By Peter Craven
FICTION
Twist
Colum McCann
Bloomsbury, $32.99
Colum McCann is a novelist who combines a connoisseur’s feeling for language, its cadences and beauties of arrangement, with a storyteller’s instinct for action and mystery. Twist is a self-consciously eloquent book in which language is treasured like the glorious illustrations of some medieval manuscript, but it’s also a compelling yarn where everything is turned on its head.
The narrator, Anthony Fennell, is an Irish writer who signs up to travel on a ship that lays the cables that allow for human communication via the ocean floor, to write a lengthy story about the ship and its captain, engineer and free-diver John Conway.
There is a lot of counterpoint and affinity between the two men. It plays every kind of trick of perspective that links the charismatic captain and the narrator who follows in his wake.
Conway is enthralled by the deep mysteries of the ocean floor, the way it’s a living thing, intense, populated and all but unimaginable. And at the centre of this world, where we don’t quite know what’s what and what’s not, there is some deep mystery about human communication. The Irish captain uses a satellite-powered mobile. The ocean floor cables for the moment don’t work.
Then everything changes: it twists inexplicably because Conway disappears and Fennell is left to ponder the enigma of who or what he was or is.
McCann’s new novel breaks lots of rules. Credit: Jillian Freyer
Early on in Twist Fennell meets the woman Conway lives with. She’s about to go to Britain to do a women-only production of Waiting for Godot, even though this is explicitly forbidden by the Beckett estate. She is a formidable figure and the mystery man who is her partner wants Fennell to meet her. (In the process of presenting their meeting, McCann talks knowledgeably about later Beckett as if there were no tomorrow.)
One of McCann’s most striking qualities is that he presents any situation in great detail – he enriches the specific – even though we’re sometimes distant from knowing the why and wherefore. This turns Twist into an almost inscrutable book because Fennell’s quest for Conway is doubled up with his attempt to write his story about the path the sailor has taken, whether into oblivion or some counter-intuitive field of action.
Twist is a precious book in both senses of that word. It is elaborately and poetically phrased – with quotations from Wilde on love and age, Gerard Manley Hopkins on the “gold vermilion” that comes from the windhover’s journey – but it is also a compelling, rule-breaking thriller.
Fennell searches the globe for a glimpse of his captain, and he also finds a moment of deep rapport in Africa with a stranger who may have seen the mystery man. He also gets in touch with Conway’s actress partner to find out what communication she may have had with her sometime swain. All the twists complicate the story, leaving the reader unsure about whether we’re getting diamonds of revelation or coloured bits of glass that gleam but deceive the eye.
Twist (as the title suggests) is about variations and tricks, but it is also about human intimacy in the age of the internet. And the missing Conway has an ineradicable reality, in the mind’s eye, shadowed by every hypothetical possibility. Is he an anti-technocrat, a terrorist - or what?
McCann’s novel is a rich oceanic dreamscape of a book and the characters retain their reality no matter what. It has a kind of cumulative formal intensity that allows it to be a “mouldy tale” which is just a bit like late Shakespeare when he’s happy to break every rule to get any effect.
Sometimes this broken-backed rule-breaker of a book has some of the fierce quality of poetic drama. It can also be exasperating because of its own elaborated artiness, but as D.H. Lawrence said once: “It may be caviar, but it comes from a real fish’s belly.”
Certainly, the realism in Twist gleams and McCann goes a long way towards earning his right to romance. He’s a rule-breaker and a deliberate lover of fancy language, but he holds you in his grip.
Colum McCann appears at the Melbourne Writers Festival, at the Athenaeum Theatre, May 10. mwf.com.au and will make a special Newcastle Writers Festival event on May 9.
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