A darkly epic novel about connection, disconnection and destruction – from the New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-winning, Booker Prize-longlisted author of Let the Great World Spin. Twist by Colum McCann is a profound exploration of narrative and truth, masterfully crafted by one of the greatest storytellers of our time. He shares a few words below…
I am so grateful to my Dubray readers who have always been fantastic. This is a new sort of novel for me. It also involves some Irish characters although it definitely takes place outside of Ireland, but maybe the deep ocean belongs to all of us. Then again, I always think of my novels as Irish novels, even if they take place in Israel and Palestine, or in Russia, or elsewhere. I feel at home just about everywhere. Joyce used to say that he had been so long out of Ireland that he all at once heard her voice in everything.
As a writer, I like to enter new territory. It’s part of the explorer in me. After writing Apeirogon, I was searching for a novel about repair. It is, after all, the ongoing theme of our times, especially when everything seems so broken. I was stunned to find out 95 percent of the world’s intercontinental information runs at the bottom of the sea in small tubes no bigger than a garden hose. So, the cloud wasn’t in the air at all. It lay in the abyssal depths. The actual information is carried by fibres no thicker than an eyelash. I suppose this was the image that stuck itself between my eyelids. I kept thinking of my own words shooting along the dark of the ocean floor. There was something very Prufrockian about it: ‘Til human voices wake us and we drown.
I was tempted to go back in history and write about the original cables that were laid between Ireland and Canada in the 1850s and 1860s. But that seemed too close to another novel of mine, TransAtlantic. So I decided to keep it contemporary, but with a nod to Joesph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. To meld the old and the new. Also, I wanted something more straightforward, with a chronological intent, a single narrator, perhaps even a love story of some sort. And while it was supposed to be a novel about underwater cable repair, but it also ended up being a novel about sabotage. Also, while it was supposed to be a love story, it came closer to a novel about ruptured love.
I ended up going to South Africa to get on a boat called the Leon Thevenin, run by the French company Orange Marine. One of the things I enjoy about writing books is that it’s almost like going to university all over again. And, so, a whole new underwater universe opened itself to me. It was my job to shuffle the pieces and to find a story that did, or maybe didn’t, make sense. Like much of the world’s communication, in fact. All our ones and zeroes shooting along the ocean floor.
You can now pre-order Twist by Colum McCann on dubraybooks.ie.
