Twist by Colum McCann

Twist

By Colum McCann

Random, 2025

By Tom LeClair

Over the last fifteen years, two Ireland-born novelists now residing in the United States--Colum McCann and Joseph O’Neill--have been writing some of the most perceptive global-minded fiction published in America.  O’Neill is best known for the 2008 novel Netherland (about immigrants in New York City) and last year’s Africa-set Godwin.  McCann’s best known is the multi-ethnic Let the Great World Spin, winner of the National Book Award in 2009. With Twist, McCann “follows” O’Neill to Africa.  Or, more specifically, to the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Cape Town, the old Congo, and Ghana—then on to the Mediterranean off Alexandria.

O’Neill uses a couple of very contemporary land-based narrators.  For his sea story, McCann turns back to a Conradian Marlowe figure, a failed and depressed Irish novelist who refers to Heart of Darkness and spends much of his narrative in Conrad-garrulous speculation and uncertainty.  Looking to get away from himself and Europe, Anthony Fennell at 48 takes a journalistic assignment to write about a ship that repairs undersea cables that carry much more information, he says, than satellites.  He travels to Cape Town and is helped aboard a ship by a younger fellow Irishman named John Conway who is chief of repair operations on the Georges Lecointe.  (The characters address each other by their last names, giving the novel a pre-modern quality.)  Fennell immediately finds Conway enigmatic, one of Melville’s sea-going “isolatoes” even to Conway’s beloved African partner Zanele.  (Yes, Fennell also mentions Melville.)

Slowly sailing to, then exactly locating, and finally repairing the cables give Fennell a lot of time to wonder about Conway’s past, particularly his “lost years,” his name change, and his feats of free-diving, reaching great depths without an oxygen tank.  Also time to describe, like Ishmael, the complicated workings of the ship and its multinational crew who revere the calm competence of Conway, no raving Ahab but, thinks Fennell, still mysteriously obsessed like Melville’s captain.  Perhaps aware that the story (like Moby-Dick) is advancing slowly, Fennell and McCann keep dropping hints that Conway will ultimately disappear from the ship (though not the story). 

Because of Fennell’s literary sensibilities and allusions, I’m patient with McCann’s pace, just as I am with Conrad and Melville, but the style of Twist is throwback, possibly archaic for many readers.  Here is the ponderous opening of Part Two:

“It is, I suppose, the job of the teller to rearrange the scattered pieces of a story so that they conform to some sort of coherence.  Between fact and fiction lie memory and imagination.  Within memory and imagination lies our desire to capture at least some essence of the truth, which is, at best, messy.”

Since Fennell so often announces Conway’s jumping ship, it’s not a spoiler to say that it does happen and that in the last third of the novel Conway performs unexpected and dramatic actions with his deep-diving abilities.  These actions Fennell reconstructs—actually almost completely imagines—in a more contemporary, even cinematic style with lots of breathless fragments (ironic because Conway is a master of the deep breath). 

Although Fennell may be fairly persuasive imagining Conway’s behavior, that doesn’t mean he understands Conway’s motives.  At the book’s very end, Fennell—like Marlowe at the end of Heart of Darkness—meets with the mystery man’s beloved, Zanele.  Marlowe lies to Kurtz’s betrothed; Zanele may lie to McCann’s Marlowe figure.  Readers may have to go around again—twist—to reach some conclusions about the possible con man Conway.

O’Neill’s Godwin is much about the circulation of information and misinformation around a mysterious African soccer player.  McCann is more concerned with the technology that moves that information almost instantaneously—and what happens, when the cables break, to countries in Africa that have come to rely on the cables for internet and phone, the new data colonialism.  McCann has Fennell provide some good on-land reporting about the chaos when Africa goes dark again.

It’s not just cables that humans have dropped into the seas.  Zanele is directing and appearing in a British performance of Waiting for Godot that she has turned into a play about environmental degradation, including microplastics in the oceans.  What are we waiting for to repair the world? she asks.  McCann’s answer may be that we won’t care about environmental “horror,” to quote Conrad’s Kurtz, as long as we have TikTok and the ocean of other entertainments that the cables carry from North to South, from everywhere to everywhere. 

In Accra, Fennell meets a Black woman who shows him a dump where men are extracting pennies worth of recyclables from the broken cable.  The woman reminds Fennell of “Zanele and her four billion tons of industrial waste” dumped in oceans. “Maybe it was only women,” Fennell muses, “who stayed focused on these things.  The true stories of our times.  The ways the land gets taken.  The stripping down.  The leaving.  The poisoning….All the stories that we had ignored down through the years.”  Ignored by many novelists but not by Richard Powers in his recent novel Playground about, like Twist, the seas and information, in Powers’ case AI.

Like O’Neill’s Godwin, McCann’s Conway is an athlete, and McCann is excellent on Conway’s deep-breathing training regimen and, later, how his almost monastic physical discipline prepares him for the actions he plots.  The alcoholic and out-of-shape Fennell is especially impressed with Conway’s athleticism—which may be why the last third of Fennell’s narration is active, swift, and linear, with fewer interpretive interruptions. 

Is Fennell unreliable?  Absolutely and maybe even excessively, compared with Marlowe.  Perhaps McCann has made Fennell so, not to comment on Conrad or fiction writers doing journalism but to parallel the unreliability of the ocean cables and the flood of information they move.  Most contemporaries live in that information, McCann implies, not in our bodies composed mainly of water.  Though Fennell is an imperfect conduit, Twist has an admirable ability to connect the global with the personal, the abstract with the concrete, how we are all colonized by toxic information and toxic particles.

One last—or initial—mystery: why does McCann call the novel Twist.  I thought the fibers within the cables might be twisted, but that doesn’t seem so.  “The most casual things can, after all, twist our tired hearts,” says the often sentimental Fennell, commenting on mud brought up from the seabed.  He tells a “Secret Sharer” tale twisted by his own projections and fears.  In the last third, framing out now, McCann gives an unanticipated eco-warrior twist to his plot.  And maybe, just maybe, McCann’s title also suggests he’s giving a tipped-hat twist to another novel by an author with an Irish name—Cormac McCarthy’s Passenger.  It, too, is about an enigmatic diver who, figuratively, disappears and ends at the edge of the Mediterranean.  

Such is the kind of reviewer speculation (like Fennell’s?) that McCann’s radical unreliability and pervasive allusiveness can elicit, particularly when a novel is explicitly about hyper-connectivity.  “Everything is connected,” Pynchon wrote in his global Gravity’s Rainbow.  What could be laughed off as coincidences when that book was published may now, given the current state of information retrieval, be connections.  For McCann, the bottom line—and I don’t mean the undersea cable—might be the last word of the novel: “wonder,” both verb and noun.  Perhaps the natural world could be repaired if we just wondered about—questioned, like Zanele—the “wonders” of the artificial world within the globe-connecting cables.

Tom LeClair is the author of eight novels, several of which have global environmental themes, as do his non-fiction books The Art of Excess and In the Loop.