Colum McCann's Twist is a haunting portrait of "a chameleon, a charlatan, a con man," painted by a narrator whose own existence in midlife provides a meaningful counterpoint. Invoking Conrad's Heart of Darkness, McCann delivers this utterly contemporary story with his customary intelligence and graceful style.
"Struggling novelist and occasional playwright" Anthony Fennell leaves his Dublin home to research a piece of long-form journalism. He boards a Belgian-owned vessel whose crew is charged with repairing an undersea cable in a canyon four kilometers below the ocean surface off the African coast. But Fennell has no hint of the mystery he'll need to untangle, a puzzle that revolves around John A. Conway, veteran chief of the mission to fix the vital communications link that stretches from London to Cape Town.
Among his other nautical skills, Conway is an expert in the risky art of free diving. Before they set sail, he introduces Fennell to his partner, multitalented actress Zanele Ombassa, raised in South Africa's townships, and about to embark for England with her seven-year-old twins to appear in a performance of Waiting for Godot, reimagined as a metaphor for climate change. They seem well-matched only in their shared aloof demeanor, and she becomes equally intriguing to the writer.
Once aboard the ship, Fennell gradually realizes the difficulty he will encounter in penetrating to Conway's essence, as the taciturn chief and his crew go about the exacting business of locating and fixing a cable that represents the "great expansiveness of global information, the world unfurling through a wire," even as it amounts to "such a paltry thing--an inch and a half wide, a roll of metal and plastic and glass." But just as they're about to complete their assignment, Conway, whose eventual death is announced early in the novel, vanishes, leaving Fennell with only the "shards of the broken things to put back together again."
As he attempts to unearth Conway's story, Fennell muses about the missteps in his own life--his heavy drinking, divorce, and estrangement from his teenage son who now lives with his mother in Chile but with whom he's trying to reconnect. "Mine has been a lifetime of dropped connections," he writes, an apt summary of a self-perception that somehow links him to Conway despite the obvious differences in their lived experience.
"Between fact and fiction lie memory and imagination," Fennell observes. "Within memory and imagination lies our desire to capture at least some essence of the truth, which is, at best, messy." That's an eloquent benediction for a story that, at its heart, reveals the frequent elusiveness of that truth and the often unbridgeable gap in any attempt fully to understand another. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: A writer attempts to unravel the mystery of the enigmatic chief of a mission to repair damaged undersea cable off the African coast and winds up painting a haunting portrait of a con man.