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Sydney Morning Herald
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
When the internet cut out, Colum McCann boarded a ship – and found his next novel
Colum McCann is sitting in the study of his New York apartment, looking very relaxed, wearing one of his trademark scarves, waving his hands around as he speaks. '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'. Loading 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.
The Age
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
When the internet cut out, Colum McCann boarded a ship – and found his next novel
Colum McCann is sitting in the study of his New York apartment, looking very relaxed, wearing one of his trademark scarves, waving his hands around as he speaks. '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'. Loading 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.
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Colum McCann: ‘I like having my back against the wall'
The award-winning Irish author Colum McCann was born in Dublin in 1965 and worked as a journalist before moving to the US and turning his hand to books. His novels include Let the Great World Spin, which won the 2011 International Dublin literary award, and 2020's Apeirogon, which took a kaleidoscopic view of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Last year he co-wrote the memoir American Mother with Diane Foley, whose son, US journalist James Foley, was murdered by Islamic State in Syria in 2014. In his latest novel, Twist (published on 6 March), an Irish journalist on a cable repair ship off the west coast of Africa is confronted by questions of environmental destruction, information overload and colonialism. McCann lives in New York with his wife Allison and their three children. Undersea communications cables are underexplored in fiction. What prompted you to write about them? In the early part of the pandemic, I was thinking a lot about the notion of repair, because things were shattering around us fairly frequently. Somewhere I fell upon the story of the Léon Thévenin, a cable repair ship out of South Africa. Like everybody else, I thought that [digital] information went up from our phones and hit these satellites and came back down. I was really taken by the notion that it all happens in the bottom of the deep black sea. Bizarrely, since I started writing it, undersea cables are now being cut left, right and centre – the Houthis in the Red Sea, the Russians and Chinese in the Baltic. We're going to be talking about it a lot more in the years to come. It's amazing how vulnerable these cables are to attack – all our ultra-modern communications being funnelled through these flimsy tubes draped across the Close to shore you can send down a remotely operated vehicle to fix a break, but beyond that, you're going back to the 19th century. You're throwing a rope down with a grappling hook on the end and hoping for the best. The narrator makes several references to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. What's the resonance there for you?On very obvious levels, [Twist] is a man on a quest on a boat. The cable break occurs after the Congo River floods and flushes all of its refuse out to sea. It's interesting that the cables we've laid down follow almost exactly the old colonial shipping routes. So all of those little echoes began to kick in. You tackle big subjects… do you think novels can make a difference?I don't think it's within [a novel's] scope to change this stuff. But what it does is put a little crack in the wall, and then other people make the crack bigger, and then sometimes the wall comes tumbling down. I don't call on novelists to necessarily be activists or to write about the big issues of the day. But for me personally, yeah, I think I do have to. The Israel and Palestine situation in Apeirogon was a big subject to take on. And, of course, there's a danger in doing so, but the hope is that, in some small way, you disrupt conventional thinking. Novelists are not as important as we were 50 years ago. I find that you have to work out of a reckless inner need more than ever. It dilates my nostrils a little bit and I like that. I like having my back against the told the story of Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, two real-life Israeli and Palestinian friends who work together for peace. Are you still in touch with them?I talk to Rami and Bassam at least once a week, and I filter a lot of how I feel about [the current] situation through them, because I'm sitting here in New York, not in the West Bank or Jerusalem. They will say that they are heartbroken and very angry and very, very scared. I was talking to Bassam's son Arab recently, and he was stopped at a checkpoint and a gun was put to his head. There are things happening in the West Bank that Bassam tells me about that send absolute shivers down my spine. I too am heartbroken and angry and confused. There are times I think about writing a second Apeirogon book. But imagine going into that right now. You're really entering into something that's very, very raw and complex. But maybe that's the place where I should go. You taught creative writing for a long time, and you've published a book of writing advice. If you were to boil it all down to one key point, what would it be?I love this phrase by the novelist Aleksandar Hemon: 'It's all shit until it isn't.' Which is really interesting, because it's all about sitting down and working at the coalface and doing it again and again. It's the refusal to give up, the refusal to let the story beat you. Every single book that I've ever written, I have given up. It's almost like a necessary part of the process – you've got to cause yourself grief in order to understand what it is that it actually means to you. Read any good books recently?I just read Frankenstein for the first time and it blew me away. It's a perfect metaphor for where we are now, the monster that we are creating and the guilt that's involved. I'm reading a book called One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by the Egyptian-Canadian writer Omar El Akkad about the current situation in Israel and Palestine: it's very good, very necessary, and it pulls absolutely no punches whatsoever. I've also been reading Louise Kennedy's The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, and I really liked The Convoy by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, about her escape from the 1994 Rwandan genocide. I see you have a photograph of Edna O'Brien on your shelf. She once told the New York Times that if she could choose anyone to write her life story, she'd choose that was so nice. I travelled a lot with her. In fact she gave me my very first reading back in London in the early 90s when my first book was coming out. It was a bit of a disaster – I read for far too long – but she became a friend. Her influence has entered the air in many ways. It'll be interesting to see how young writers, especially young women writers of Ireland, will take up her mantle in the next few years. What do you need in order to write?A perfect day would be getting up at 4am and, without checking the soccer results or my email, getting straight down to it. I'd stop to walk the dog and do a few chores, then go back to work until about midday. In the afternoon I'd do some editing, and then maybe have a glass of wine at about 4pm, meet a few pals. Then late in the evening I'd get a bit more editing done. That would be a perfect day for me. Is that how it usually happens?No, of course not [laughs]. Twist by Colum McCann is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99) on 6 March. 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