Twist

It is, I suppose, the job of the teller to rearrange the scattered pieces of a story so that they conform to some sort of coherence. Between fact and fiction lie memory and imagination. Within memory and imagination lies our desire to capture at least some essence of the truth , which is, at best, messy.

So begins Part Two of Twist, a beguiling and fascinating novel from National Book Award-winning author Colum McCann.

Anthony Fennel is an Irish writer and journalist on board an Internet cable repair vessel. His personal life is in tatters, his last novel disappeared without trace, his ex-wife and son are living in South America, he is unable to control his drinking and he has taken this ocean-bound journalism job as a last resort to gain some control over the shambles of his life.

John Conway is the chief of mission onboard the George Lecointe, a vessel tasked with repairing the ruptured cables undersea that transmit billions of bytes of data, allowing us to communicate almost instantaneously. The ship and crew do so by trawling along the sea floor with a grappling hook, looking for a burst pipe the size of a garden hose and its ruptured twin, so they can repair the break and restore communication between continents.

McCann is far too astute to belabour the fact that almost everyone in this novel is disconnected from themselves, their loved ones and each other. The metaphor of connecting themselves in the blink of an eye while at sea, yet being unable to do so in person repeats throughout. It definitely feels as though McCann spent many months at sea researching and writing this timeless and modern novel.