‘Twist’ Review: Colum McCann’s New Novel is a Deep, Deep-Sea Mystery
For the whole time I was reading it, I tried to second-guess Twist, the new novel by the Irish writer Colum McCann. Ah! I said, a chapter or so in, as the narrator, a lost soul, washed up in Cape Town awaiting a summons to an ocean voyage: it’s a re-working of Moby-Dick! (I do have a confirmation bias problem with Moby-Dick sightings I’ll admit.) McCann’s Ishmael was a writer – Anthony Fennell – working on an assignment for an online magazine about the boats that traverse the world to fix ruptures in the fibre-optic cables through which most of our exchanged information is conveyed. Fennell, too, has been told of a mysterious captain, or rather, a chief of mission – John Conway – to whose boat he has been assigned by a press office somewhere in Brussels.
Conway, though, is no Ahab – although his surname does pre-empt some future slipperiness – and makes himself surprisingly available to Fennell before they’ve even stepped offshore. He invites Fennell to his home to meet his partner, Zanele – a glamorous actress and, like Conway himself, an accomplished free-diver – and the two children they’re raising. Later, Conway introduces Fennell to his free-diving friends. (Ahab, by contrast: not a big friends guy.) Something is awry though: Zanele is taking the kids to Brighton while she stars in a play; Conway is heading out to sea. Perhaps Twist isn’t a seafaring adventure, but an ill-fated love story?
Twist
There are further twists to come. In Africa there has been a deluge of Biblical proportions and import: rains so heavy they’ve created a gargantuan underwater landslide and a cable has been severed. The internet is slowing – heaven forfend! – and Conway’s crew is assigned to locate the cable and repair it. Fennell is quick to claim his cabin although, in scenes semi-reminiscent of that middle bit in Triangle of Sadness, takes some days to find his sea legs.
McCann, who won the National Book Award for his 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spin, partly inspired by the French tightrope-walker Philippe Petit, spent time aboard a French cable boat, the Léon Thévenin, which, like the fictional Georges Lecointe, flies under the flag of Mauritius. He has clearly studied closely the mechanics of such a ship, from its crew to its layout to the exact way the replacement cables are coiled or the frayed ends of the cable recovered. But also he has thought about it deeply too – what it means that we surrender the stuff of our lives, from the profound to the frivolous, to these inconspicuous lines snaking along the ocean floor.
And it is fascinating, really, isn’t it? That we understand so little of how the world works, what the fundamental infrastructure of our lives really is, or how vulnerable to damage we allow ourselves to be. And McCann’s prose has a power and lyrical propulsion that can be quite dazzling: the huge landslip, for example, is “an underwater punch to the back of the brain, rupturing the eardrums of whatever was there to hear it, an eight-hundred-kilometre slide that could have destroyed anything in its path, passing through the underwater gorges, beyond the jagged cliffs, over the drowned ridges, the bluffs, the crags, the caves.” Like the engorged Congo River, his descriptions sweep, unsparingly, across the page.
Let the Great World Spin
But just when you think you’ve got it sussed – ah, a semi-philosophical enquiry into the nature of connection and human frailty! – it twists again. We’re back with Conway, and an unexpected denouement that uncoils with page-turning urgency. Having been absent a while, the chief of mission returns, or a fractured version of him anyway – a portrait of a man who, like Petit before him, possesses a singularity of vision and an ability to endure extremes. And the book becomes… something else. A character study? An ecological thriller? Certainly it wasn’t the book I thought it was. But sometimes it’s best to take a breath and follow the line.
Twist by Colum McCann is out on 6 March (Bloomsbury)
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