TWIST is Colum McCann's latest, aptly titled, exploration of communication and its breakdowns

TWIST
COLUM McCANN
Random House
$13.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A propulsive novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean—from the New York Times bestselling author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin

“Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.”

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth. Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.

When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Setting your repair story at the mouth of the Congo River is asking for Joseph Conrad comparisons. On a craft level, Author McCann is *streets* ahead of Conrad. On an imaginitive axis, he's at the fatal disadvantage that time presents us all. Somebody else did it a century-plus ago. That isn't always a problem since, after all, nothing's original after The Tale of Gilgamesh.

This story is focused more on Kurtz, sorry Conway, and his South African actress lover Zanele, than on Fennell the journalist covering Conway's really, really interesting role in maintaining the infrastructure we're so completely dependent on for modern life. I was captivated by the bits of the story that featured the underwater cables and their care, the hazards that beset them, and the clever, dangerous ways we use to maintain and repair them.

This is Colum McCann's métier: Metaphor. Underwater cables carrying all the world's information, all the connections between people, the vast accumulation of meaning enabled by them; the threat to them in the story is natural and requires huge, dangerous effort by multiple people; the man whose job it is to tell us about it is, unsurprisingly, in crisis of the same sort.

Because Fennell is the PoV man doesn't make him the center of the action, necessarily, and the argument that Conway's the main character is possible to make. All the action centers Conway. Every physical thing done of any consequence is done by Conway. His are the skills...freediving! ZOMG...that will repair the vital cable. Fennell has to learn all this data, and so we have an excuse to learn it with him. He is us...Conway is the action hero doing the stuff to make us more comfortanle, safer, in our cocoons. Fennell is there to tell us his story.

And Fennell himself? He's got the whole world in his head. He needs the same repairs as the cables. His ex, and his son, can tell you stories of the man who tells stories and yet has no emotional facility; no facility at moving the emotional data through the wildly pressurized cables of his emotional system out into the places they're needed. On this assignment, he's doing everything he can from miles away to understand and present to his audience the facts of the situation when, in reality, he's trying to explain how communication is invisible until it's broken. This is a central-to-life human fact.

What makes the men at the center of this story do what they do is women. That's a dreary, heteronormative reality. The actress...note her profession's essential artifice...that Conway and, though less blatantly, Fennell desire is a professional dissimulator who presents emotional realities in an unreal, fictional way to illuminate their truth.

Acting is Orwellian...lying to create truth. Like writing, an artifice, an epicyclic system humans have created.

This is McCann's métier. He's operating within nominal parameters. He's found a story to tell that makes its mark by taking all Conrad's colonial-era concerns and trimming them to fit a twenty-first century audience's blind spots. He then uses the people he's created to fulfill the archetypal duties once held by Marlow and his blank-spaces-on-maps fascination, Kurtz, and the largely forgettable women Kurtz acquires. It's got verve, it's stylish, and it's built on foundations that have withstood the test of time. All that is the basis of a five-star rating, surely! Yes, but...the novella length is notably absent. This is a novel in full, not to say a maximalist one; but novels allow a scope that can lead the ambitious into temptation of prolixity. Author McCann's succumbed to this fiction-fever. The ending of the story is not the end of the novel. It goes on a bit. Not long enough to get boring but long enough to feel baggy as an old, well-loved cardigan.

So I'm recommending it to all y'all who want a solid, involving story that is not perfect but is delightful and successful at revivifying a classic story that can never get stale.