BookLife Review: Twist: A Novel (Colum McCann, author), by Carol O’Day

Contemporary fiction, National Book Award author, deep ocean diving, internet cable repair ship, Irish journalist, environmental activism, disappearance, repair and redemption, clarion call

National Book Award winning author, Colum McCann (Let The Great World Spin, 2009), delivers a fresh and thought-provoking novel in Twist: A Novel. An Irish journalist is assigned to cover the relatively unknown activities of ships tasked with repairing damaged internet cables lying along ocean floors all over the world. The public, for the most part, understands access to the internet as a service moving around the world via satellites. In fact, fiber-optic cables carry much of the massive internet data traffic over cables traveling across ocean floors around the world. For a wide range of reasons-earthquakes, mud slides, oceanic floods, boat traffic in shallower waters, and even eco-terrorism–these cables suffer damage. When damage occurs, significant internet data outages occur, not only slowing or interrupting social media feeds but critical functions including government communications, hospital operations and world-wide business and financial transactions, all of which increasingly depend on properly functioning digital systems and internet access.

The high tech world of communications is equipped with sea-faring vessels and expert engineering teams that traverse the world’s oceans to effect repairs of these essential cables. Together with the communications companies, the ships identify the location of the cable break, travel to sea, troll the location with hooks to locate the cable, raise it to the surface and, with sophisticated equipment on board, repair, reconnect and resubmerge the cable, restoring data transmission service.

Anthony Ferrell, an Irish journalist, is assigned to cover this arena and produce a lengthy article. In order to research the process, he must embed himself on a repair ship. He meets an enigmatic repair crew leader, known as Conway, based in South Africa and joins a repair journey. Before departing, he meets Conway’s partner, a well-known actress, named Zanele, who is bound for the UK to direct and perform in extended performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which she has interpreted as a commentary on climate change and the world’s desecration of its oceans. She and Conway share a passion for diving and the oceans. Fennell detects a strain and rift in their relationship.

McCann’s language is sublime. Whether he is describing a mudslide from the Congo delta into the ocean or using two spare lines to describe key personnel on the ship, his prose soars. Of the mudslide that triggered the breach of the cable, McCann writes:

… Sand and silt and stone and dust. The river gathered the debris from the banks, from the river bottom, from the air itself. Every raindrop, too, had its own weight of dirt inside. The Congo became a malevolence of rushing brown. The boulders tumbled. The rocks somersaulted. More soil was ripped from the bottom and the water became a portrait of the weight it carried. Drowned boats, cars, bicycles, cows, hydraulic jacks, fertilizer bags, spears, pirogues, seeds, insects, birds, old paddle wheels. A heap of bones too, surely bleached and tumbling now, femur against tibia against rib against mandible against sternum. Day after day, week after week. It was as if the Congo was purging itself, all that history, all that rancor, under the sun, under the swollen stars, a rage of soil heading out into the channel, an underwater canyon that stretched for hundreds of kilometers….

And with equally spare prose and defining details he gives us Conway’s two lieutenants, Samkelo and Ron:

. . .Samkelo was tall and thin, with perfectly creased shirts. Ron, third in command on the cable team, was a tight compact man from Virginia, the only American on board. He was elaborately, if predictably, tattooed-a grappling hook and a series of rope tattoos high on his arms.

As Fennell acclimates to life on board the ship, he works to repair himself. He struggles with alcoholism and embraces the opportunity to get sober on board the ship where alcohol is prohibited. Fennell is estranged from his teen-aged son who lives with his ex-wife in South America. Fennell uses his time on board to reflect on his failed fatherhood and sets himself the goal of reconciling with his son. He also attempts to decipher the enigmatic personality and backstory of Conway, the captain of the ship and cable repair savant.

….If there was a clock inside him, instructing time, it was ticking slower than the timepieces inside the rest of us. It wasn’t that he tamped down the moment or tightened it, or obscured it. On the contrary, he gave air to it, let it hover, made it new. I would say that he struck me as the kind of man who might be found in a monastery, or a phrontistery, somewhere raw, distant, on the edge. He didn’t advertise himself as such, no sandals, no carpenter pants, and he seemed completely unaware that he was standing in the slant of other people’s gaze.

As the leader of the repair expedition, Fennell must understand Conway in order to to tell, and write, his article. The search for the broken cable and the repair of what is discovered to be not one but three breaks proceeds apace, in contrast to Fennell’s efforts to crack the mystery of Conway. Fennell discovers that Conway has significant gaps in his personal history, his “lost years”, and cannot unearth any clues other than discovering that he once lived under a different name. Both crew and Conway go silent when Fennell probes for more and Conway ultimately restricts the journalist’s internet access on ship. When all but the final, and easiest repair along the coast of Africa is completed, Conway disappears from the ship overnight. This unexpected turn of events is one of the titular twists in the novel.

What becomes of Conway, and the missing pieces of his backstory chronicled in the epilogue will be left for the reader to discover and enjoy. The story’s twists turn the novel and the significant efforts of a massive crew to repair the lines on their heads. The author artfully unfurls the story while retaining the mystery. He also manages to interject serious reflections on personal redemption and repair in this imperfect and messy life we lead, all the while sounding a persistent and substantiated alarm about both the ubiquitous creep of digital data and the largely ignored human toll on the natural world that accompanies our dependence on technology.

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