A novel that rolls across continents on seas of emotion that find their form in glorious passages of writing
Twist by Colum McCann: Surprising and electric, a wired-up story of what it means to bend yourself into new shapes
McCann loves unlikely circumstances, which his novels treat as a function of the unpredictability of the world at large. The pace of his prose carries the reader along, as does the sweep of his settings as Twist follows a course from Dublin to Cape Town to the west coast of Africa and back to London, with a flourish to the Americas in passing. McCann has made this worldliness the substance of his writing.
The world, in McCann’s books, is a place of grand gestures, words buoyed up with emotions, the expression of which break the surface of the everyday. Twist is made of these moments, its oxygenated prose minutely alive to the smallest variations in pressure between place and character. This gives the novel a physiognomy that is its major grace, the prose humming with the pressure of the story, like so many small bones in a diver’s skull, deep underwater.
The theatre comes from McCann’s ability to make each of these moments a little tragedy, the accumulation of which creates an atmosphere that few writers achieve. The effect is something like looking at a painted stage. On close inspection the figures and the subject can be overwhelming. A few steps back and the panorama opens out, the colours finding common form.
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