BookBrowse Reviews Twist by Colum McCann

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On board a repair ship heading toward a rupture in a vital seafloor cable, an Irish journalist must sift through competing narratives to discover an elusive truth.

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As Colum McCann's novel Twist opens, Anthony Fennell, a writer struggling with alcohol and career stagnation, has reluctantly agreed to write a long-form journalistic piece on the Georges Lecointe, one of the world's busiest cable repair vessels, for an online magazine. The ship is docked in Cape Town but heads out to sea whenever there's a breakage in the vital submarine cables that run along the ocean floor and convey most of the world's digital communication data (see Beyond the Book).

Arriving in South Africa and awaiting an opportunity to join a cable repair operation, Fennell meets fellow Irishman John Conway, the ship's enigmatic chief of mission. Conway invites Fennell home to meet his magnetic partner, Zanele, a South African actress busy preparing for her own journey. She is on her way to England to perform in a climate change–focused adaptation of Waiting for Godot. Although this trio will be together in a room only this one time, all have experienced periods of fracture and renewal, linking them thematically to the broken subterranean cables that the repair ship seeks to locate and mend. All three characters are emerging from shadowy, complicated pasts, and each is poised on the brink of utter transformation. The rest of the novel traces their very different trajectories.

With his always elegant prose, Colum McCann is one of those rare writers who successfully arcs back and forth between the wide-angle perspective of global and societal concerns and its opposite, the sharply focused close-up on individuals and their specific and complicated human lives. His novels expand and contract in an almost breath-like manner. Like his free-diving characters, McCann is willing to risk plunging into the depths in the hope of better articulating what exists in the dimmer reaches of the human heart: "Our lives, even the unruptured ones, bounce around on the seafloor. For a while we might brush tenderly against one another, but eventually, and inevitably, we collide and splinter."

McCann uses the classic literary motif of a sea expedition, with quiet nods to Conrad and Melville, and it's no coincidence that the crew of the Georges Lecointe sets out to trace fractured communication links. The journey also provides an opportunity for reflection on the complicated relationship between human society and the planet. Undersea cables transmit the whole of human digital information—the flotsam and jetsam of societal interaction from the most precious artistic endeavors to the millions of bytes of spam and pornography. When a storm off the Congo coast disrupts the ocean floor and breaks communication cables, Fennell envisions the sea spewing up remnants of human and natural history: "Drowned boats, cars, bicycles, cows, hydraulic jacks, fertilizer bags, spears, pirogues, seeds, insects, birds, old paddle wheels."

The plot of Twist follows several interweaving strands. It chronicles the voyage of the repair ship on its quest to find the two cable breaks located off the coasts of the Congo and Ghana. It moves into stranger territory after a surprising disappearance leads to a shocking act of ecoterrorism. A less comfortable strand for this reader follows Fennell's close attention to Zanele's life in London. Since he scarcely knows her, his fascination reads as unearned intimacy, just as his insistence on calling her by Conway's pet-name for her, Zee, demonstrates a curious lack of boundaries. The discordance is most likely intentional on McCann's part and brings to mind a quote from another of his novels, Let the Great World Spin: "People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time—but even on the best day nobody's perfect."

Throughout the novel, McCann emphasizes that life is built on cycles of rupture and repair. At sea, without the usual distractions and escapes, it becomes harder to avoid facing one's demons. Fennell's path to wholeness is crooked and incomplete, but he is ultimately able to take tentative steps toward change and reconnection. Others may not be as fortunate. Some breakages cannot be mended and some actions cannot be understood. As Conway notes, inevitably, "Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken."

This review first ran in the May 7, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.