By Colum McCann
ISBN 978-0593241738 Random House 2025 256 pgs.
Review by Terrence Kenneally
“Twist” begins with a straightforward narrative. Anthong Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, down on his luck, gets an assignment from an online journal to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s data. Fennell’s editor sends him to Cape Town, where he is to meet a man named Conway, a fellow Irishman, who is the chief of a mission on a cable repair ship.
The mysterious Conway is and will remain a mystery. Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London, where she is performing in “Waiting for Godot.” Fennell’s assignment is to write a long feature about Conway’s cable repair vessel, the George Le Cointe, as it sails with the crew up the western coast of Africa to the site of a cable break.
Fennell lets the reader know early on that Conway will be the puzzle at the book’s heart and that it won’t be an easy one. Physically gifted – he can hold his breath for eight minutes – Conway is charismatic and secretive.
After repairing the second of two cable breaks, the second occurring to a massive underwater mudslide thousands of kilometers to the north in the Congo Channel, the ship heads for a smaller break near the capital of Ghana, Accra. There Conway suddenly disappears. No one knows where he went.
Fennell searches for him for three weeks but comes up empty. Fennell fictionalizes what happened to Conway and that is the denouement of the book. The depths of the ocean are a plausible explanation as to what happened to him.
McCann evokes physical activity in an intense, cinematic way. There are passages of extraordinary vividness. The depths of the oceans; freedivers plunging to the sea floor on a single breath, out of the way cable relay stations on Africa’s west coast; sea sickness; extreme weather that paralyzes part of Cape Town; these are all evoked with a power that seems to persuade the reader that you are a participant or a witness.
Colum McCann is the internationally bestselling author of Let the Great World Spin, Twist is an interesting and thought provoking read. I rate it TOP SHELF.
