The novelist was astonished by the lax security around the undersea internet cables that keep us connected. That vulnerability, both technological and human, is at the heart of Twist, his new novel
Colum McCann on his new book: ‘You could actually take down the world’s internet ... with a fleet of 20 ships’
I’m not ready to let Bridget Jones go just yet. She has been a constant comfort to me and so many women I knowLet the Great World Spin, a 9/11 allegory from 2009 that won the US National Book Award and the International, recounted Petit’s high-wire walk between the World Trade Center’s twin towers in 1974. Apeirogon, from 2020, explored the Middle East’s most enduring conflict through the lives and deaths of two daughters, one Israeli, one Palestinian.
“We had that moment where it’s like time was crushed and we were so dependent on these little machines, and it was a real mystery to me how I could call Sally in Clonkeen Road from New York. It’s a wonder of science and it is also a wonder of connection.” At one level a thriller examining the powerful, fragile network that connects the modern world, Twist also seeks to plumb its characters’ souls, an equally delicate operation, as Conway disappears off grid and Fennell searches for him.is big news now, with allegations of Russian and Chinese trawlers dragging their anchors on the seabed to wreak havoc. But, five years ago, McCann had little to go on.
“It’s a deceptively simple book for me. I’m still trying to fathom it. It’s about two characters, it’s chronological, it goes in a straight line, it’s not multiple voices, not really outside my realm of experience, like I did with Apeirogon or American Mother, or Let the Great World Spin. Twist, the title of his new novel, met no such resistance. It economically captures the sense of something going awry, with the secondary sense of an unexpected change of direction in the plot.
He wanted to write something straightforward and almost confessional, through a character like Nick Carraway, The Great Gatsby’s narrator, looking back on his younger, more vulnerable years. But as his research led him to realise that the world’s internet cables followed old colonial shipping routes, he conceived of a rupture of an Atlantic cable caused by a flood from the Congo river – a nod to Heart of Darkness’s plot, as is Conway working for a Belgian company, like Marlow in the original.
McCann believes that fiction writers today face an uphill battle for relevance compared with the era of Philip Roth and Norman Mailer and Toni Morrison, who had more influence in the public sphere. Fennell says, “I was unsure what fiction and drama could do any more.” Donald Trump is referred to in Twist as “a damp white loaf”. McCann’s response to the election of the United States’ most successful seller of sinister fictions since Stephen King was to lick his wounds. “But then I got this wonderful email from a friend. She said, ‘We’ll spend a day trying to figure all this out. But then tomorrow we ride at dawn.‘”
“Often I use the prompt of repair . It could be a story about the repair of a bicycle, or of a relationship or a neighbourhood. And they begin to understand things about one another, that they aren’t quite as distant as they thought. What we have in common breaks down the borders, the stereotypes.” “I have a powerful fondness for the North. My mum is from there. She grew up on a dairy farm near Garvagh. She came up to theDespite being a Dubliner born and bred, McCann once said that he felt more like a Northerner. Why was that?
“When first emerged they were laughed at, but essentially what they were saying was entirely right. For centuries writers and corporations have condescended, stereotyped. On the same hand, there is a way to go in with head bowed and a degree of wonder and curiosity. It’s a form of cultural celebration.
“The music of my childhood was my dad on his typewriter, writing kids’ soccer books about Georgie Goode , a Traveller from an Irish family in England. He wrote on big rolls of paper – very Kerouac – with a carbon underneath, which he gave to me to do edits. “I also remember Mr Banville in the newsroom, always wrapped in big, heavy scarves.” Did that inspire McCann’s famous taste in scarves? He laughs. “No. That was inspired by being on the road and wearing a bandanna.”
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