Infinite Books

There is a picture described in Colum McCann’s “Twist”: a simple drawing made by children that shows a tiny ship at the top of the frame and the overwhelming depths of the ocean below, its waters changing from blue to black. The small ship carries a hook that extends to the bottom of the sea, searching for something: as we learn, searching for the underwater broken data cable to fix it. This is how people attempt to harness the ocean and utilize it for our purposes: connecting through the internet.

Anthony Fennell, a journalist tasked with writing an article about repairing underwater cables, tells the story of this strange relationship between humans and the ocean. As an observer, he joins a ship’s crew and quickly becomes fascinated not by the sea or the repair process but mainly by the ship’s captain, Conway.  Together with Fennell, we observe how skillfully Conway leads his crew and how the repair process is done, but from the beginning, we are warned that the captain is not a person we can easily understand; his motives, seemingly straightforward, become darker, and murkier, just as the water in the ocean gets darker with depth. At times, I found the fascination with Conway a bit exaggerated: “He had a magnetic effect. I recalled how much the women seemed to hover in his orbit (..)” but perhaps showing the captain as a mysterious man, a lone ranger of a sort was in sync with other nautical fiction characters, mostly bringing the characters from Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville’s books to mind.

To me, the most alluring part of this novel was a feeling of being out there in the ocean, disconnected from the world but trying to reconnect: in a very literal sense of repairing the underwater cable but also in trying to repair relations with people: in Fenell’s case it was his neglected relations with his son, in Conway’s – relations with his beautiful ex-girlfriend, South African actress,  Zanele.  Yet, if we can succeed in repairing an underwater data-carrying cable and achieve the illusion of being connected, our personal connections are another thing.

TWIST by Colum McCann, Random House, 2025