Colum McCann ranges widely in his fiction, from multitimeline historical novels like TransAtlantic to the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin, which followed New York City characters through one day in 1974. With Twist, McCann focuses on the present day and a timely issue: the surprising fragility of the internet, whose traffic is carried in fiber-optic cables across ocean floors, and the unseen labor it takes to keep us all connected.
Despite the contemporary time frame, Twist opens with an almost 19th-century feel as it sets up a mystery. On page one, narrator Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and would-be playwright, tells the reader: “I am not here to make an elegy for John A. Conway, or to create a praise song for how he spent his days.” Instead, he says, he’s going to tell Conway’s story, which others have gotten wrong.
That story begins with Anthony’s first meeting with the enigmatic Conway, who goes by his last name. A shipboard engineer and fellow Irishman, Conway heads a crew that repairs internet cables, often at the bottom of the ocean—a near-impossible job. Anthony has an assignment to write about the cables, and he’s in Cape Town, South Africa, to interview Conway. Although Conway invites Anthony home for dinner, where Anthony meets Conway’s partner, a charismatic actress named Zanele, and then brings Anthony on an outing to observe a group of freedivers, he gives little away.
After a storm in the Congo snaps a cable, cutting off internet access for much of Africa, Anthony joins Conway aboard as the ship chugs north along the coast to find and repair the breaks. The alcoholic Anthony, not drinking for the first time in years, begins to reckon with his own failings as he tries to get to the heart of Conway’s story, and that of Zanele.
As the title suggests, the novel features a plot twist that feels both surprising and inevitable. But in its setting, its narrative of one man’s search to understand another man’s obsession, and its division into three parts, the book is an homage to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Like that 1899 novella (which is referenced in Twist, along with the Francis Ford Coppola movie it inspired, Apocalypse Now), Twist comments on the 21st-century version of predatory colonialism: the environmental degradation that falls on the world’s poorest, and the simultaneous connection and disconnection that the internet has created. This is a lot for one novel to carry, but McCann does it seamlessly, and in the bargain creates memorable characters in both Anthony and Conway, making Conway Gatsby-like, noble in his doomed pursuit.
