Book review: Twist

“We are all shards in the smash-up. Our lives, even the unruptured ones, bounce around on the sea floor. For a while we might brush tenderly against one another, but eventually, and inevitably, we collide and splinter.”

So begins Colum McCann’s Twist: an unwieldy novel exploring connection, repair and sabotage. It aptly foreshadows the oncoming story. McCann presents a puzzling recollection by an unreliable and disaffected narrator that is a maelstrom of metaphor, intertextuality and aspiring profundity. At its heart is a simple mystery and a complex obsession. Does it brush tenderly, or does it collide and splinter, destroying itself from literary excess? After a week of turning Twist over, I’ve come to think it does the latter but in the best possible way, leaving its readers in a jolie-laide haze. It does what many novels want but fail to. It keeps you pondering its ideas and images in idle moments long after you’ve put it down.

You’ve probably heard about the submarine communications cables on our ocean floors. ‘The cloud’ is really a misnomer. The data doesn’t go up to the skies, it goes down to the depths. Instead of satellites, there are tiny fibres, no bigger than your eyelash, running through veins at the bottom of the sea, conduits for flashes of light that carry the enormous weight of the world’s information; its consciousness; its stories; its essence. They are implausibly fragile. What happens when they break? What happens, in this internet age, when we are unexpectedly severed from each other? Recent events may have gotten ahead of McCann but his central metaphor is refreshingly absent of the geopolitical angle.

Twist follows a world-weary writer, Anthony Fennell, who is commissioned to write a story on how these cables are repaired when they do inevitably break. After floods in the Congo sever one, he finds himself aboard a repair vessel and under the spell of its enigmatic captain, John Conway. Our narrator, whose penchant for overwrought musings and tantrums makes him increasingly unlikable, builds an obsession with Conway and his partner, Zanelle. It’s very Carraway-esque (and that’s only the beginning of McCann’s allusions). Conway is an archetypal masculine hero: devoted, capable, charismatic and in great shape. Everything Fennell is not. But Fennell senses something is awry within Conway and begins to investigate his history. As the plot thickens, Fennell’s narration becomes stylistically dynamic. Discursive, reflective prose ramps up into a uniquely frenetic climax. I was there for all of it. 

Conway’s eventual disappearance, reappearance and death mythologises him in Fennell’s psyche and Twist reveals itself, in fact, as an elegy – something which Fennell denies on the first page. The story is told in retrospect, from the perspective of a present Fennell who is reconstructing it, trying to garner meaning from his experiences. This is the eponymous twist. Fennell twists fact and fiction, evidence and conjecture, truth and myth for his own purposes. His account is contradictory and full of both beautiful and limited poetry. Niels Bohr famously stated, “the opposite of a great truth is another truth”, suggesting profound truths have complementary or paradoxical aspects, rather than simple opposites. Twist encapsulates this. The closer you get to things, the more they defy our understanding. The ‘shards in the smash up’ come to resemble electrons whose speed and position we cannot know without changing either. Ultimately, McCann trusts his readers and doesn’t presume we’ll take Fennell’s account as gospel, nor does he wrap his ideas up neatly for our easy consumption. This one’s an everlasting gobstopper and it has certainly kept me chewing.