure story; it reflects sombre realities, but I would never dream of discouraging you to pick it up, dear reader. It’s done in a terse, muscular style, with McCann’s assured artistry. It will encourage your mature reflections, and impress you with the author’s awesome powers. McCann is by acclamation one of the front rank of novelists writing in English today.