“We are all shards in the smash-up.
“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.”
***
These opening sentences welcome the reader to a masterful, enigmatic tale of loss and recovery, an extraordinary story that questions the morality of unfettered consumption and the increasing dependence on technology to define humanity.
Anthony Fennell, an Irish writer in decline, narrates. He is a man broken: a wife gone, a son lost, so much ache the booze can’t soothe it. A digital magazine offers him a gig in South Africa: report on the crews who repair breaks in the underseas cables whose hair-width filaments power the global economy and keep us entertained with cat videos. Fennell takes the job. It’s a chance to put his own Humpty-Dumpty back together.
The chief of mission on the repair ship is fellow Irishman John Conway, a free diver, a flip-phone user, a taciturn guardian of his protean past. He allows Fennell to shadow him, but urges him to write about his girlfriend, Zanele, an ascendant South African actress who serves as both oracle of conscience and Conway-whisperer, uttering to Fennell one day, “He aspires downward, you’ll see.” A portentous statement.
McCann’s description of the savage storm that causes a cable breakage and the repair vessel’s long journey to the site is vivid, forceful and a welcome display of writerly craft and confidence not seen in many current novels.
Equally acuminous is McCann’s dissection of the inner Fennell, whose quest for self-repair compels him to draw analogies to Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) in “Apocalypse Now,” itself based on Conrad’s (Conroy?) “Heart of Darkness,” which tells of a journey up the same Congo River whose flood overwhelms the cable. Circles within circles. “The horror! The horror!” Breathe.
Such literary crosscutting could easily go awry, but not with Capt. McCann in the wheelhouse. Even minus the mesmerizing climactic moment to come, his preceding renderings of shipboard life (the tide of tension vs. boredom), of the randomness and precision that enable the repair, and of the eventual denouement, which is Fennell returned to the Emerald Isle having found no answers but now asking better questions, are more than enough.
There are so many good paragraphs in “Twist” that I filled several pages with them. I’ll drop one here, chosen in the spirit of repair and with the acknowledgement that each of us is fractured, dented or otherwise disfigured. Life takes a toll. What keeps us going is looking for the patch:
“… we are creatures of great change. Not a single atom in our body today was there when we were children. Every bit of us has been replace many times over. We flake away and become new. Whatever we are now, we are not the stuff from which we were originally made. All the people we once were. All the people we had once hope to be.”
Perhaps the best book I’ve read this year (Cormac McCarthy and Claire Keegan are the competition).