Twist by Colum McCann

Twist by Colum McCann

256 pages

Published March 2025 by Random House Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

“Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.”

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.

Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.

When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

My Thoughts: 

In 2010, I read McCann's Let The Great World Spin and completely understood by it won the National Book Award, even if it didn't entirely work for me. But ten years later, I read his Apeirogon. That one I proclaimed "incredible;" so impressed with it was I that I couldn't put words together and had to just type in notes that I had taken as I read the book. 

This one falls somewhere in between for me. I was immediately pulled in by McCann's writing; but the story itself is a slow build as Fennell waits for his opportunity to get on that boat that will ship out to repair a broken internet cable. Even though it gave McCann a great opportunity to paint a picture of who both Fennell and Conway are and the world they find themselves in, I was as eager for Fennell to get on that boat as he was. Let me also be honest and admit that I really couldn't see why Fennell was so interested in being on that boat or what the draw was about the cables. 

Until I could. Once on the boat, though, McCann really begins to amp up the tension, but in the job they've set out to do itself and in the relationships between all of the characters. And I understood what those cables meant...not just to the world because they carry the glass tubes that carry the internet, but all of our connections to each other and our ability to communicate (or not) with each other, as much on a personal level as on a global one.

Once they are out to sea, once that tension began building, I was all in and the closer I got to the end, the harder it was for me to put down the book. Now here's a thing that often happens in a book - we reach the zenith of the story with fifty pages or so left to wrap things up and the story often flags at this point. This one did not. Even after we learn what happened to Conway (we know early on that something has happened that has tarnished his image), I needed to find out how Fennell and Zanele moved on from it. And how Fennell finally resolves his relationship with his son.