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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Colum McCann's New Novel 'Twist'
00:26:53
Kirkus Reviews says Colum McCann's latest novel, Twist, is "another astounding novel from a fiction master."
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Colm McCann
Listener supported WNYC Studios.
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Kusha Navidar
This is all of It. I'm Kusha Navadar. I'm filling in for Alison Stewart today who is on vacation. Hey, thanks for spending part of your day with us. I'm so grateful that you are here. Here's what's up on today's show. We'll conclude our Women's History Month series, Equalizers with Trina Shoemaker, the first woman to win a Grammy for best engineered album. We'll speak with Atlant writer Caitlin Tiffany about why women love baseball, but baseball doesn't really love them back. And we'll hear from author Amor Toles. His best selling short story collection, Table for Two is New York Times best selling short story collection, is about to be published in paperback. That's the plan. So let's get this started with a new novel. It's about a crew repairing underwater communications cables. Author Colm McCann has traveled around the world in his fiction. He's written novels that take place in Czechoslovakia, in Dublin, in Palestine and right here in New York City. In his latest novel column takes us to a place most humans can't visit, the depths of the ocean. The new book is called Twist. It follows a struggling novelist named Anthony Fennell who excites, accepts an unusual journalistic assignment. He will spend time with the workers tasked with repairing massive underwater cables that connect the world to the Internet. The process of fixing these cables is time consuming. It's really difficult and potentially dangerous. In particular, Fennel gets swept up in the life of John Conway, the head of this mission. Conway is a man with a mysterious past and Fennel finds himself drawn into his orbit. But as Conway and Fennel head out to sea, their tenuous relationship begins to fall apart. In a starred review, Kirkus says Twist is, quote, another astounding novel from a fiction master. Tonight at 7:30, Colm McCann is speaking at St. Joseph's University with Phil Klay. But first, we are very lucky to have him sitting right across from me in the studio right now. Colm, hey, welcome to all of it.
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Colm McCann
I am so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
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Kusha Navidar
Absolutely. I'm almost through the whole book. I really enjoyed what I've read so far and the Whole time I was just wondering at the start, how did you get interested in these underwater cables first?
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Colm McCann
Well, it's amazing to me because I didn't know. I thought that everything that I wrote on my phone and everything I communicated with my computer went somehow up in the air and that the cloud lived in some sort of celestial, heavenly place and then sort of rained a little bit of its darkness down. And you know, what I didn't know is that 95% of the world's intercontinental information lives and travels and moves at the bottom of the sea. And it's amazing to me because you think of our world and you turn it upside down. You have your Mount Everest down there, you have your Grand Canyons, you have your crags, you have your cliff faces, you have everything. And it's a cable that's no bigger, in fact, than a garden hose snaking along the floor, carrying your voice, my voice, every listener's voice, every text, every inanity, every beauty, every love note, and $10 trillion worth of financial information every day. And what happens when it gets busted? That's a big question.
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Kusha Navidar
Yeah. What kind of research were you doing? Like, how did you stumble onto that 95% statistic?
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Colm McCann
Well, that's the thing is I had no idea. And most of us have no idea. Satellites are slower, 5 times slower.
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Kusha Navidar
Find these underwater cables, you're saying.
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Colm McCann
And that's why underwater cables, they're owned by Google, they're owned by Meta, they're owned by all the, all the big companies and they're the way that all of our information goes. And so I went down to South Africa, I got on a boat, only for a couple of days, but what happens is it takes these guys at least six weeks to fix a really deep sea underwater repair. Now this is interesting because if you're in Africa, there are two main cables. One goes on the west coast, the other goes on the east coast. If the west coast one goes out, which it did during floods from the Congo, and that's where the novel actually takes place, or a lot of it takes place, then the stuff gets rerouted around to the eastern cable and everything gets slow. But if the eastern cable goes out, you are in serious trouble. You could isolate the whole many, many countries in Africa. And that has consequences for not only for the people there, but all over the world.
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Kusha Navidar
Yeah. So the small but mighty garden hose or its siblings that are running around, it's a high stakes situation. Like one crack, one shift, and you could take out an entire side of one continent.
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Colm McCann
You can. And if you went to, say, Alexandria, Egypt, and you took out the thing. Cause that's the Nexus cables coming from Asia, from Africa, from Europe. And there are certain places, even little landing stations that look like bungalows on the beach. You can actually go on the beach, put your umbrella down, spread out your towel, and about four feet underneath you, the world's Internet will be humming and it'll be going into a landing station where then it gets converted into its ones and zeros and gets. Gets pushed on again. But if I send a message to say, my folks in Ireland, right, Or my brothers and sisters in Ireland, right now, it goes down to 60 Hudson street, then it shoots out to Long island or New Jersey, goes under the sea, gets caught up in the west coast of Ireland, then shot over to Dublin in 0.0006 of a second.
