Colum McCann doesn’t like repeating himself.

Apeirogon
CoLUM McCANN
(BLOOMSBURY, 480 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Colum McCann doesn’t like repeating himself. He inhabited the life of Nureyev in Dancer, delved into the subterranean world of the New York homeless in This Side of Brightness and wrote a back-to-front 9/11 novel, Let the Great World Spin, by focusing instead on the day daredevil Philippe Petit walked between the newly built Twin Towers on a wire. Uniting these subjects is McCann’s passionate lyricism and exquisite control of verbal effects. Formally dazzling, narratively puzzling, Apeirogon leaves his beloved New York for the Holy Land, and by the end the reader feels as though they’ve crossed it repeatedly on foot, motorbike, bus and jeep.

In a nod to One Thousand and One Nights, one of many references in its 480 pages, the novel is formed of 1,001 segments of varying length, from several pages down to one gnomic sentence or phrase. The numbering is eccentric, beginning at 1 and counting up to 499, with sections 500, 1,001 and 500 again forming the core. Then the countdown begins, from 499 back to 1.

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