Fiction: Colum McCann’s ‘Twist’

At sea

Twist
COLUM McCANN
(BLOOMSBURY, 256 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • tel 020 7799 4064

The narrator of Colum McCann’s absorbing novel is a drunken, divorced, middle-aged author suffering from writer’s block. In an attempt to put his life back together, Anthony Fennell accepts a commission to describe life on board a ship which roams the world repairing undersea cables.
Fennell joins the Georges Lecointe in Cape Town as it sets out to find a breakage 200 miles off the coast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Captaining the vessel is a mysterious, charismatic fellow Irishman called Conway – “troubled and angelic all at once”. Before departure, Fennell catches a glimpse of Conway’s extraordinarily intense relationship with his actress girlfriend Zanele.
The voyage goes well at first; then comes the news that Zanele has been violently attacked on stage. Too far from land and too locked into his work to help her, Conway becomes increasingly desperate. When the ship eventually makes landfall in Accra, he vanishes without trace; and although he later reappears, it is under very strange ­circumstances.
Twist openly acknowledges a debt to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War adaptation Apocalypse Now. Like Conrad’s Kurtz, Conway is a company man who goes rogue, commanding his own small kingdom and the utter loyalty of his men. Fennell, wrestling with his own demons, identifies strongly with Captain Willard, the troubled narrator of Apocalypse Now. “It’s often the unseen that most deeply stirs the imagination,” he observes as the darkness draws him in.
Fennell and Conway may not face the guns of the Viet Cong, but dangers of a different kind are ever-present. Climate change and pollution are recurrent themes: the broken cable is buried under sediment carried out to sea by catastrophic floods; plastic waste is found in the deepest depths; Zanele stars in an eco-themed production of Waiting for Godot.
The internet’s toxic maelstrom of misinformation also looms large. The attack on Zanele brings her fame and a million Instagram followers, but also invites the attention of racists and conspiracy theorists. Conway, all too aware that the cables he brilliantly repairs are what make this possible, starts to question his whole raison d’être.
McCann’s writing is first rate throughout. Twist is beautifully paced and its prose full of grace, offering a wealth of thought-provoking aperçus and atmospheric descriptions:
“The ocean teemed. The birds were fewer now, but more glorious for their scarcity. Terns, storm petrels, shearwaters, frigate birds. They swung with the wind, skated, sloped, soared … I felt that I had discovered colour. There were patches of yellow and green to be discovered in the grey. The widening wake gave new colours too: magentas, a rutilant line of gold I found at the edge of the waves.”
McCann’s homage to Joseph Conrad does not entirely succeed: for all his skill, he is unable to give Conway the depth and stature of Kurtz. But Twist is nevertheless a haunting novel – and, in the light of current attacks on undersea cables by the Russians, an alarmingly topical one.