In Colum McCann’s Twist, the undersea data cables that connect us inspire a story of mystery and severed connections
- Written by Chris Murray, Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, Monash University
As with his previous novel Apeirogon (2020) and the much-garlanded Let the Great World Spin (2009), Colum McCann’s Twist demonstrates his eye for a premise.
Along the bottom of the ocean run the data cables that connect the modern world. Severance of these cables creates a potential crisis. Specialists in deepsea cable repair are among the unacknowledged powerful people of our times, vital to maintaining the global flow of information.
McCann’s conceit is that the editor of an online magazine recognises the drama inherent to such a high-stakes scenario and commissions the novel’s narrator to write a piece of reportage about a repair crew.
Review: Twist – Colum McCann (Bloomsbury)
Anthony Farrell is the divorced, alcoholic novelist-cum-journalist who accepts the commission. “Eager to dwell in a story of repair”, he travels to Cape Town to join a ship called the Georges Lecointe. Soon after his arrival, news emerges of a ruptured undersea cable. The chaos that ensues on land persuades Farrell of the worth of his assignment.
From the outset, Farrell deviates from his brief. He gravitates toward the Chief of Mission, a fellow Irishman named John Conway, rather than the task of repair itself. He first meets Conway in a stuffy colonial hotel – a setting that suits neither of them. Thereafter, Farrell spends much of the novel attempting to place Conway in various senses. There is a hint of The Great Gatsby when Farrell writes elegiacally of Conway – who, we understand early on, will be lost to him – “his was a heart full of petrol, and when a match was put to it, it flared”.
The single narrator with a central fixation sets up Twist for refreshingly old-fashioned storytelling, in an age when novelists, including McCann himself, have often favoured fragmented narratives with multiple vantage-points.
Dangerous sparks
Conway is a guarded figure, but before their departure Farrell notices dangerous sparks in Conway’s interaction with his South African partner Zanele. “I have seldom seen someone so taken by another person,” Farrell writes.
We learn that a rupture is in progress: not a sudden snap, but a gradual pulling apart, which is understood by both Conway and Zanele as inevitable, though it remains unarticulated. Zanele’s imminent move to England is either a cause or consequence of this parting. Conway appears resigned to the separation. Farrell, ominously, raises the possibility that heartbreak can be fatal, if in the long term.
Meanwhile, Conway is leading the mission to find and fix broken cables off the coast of Gabon and the Congo. His deepsea diving credentials are largely redundant here, since a mechanical claw is sent to the depths to grab the cable ends, though it frequently surfaces with refuse or a sea creature instead.
Conway is also subject to constant attention, through a phone he must carry at all times, from “Brussels”: shorthand for the impatient financers of the Georges Lecointe. At such intrusions, Farrell struggles to reconcile the reality of Conway as corporate lackey with his intuitive vision of the romantic sea-explorer.
Amid these frustrations, Farrell remains convinced that there is a mystery to Conway worth pursuing. He is intrigued rather than rebuffed when the crew members close ranks and dismiss the significance of Conway’s “missing years”. Recalling the voyage years later, Farrell says that he has been vindicated by the incidents that propel the novel towards its resolution, events that cast Conway in such a light that he starts to resemble the saboteur artist Banksy no less than Gatsby.
Submarine secrets
Twist is a richly allusive novel. Farrell invokes Ahab from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Kurtz from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to portray the unfathomable Conway. He muses on Martin Sheen’s breakdown during filming of Apocalypse Now as a development that may have enhanced the production. Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral also haunts Twist.
In most of these precursors, the narrator’s personal acquaintance with his subject precedes the catastrophe of the story. The reader understands that the presentation of the most important incidents and their aftermath involves some conjecture around an unsatisfactory set of established facts. As Farrell says: “We fall back on invention.”
This is not the case in Heart of Darkness, in which Kurtz’s reputation precedes Marlow meeting him. But Twist runs up against a difficulty analogous to critic F.R. Leavis’s claim that Conrad’s novella was weakened by the “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery”. Conway never lives up to the billing. We are constantly being told that he is a fascinating figure and having to take Farrell’s word for it:
There were several times I saw him on the deck. He remained looking portside. I wanted to blindside him. Forgive me, Conway, but I know you are lying. Your silence. Your cover-up.
That the blurb spoils a fairly late turning-point by telling us that Conway goes missing corroborates the impression that the narrative does not do enough to keep our attention on the story. The departures from analogous texts don’t always work. American Pastoral reveals its catastrophic focus at the outset, rather than towards the end. Conway, unlike Martin Sheen, does not break down on set; there is little sign of the flaring heart.
What McCann has done in Twist is deliberate. Mystery stories stage their revelations in a process of intrigue and reward. Here, Farrell recalls a hunch about Conway, contrary to the initial evidence, that is later justified, so we might surmise that the whole point is that the writer’s instinct proves to be correct.
This leaves the problem that, in Farrell’s account of his time with Conway, rumination on the hunch does not sustain our attention. There are no red herrings aboard the Georges Lecointe. Those who know Conway behave as though there is something to say about him, although hidden. But Farrell does not fill the negative space in any imaginative way, nor does he venture theories about Conway’s past that might provoke dramatic conflict.
Farrell presses on in his study of Conway, driven to locate the frayed line within and comprehend why the man’s world comes apart. The reader waits for the narrative to spring into action, like the Georges Lecointe’s repair engineers probing the murky depths for a rupture.
Authors: Chris Murray, Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, Monash University
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