On the first page of Colum McCann’s compelling novel Twist we meet the two leads: John A. Conway, who has disappeared, and Anthony Fennell, who’s trying to tell his story. They first met when Fennell, an Irish journalist, struggling novelist and occasional playwright, was commissioned by an online magazine to write about the fragile fibre-optic cables that carry information around the world on the ocean floor. Conway, also Irish, an engineer and intrepid freediver, was in joint command of the Georges Lecointe, a ship that spends months at sea repairing the cables when they break. In January 2019 this happened in three places. Fennell hitched a lift with Conway when the ship set sail –and Conway never came back.
It’s a catchy premise and one that McCann, the award-winning Irish author of seven previous novels, delivers with panache. The story begins in Cape Town, where the ship is docked, and unspools on board and off, above the water and deep below its seductively still surface. There are episodes in Brighton, where Conway’s girlfriend Zanele, a beautiful, enigmatic actor who’d grown up in the townships, is starring in a play, and Accra (one cable break occurs off Ghana’s coast). Twist is simply and beautifully told, even as it laps at knotty issues that more often than not come back to the idea of connection.
There are direct references to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, but the classic that most came to mind when reading it was The Great Gatsby. Fennell is to Conway as Nick Carraway is to his extravagant host – both observer and participant, seemingly straightforward and self-effacing.
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