Twist

Colum McCann has no fear of taking on novels that involve years of research. Previous works Let The Great World Spin and Apeirogon manage to tie together many fragmented stories and characters into a coherent whole. In Twist, McCann takes a different approach: an insular first-person narrative in a story about subsea cables and the internet.

The first half of the book works very well. Our protagonist, Anthony Fennell, is a writer recovering from past addiction issues. He has been commissioned to write an article for a magazine about subsea cable repair, and gains a berth on a cable repair ship after a major break in a cable off Ghana. He is an unreliable narrator, becoming obsessed with the lead cable repair technician and his love, an actress who is working in England on tour. While at sea, his addictions resurface, not in substance abuse but in data abuse. He becomes obsessed with his moments of internet access and the fragments he pieces together into intrigue, scandal and paranoia. As they search the ocean floor for a cable the width of a drainpipe, the story becomes brilliantly claustrophobic, manic, and desperate.

The second half of the book drops off, and becomes a bit too fantastical. Fennell is not a likeable narrator. His obsession with other peoples' more interesting lives is a good narrative device for the disconnection and individualisation that McCann has decided to write about, but it never really feels true enough and he wraps up his assumptions a bit too easily. For an author who thrives in writing multiple narratives simultaneously, trying to hold it all in one narrator's voice doesn't seem to work as well, particularly when the story becomes mostly speculative. It is a good experiment, and with McCann's sharp style and prose it remains enjoyable, but the result lacks the impact it might have had.