A favored author, Colum McCann, with a new twist
A horrific storm damages cables deep in the ocean wreaking havoc with the world above and its reliance on the internet. An author struggling with his writing and personal relationships is eager to lose himself at sea and accepts an assignment to document the event onboard a ship heading out to locate and hopefully repair the cables.
Reminiscent of The Old Man and the Sea with constant shifts between characters, the story is sometimes about the narrator, other times about the repair ship’s captain and the depth of the earth’s oceans—all told with McCann’s beautiful prose:
‘Conway led me past a small office, cluttered but neat. The walls were full of underwater photos. Fields of coral. Hypothermal vents. Fissures in the rock. Snippets of color. One of the photos showcased a woman moving upward through the water, in profile, in a wetsuit and a single long black fin, a line of grace and stealth through shafts of silvery light: somehow the water seemed to open itself to her.’
The luminous images throughout the novel add to the narrative depths.
It is at times a gritty story, twisting forward, backward, and forward again with philosophical musings reflecting how fragile we and our world are. The satisfaction in the ending is in accepting that sometimes life doesn’t provide us with all the answers or relationships we desire. As the world well knows, Colum McCann is a skillful writer, and I enjoyed being mesmerized by his words once again.
Twist by Colum McCann (Random House, 2025, 235 pages)