While this century’s technological advancements have made communication easier, they’ve also made more people feel lonely, a trend well underway when the pandemic arrived to make everything worse.
Yet five years later, the only genuine attempts to reckon with those “unprecedented times” have come from fiction. Irish writer Colum McCann’s latest novel, “Twist,” is a tantalizing if ultimately dissatisfying addition to the discourse in that it’s a pandemic novel that doesn’t really want to discuss the pandemic, preferring to focus more broadly on our era “of enormous greed and foolish longing and, in the end, unfathomable isolation.”
The retrospective narrator is “struggling novelist and occasional playwright” Anthony Fennell, a 48-year-old Dubliner who has spent half his life battling alcoholism. Fennell is desperately alone — divorced, estranged from his teenage son and seemingly without friends — when he’s assigned a story he hopes will help him pick up the pieces.
In January 2019, he heads to Cape Town, South Africa, to link up with the Georges Lecointe, a cable repair ship responsible for restoring our ability to communicate whenever a break occurs in the series of “fragile tubes on the seafloor” that carry the world’s intercontinental information. (The oft-ridiculed, famously clueless about the internet and now deceased Sen. Ted Stevens would feel very seen.)
Cape Town does nothing for Fennell’s discomfort with himself or his place in the world, however. He’s disturbed at how “pale and pasty” he feels, “shocked” at the barefoot beggars and “terrible proximity” of poverty.
Enter John Conway, chief of the Lecointe’s repair crew. Conway hails from Northern Ireland, is a world-class freediver and is “handsome in a way that seemed to puzzle him.” He carries a flip phone, that most ironic statement of modern independence. In short, he’s everything Fennell is not.
Even before they board the ship, Fennell thinks he “hadn’t had a friend or even an acquaintance like Conway in quite a while.” But Conway is broken, too, starting with his relationship to his partner Zanele, an actor who is set to perform Beckett at a theater in Brighton, on the English Coast.
Once the Lecointe sets out to repair several cables off the west coast of Africa, Fennell quits drinking, with zero complications, and hits the onboard gym. As Fennell remakes himself, McCann pens gorgeous passages marveling at the terrifying majesty of the flooding Congo River and the miracle of communication via that “series of cold, wet tubes” carrying “all our longings, all our desires.”
