Book Review: ‘Twist,’ by Colum McCann

TWIST, by Colum McCann

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.”