"Twist" | Reviewed by William Winkler

Many believe that information distributed on the World Wide Web is transmitted via satellites in orbit. This is incorrect. Satellite transmission is too slow and too expensive to handle the vast amount of data  required to move information efficiently around the world. Rather, the Internet depends on an extensive network of undersea fiber optic cables to span the continents.

Colum McCann’s most recent novel, “Twist,” is based on the technology of cable transmission, and more specifically the technicians responsible for maintaining their integrity and when necessary repairing damage to these vital links.

The narrator, Fennell, is a freelance journalist whose fascination with cable technology has landed him an assignment to write an 8 to 10,000-word piece for a magazine similar to The New Yorker. He is led to a meeting with Conway, the chief of a crew specializing in deep sea cable repair, and agrees to join him on a repair mission for a major cable in the sea off the west African coast.

As the mission unfolds we learn more about both Fennell and Conway. The former has had a spotty career as a playwright, but moderate success as a journalist. He has a teenage son from a brief, generally happy, but ultimately failed marriage. His son and former wife, a choreographer, live in Chile. His relationship with his son is, at best, remote, a fact he regrets.

Conway, also an Irishman, has had a career in and under the sea. He has worked as an underwater welder on oil rigs off the Louisiana coast, and has trained himself in free diving, descending to the sea floor with no equipment, only the air he can hold in his lungs. Conway has developed the ability to stay underwater for up to eight minutes at a time.

When Fennell and Conway first meet, Conway is living in Cape Town with a native South African woman, an actor who is preparing to depart for London where she will direct a version of Becket’s Waiting for Godot.

After a storm that keeps the cable repair ship in harbor for days, it departs with Fennell and Conway on board. The initial repair job is successful, as are two subsequent, less challenging jobs.

Then Conway disappears.

The final section of the novel, set more than a year after Conway’s disappearance, leads to a layer-by-layer uncovering of secrets from the lives of the two principal characters.

The concept of a novel based on undersea cable technology runs the risk of devolving into technical arcana. “Twist” avoids that temptation. The cable, its function, dysfunction, and repair serve as a stage upon which its characters reveal more and more of themselves in fascinating detail.

Buy the book.