When the internet cut out, Colum McCann boarded a ship – and found his next novel
'I know it looks like Ted Kaczynski's cabin,' he says of the room, cluttered with books and posters and important bits of paper. Kaczynski, the Unabomber, used his cabin to plot acts of terrorism. McCann uses his to fashion his award-winning novels, notably the bestsellers Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin. Apropos of nothing, he shows me a scar on his head: he's just had temporal surgery for headaches, fortunately, nothing nasty was found.
We're delving into the marvel of how we can see and speak to each other across half the world. 'My voice goes into the computer,' he says, 'then into a little black box at the bottom of my apartment, and then it shoots down to 60 Hudson Street, then either to Long Island or New Jersey, then to Alexandria in Egypt, and then …' He digs out a huge map of Australia. 'To Perth. Or maybe Oxford Falls in Sydney, or Maroochydore?'
Anyway, his voice and face get to Melbourne and me via a series of cables about as wide as a garden hose, crossing the bottom of the sea. At the heart of the cables are glass tubes the width of an eyelash, carrying light. 'I find it startling and a little bit scary,' he says. 'Well, it's beautiful. Our voices and images are being translated into billions of pulses of light with a 0.0006-second delay.'
These miraculous little glass tubes are the inspiration behind his latest novel, Twist, which began when he read a news report about a cable repair ship, the Leon Thevenin, operating out of Cape Town. Several African countries lost their internet service for six weeks, and the ship was sent out to resolve the problem. 'All of that began to gather in my head and knock on my brain cells: what is going on here?'
A novelist's curiosity led him to go out on the Leon Thevenin himself for a few days, on local missions. He met a diverse crew: South Africans, Zimbabweans, people from all over the world. Some were highly trained in technology and mathematics, some worked the engine room, some would operate the surprisingly primitive tool for a boat far out over deep water: a grappling hook trawling the bottom for a break in the cable, the needle in the haystack.
The crew called him the Book Guy: 'They wanted to ask me as many questions as I wanted to ask them.'
The book contains some heart-stopping descriptions of free diving, so vivid and detailed I'm sure he must have tried it himself. 'I was possibly the worst free diver they've ever come across,' he says. 'They go down to huge depths, 100 metres. I got down to one metre. A lot of writing is like that. You go in and try to understand the passion and try to be honest, and then run it by the best experts.'
Gradually, his research revealed sinister findings. The African break was caused by a mighty flood in the Congo River, which pushed mountains of debris far out to sea. But there's also potential for military sabotage. At the time we are speaking, Chinese warships have been circling Australia. The Chinese government said they were doing scientific work, but such a voyage could also be scouting for cables to cut.
McCann says this is already happening with Russian vessels in the Baltic and around the coast of Ireland. An admiral in the British navy told him, 'I guarantee you that the next major war will begin underwater.'
All this alarming background could lead to a sizzling spy thriller about international sabotage. 'I could have made a lot of money!' McCann laughs. 'Maybe I will write the James Bond version one day. But I just don't believe in it.'
Instead, he has created suspenseful literary fiction where the breaking and healing in the hearts and minds of his characters is at least as important as what's going on underwater. His narrator, Anthony Fennell, is an Irish novelist, like McCann, who goes out on a cable repair ship which is aiming to fix a break far out at sea. Unlike McCann, Anthony is a broken soul, suffering from professional and personal failure.
I was possibly the worst free diver they've ever come across.
He becomes obsessed with the enigmatic master of the mission, John Conway, who in turn is troubled by cracks in his marriage. Anthony and Conway recall Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby in one of a series of allusions to literary predecessors (including Heart of Darkness, T. S. Eliot's Prufrock, the film Apocalypse Now and Don DeLillo). 'Nick Carraway is a narrator who is broken,' McCann says. 'He's trying to figure out a mysterious man and trying to figure out himself as well, and in the end we don't know the full story.
'I like that. The times seem obsessed with certainty. Everyone is so certain. And increasingly people want to make it simple, pretend there's no mystery.' So in Twist, 'there are a lot of big ideas but I didn't want to make it violins and trumpets coming up … I wanted it all embedded in a small, deeply simple story'.
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In a long career, Dublin-born McCann has written eight novels, three story collections and two non-fiction works. His writing has been translated into 40 languages and has won many international awards. He's written fiction about real people and events: Rudolf Nureyev, the Roma, two friends across the Israel-Palestine divide who both lost daughters in the Middle East conflict, aviators, black slavery, a tightrope walk between the World Trade Centre towers, the Irish Troubles and people tunnelling under New York.
What does all this have in common? 'I don't know, and I don't know if I even want to know, it might bring on a paralysis,' he says. 'But I do feel there's a sense of movement from one place to the next, very specific places where work occurs. And I like exploring things, trying to figure out what's going on, to carve a personal story out of them, rather than get didactic, political, moralistic.'
Next he's off to Australia, a country he hasn't visited for 26 years; he has happy memories of the first visit: 'There was a peculiar strong Irish character; I felt at home.'
Then on to Germany for the world premiere of Charlotte Bray's opera based on American Mother, the non-fiction story he wrote with Diane Foley about the ISIS beheading of her son Jim; he wrote the libretto. 'I'll be getting my tuxedo ready. With a scarf over it.'
Colum McCann will be at the UNSW Centre for Ideas on May 6. He is also a guest of the Byron Writer's Festival (May 7), Newcastle Writers Festival (May 8), Canberra Writers Festival (May 9) and Melbourne Writers Festival (May 10). The Age is a festival partner. Twist is out now.
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