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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.
New York Times
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Novel Explores the Undersea Cables That Connect the World
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.
Washington Post
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Colum McCann's ‘Twist' drags us to the depths of the ocean
In 2009, Colum McCann published a curious book called 'Let the Great World Spin' that had everybody looking up. The novel, which went on to win both a National Book Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, presents several apparently disparate stories while a tightrope-walker modeled after Philippe Petit tiptoes between the twin towers on a wire.
The Guardian
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Twist by Colum McCann review – globalism and a voyage into danger
Colum McCann's breakthrough 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spin, was set on the day in 1974 when the acrobat Philippe Petit walked across a high wire strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. McCann's bravura account of the wire-walk forms the centrepiece of that novel, which relates the interlocking lives of different New Yorkers who are touched by Petit's thrilling but benign assault on the Manhattan skyline. In his new novel, Twist, McCann is drawn to another type of wire and another obsessive, boundary-pushing hero. The wires, this time, are the undersea cables that carry data around our hyperconnected planet. And the hero, John Conway, is an engineer and free diver who travels the world, repairing them when they break. McCann's subject is timely. Experts have been warning for a while that our globalised lives depend on these links to a degree that few of us have considered. To travel around the world, our voices and digital data are only briefly airborne before 1.5m km of fibre optic wires transport them across the sea floor, where they are prey to hostile actors and natural disasters. Over the past two years, there have been multiple instances of underwater cables being damaged in the Baltic by ships linked to Russia or its allies. The novel is narrated by a fiftysomething Irish journalist and novelist, Anthony Fennell, who's got himself an assignment to write a long feature about Conway's cable repair vessel, the Georges Lecointe. He travels to Cape Town to join the ship then sails with the crew up the western coast of Africa to the site of a cable break. McCann/Fennell lets us know early on that Conway will be the puzzle at the book's heart, and that it won't be an easy one. 'Others have tried to tell Conway's story,' he writes, 'and, so far as I know, they got it largely wrong.' Physically gifted – he can hold his breath for eight minutes – Conway is charismatic and secretive, with a few mysterious blanks in his CV. He's also in a strained relationship with his South African partner, a beautiful actor-director called Zanele who is preparing to stage an unauthorised production of Waiting for Godot. While Fennell and Conway sail north to repair the cable, Zanele is in the UK, on a path towards an unexpected kind of celebrity. One touchstone for the book is, of course, McCann's own Let the Great World Spin, where a single act of physical virtuosity links different threads of story. 'What I needed was a story about connection,' Fennell tells us, as he takes the assignment at the novel's opening, 'about grace, about repair.' In fact, while Philippe Petit's story fits that bill, the one Fennell ends up with is much less graceful and restorative. The other, more determinative influence on the book is Heart of Darkness. McCann pays overt homage to Conrad's novella, and the shape of his plot is clearly indebted to it. A boat sails on an uncertain voyage towards the Congo. On board, an introspective narrator speculates about the motives and character of an ambiguous, inspirational and possibly sinister individual. There are some excellent things in this novel. The account of the journey and the observations of the work on board the ship feel as if they must be rooted in McCann's own reportage. We are on board for days, among the polyglot, multi-ethnic male crew. The book is full of wonder at the difficulty of their work, at the scale and beauty of the natural world – and full of anger at humanity's capacity to wreck it. As they trawl the bottom of the sea for the broken cable, they pull up forms of sealife that may be entirely new, yet nowhere is free from human-made rubbish. And much of the digital content pouring through the cables is vacuous, spiteful and wrong. As Zenele's show in the UK gets caught up in a moment of digital infamy, McCann forces us to contemplate how all these phenomena are connected. At his best, McCann evokes physical activity in an intense, cinematic way. There are passages of extraordinary vividness. The depths of the ocean; freedivers plunging to the sea floor on a single breath; out-of-the-way cable relay stations on Africa's west coast; sea sickness; extreme weather; an internet outage that paralyses part of Cape Town: these are all evoked with a power that seems to persuade you that you're either a participant or a witness. And the novel builds to a bravura climactic escapade: part Philippe Petit, part Mister Kurtz, part Theodore Kaczynski. I loved the thoughtful, essayistic inquiries into nature and the environment, and the consciousness-raising voyage towards the broken cable. But I have to confess that I'm not entirely in sympathy with all McCann's aesthetic decisions. As a narrator, Fennell can't compete with Marlow, because he's a spare part on the Georges Lecointe, where Marlow is captain of his steamboat. There's an occasional note of portentousness in the prose, and a fondness for eye-catching lines that I would file under 'Kill Your Darlings': 'A moment dolphined up'; 'The early choices in any story present vectors that can spray in dozens of different directions, a rorschach of possibility.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Like Heart of Darkness, Twist lingers after you've put it down. Conrad's novel joined the shockingly unexpected dots between the trophies of modern European culture – car tyres, piano keys – and the horrors of the Belgian Congo. Twist makes the most of the ironic juxtapositions between the ephemeral trash that spills into our smartphones, the eternal trash that spills into our oceans, and the patient, heroic, highly technical grunt-work required to keep all those spigots flowing. Twist by Colum McCann is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
