A Novel Explores the Undersea Cables That Connect the World

New York Times

23-03-2025

It's a literary conundrum of sorts, how on the surface Colum McCann's novel 'Twist' feels narratively disheveled, with subplots warmed up and abandoned, and loose threads dangling as they do everywhere in life. But the parts are not the sum. McCann, author of six previous novels, including the National Book Award-winning 'Let the Great World Spin,' clearly knows what he's up to — every sentence feels placed with confidence — and through various authorial wiles he has produced a work at once enigmatic and urgent.
'Twist' begins with a fairly straightforward narrative. Anthony Fennell, an Irish writer down on his luck, gets an assignment from an online journal to write a piece on the undersea cables that carry the world's data and the repair teams that patrol the oceans, fixing ruptures. He narrates the saga.
Fennell's editor sends him to Cape Town, where he is to sign on with a repair ship and meet a man named Conway, who is in charge of operations. Waiting in a hotel lobby, Fennell spots Conway on the sidewalk, checking his flip phone. Nothing about the man quite computes. 'I certainly thought he would be older, grayer and at the very least have an aura of the smartphone about him,' Fennell thinks. 'But here he was, a creature from the unplugged side.' The hook is deftly set.
Conway is, and will remain, a mystery: immediate and engaging at first, later aloof and noncommittal — and capable, as we'll see, of extraordinary actions. Though they've just met, he straightaway asks Fennell to come meet his partner, Zanele, a South African-born stage actress. Fennell is wholly taken by her beauty and her obvious bond with Conway. He is now full of conjecture about this man who will preside over his fate for the next weeks.
All things change when men are put out to sea. The immensities of sky and ocean are humbling. Shipboard life is a world unto itself, a primal reordering of things, and Fennell is a clear outsider. At the same time, Conway, his only link, has grown distant.
Conway charts the path to the first reported break. Though he can be mercurial in his interactions with others, he is completely fixated on his mission. But, as a woman Fennell meets before the trip warns him, 'He aspires downward, you'll see.'
The ship is far from shore, but the other world does impinge at times. One day, Conway receives shocking news about Zanele, who is performing in 'Waiting for Godot' in England. Conway is agitated. Powerless to respond in person, he senses that something has changed irreparably.
After many long days, the dragging grapnel finds the end of one cable, then the other. The crew sets to work while Fennell looks on. He is astonished: The myriad wires within, most no thicker than an eyelash, carry all the world's business, public and private — everything. 'The tiny world linked to the epic,' he thinks. Zanele is there, a split second away, he realizes, as is Joli, his son from his failed marriage; their estrangement gnaws at him throughout.
Unexpected sunderings set the course of the ship. They also form the core emotional motif of the novel. Wires can, with the right attention, be reconnected. Human bonds are different.
The ship sails on to the next cable break, at the mouth of the Congo River. We get intimations of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness,' of course, and these are highlighted by Fennell's obsession with Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now,' especially the opening scene in which the Martin Sheen character has a breakdown and puts his fist through his reflection in the mirror.
As the Congo mission proceeds, Conway grows ever more distant. Fennell sees him by himself on the deck, utterly motionless, staring out. He is elsewhere — or getting ready to be. And then Conway disappears. Overboard, not a trace to be found. Searches and dives yield nothing.
At a stroke, Fennell has lost his pole star. Conway was to be the point of his piece, its center. He thought they had a private bond.
'Twist' here modulates into a new key. While there are occasional rumored sightings of Conway, none are verified. Everything is now hearsay and supposition.
From this point on, we are reading a story told in hindsight, rich with reflection and self-analysis. 'I said at the outset that if I take liberties, and leave gaps,' writes Fennell, 'then so be it. There is so much that we cannot know. The mind begs for logic but gets the actual world. We fall back on invention.'
When rumors swirl that Conway is suspected of sabotaging a cable near Cairo, it is invention that Fennell summons. He constructs — creates — in sharp detail the man's arrival in Egypt, his elaborate preparations, and then a moment-by-moment recounting of the dive itself:
What are we to make of this unexpected writerly liberty? McCann, the author, has created Fennell, narrator and writer, who within his own imagined order is fictionalizing the last part of Conway's life. It feels like a desperate effort to get to the heart of the enigma. But what drives Conway? What is it about him?
And what are we to make of the whole? McCann's ingenious tale within a tale: Is it finally a lament for loves had and lost, or is it a Luddite's rage against a world that has become a realm of signals? Our time, our global disarray, is everywhere implicated. There is breakage at every turn. The undersea operations — reality and trope — call to mind the Judaic concept of tikkun olam, roughly translated as 'repair of the world.' It is what we are now tasked with.