Colum McCann’s eighth novel, in a sequence of wildly eclectic novels, Twist, presents as some kind of thriller tackling the weird world of undersea cables but is really a most literary, elusive beast. A washed-up journalist travels to South Africa and then up the African coast with a huge ship that repairs breaks, captained by mysterious, super-capable John Conway. From the start we know Conway’s fate but what happens and why? Those mysteries are pursued with slow but graceful, unstoppable pace, the book digging into the journalist’s self-disgust and Conway’s unknowable past and even more unknowable future motivations. Ultimately, the novel is an ode to the riddles of the human heart and mind, but in the telling, it is an engrossing examination of the arcane world of ubiquitous, scanty cables straddling the globe down in the depths of the sea. The author’s style resembles the semi-poetic but precise beauty of his earlier novels but is even more clipped and roughly hewn, so that the read is both smooth and rocky. Only after the end, only after reflection on the questions unanswered, do we appreciate the mastery employed in Twist, and the book’s existential deepness. I cannot recommend Twist to everyone, suspecting some will find it murky and complex, but if you are up for modernity and soul-searching, it will amply reward.
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