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Kusha Navidar
It's so hard to imagine. You can't really imagine it. The human mind doesn't work at that micro scale. Right.
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Colm McCann
Because you and I were going right now at billions of pulses per second. As light, we become light. Like how weirdly poetic.
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Kusha Navidar
Biblical, I was gonna say. It's so romantic. Kind of.
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Colm McCann
It's romantic, but it's also super scary.
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Kusha Navidar
Yeah.
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Colm McCann
Because people could take this out if they wanted to.
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Kusha Navidar
Well, it's interesting you bring that up. Cause lately these cables have been in the news. I mean, they've become the target of allegedly purposeful damage by Russia, China, the Houthis, wires being cut on purpose. Why are these cables so vulnerable to attack?
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Colm McCann
Well, it's amazing. Why is. Because they carry everything. And information disinformation is where it all is. I was talking recently with a British admiral in the Navy. He said, the next war starts underwater. Trust me, it's not in drones flying in the air and all the stuff that we've seen recently. It will happen underwater. And they will cut cables and they will isolate places, and then they can install their own cables in certain ways or their own information channels. They can route it in certain ways. Are grand plans afoot in certain organizations? The Russians know what's going. It sounds so crazy. I know. You know, it sounds. Look, I'm a, like a bit of a Luddite myself. Why am I talking about this stuff? But I, I spent four years studying it, and it's amazing to me that you could go in with say, six ships and a crew, a, A diving crew of maybe 12, and maybe a land crew of maybe, say, 20 people, and I guarantee you that inside a day, you could take down the world's Internet. You could Wreak incredible havoc. Now, is that far fetched? Some people say, oh, yeah, it's crazy. You can't coordinate all that stuff. But it's happening in the Black Sea, it's happening in the Red Sea, and the Russian submarines are scouting all the parts of Europe for what to cut, when to cut. And look. Is that a doomsday scenario? Possibly, but it seems to be that we're living in some sort of weirdly, you know, shattering doomsday scenario.
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Kusha Navidar
And it's also hard for us. And I think not many people are used to converting the, like, ephemeral information flying all around us to this very tactile.
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Colm McCann
Exactly.
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Kusha Navidar
Easy to conceive of and I guess easy to target thing that's kind of all around us, under our feet. Right. A big part of the book, obviously, is talking about fixing these cables. It's kind of like the instigator of the whole story. Can you explain for our listeners how they actually find the break in these cables? Because it feels like something out of Melville, like you are just searching and searching.
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Colm McCann
It is something out of Melville. In fact, that's actually beautifully put. You know, the cables get cut, say in a landslide or in an earthquake, and then they get buried. Yes. We can ping that, say, a cable between London and Cape Town. You ping down the line and find the general area where the cables. Yeah, but now you cannot send a diver out into the deep sea because they'll only go 100 meters. Right.
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Kusha Navidar
Okay.
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Colm McCann
You cannot send a robot beyond 2 meters. It'll get crushed.
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Kusha Navidar
Okay.
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Colm McCann
And so guess what we do? We send a rope and a grappling hook, which we did also 170 years ago when the first cables went across the Atlantic. We have no other solution than the most primeval rudimentary. Yeah, rudimentary. That's a better word. Solution. And so they're looking for a needle in a haystack. And these boats, which are full of men, primarily men, occasionally there's women on these boats, but primarily it's a crew of about 50 men on a. On a boat about the size of a football field or, you know, a couple of blue whales. And they go out there and they. And they search for this stuff and they bring us together. But part of this is that we are connected and we're disconnected at the same time. You know, what is this information doing to us? And that's part of the novel is asking those questions. Is this technology, how do we manage it? And what are your spiritual obligations towards one another?
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Kusha Navidar
Yeah. And both externally and internally because so much of the story happens with your main character kind of teasing that something has happened. And this is a retrospective in a lot of ways. Main character Fennel narrated the story. Let's talk about him a little bit. How did he become interested in this idea of repair?
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Colm McCann
Well, first of all, it was pandemic. And I thought, what's our theme? What is our theme? What's our theme gonna be the next few years? Healing. Yes, gotta be healing. And then I thought, well, maybe it's repair. And then I stumbled upon this story about a ship that goes out. And I said, okay, well, I'm gonna follow that. And then I started thinking, oh, maybe I'll put a journalist at sea. But that's so boring. Why put another journalist boring. Journalist boring.
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Kusha Navidar
You still went with it.
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Colm McCann
I still went with it. That's the thing. Because, you know, Nabokov says his characters are his galley slaves. He can get them to do whatever he wants them to. I can't. My characters sort of controlled me. I tried to make him into a chaplain, I tried to make him into an engineer. I tried to do all these different things. He insisted. And I think a part of it was because there's so much information to communicate, and he has to come at it from a point of view of somebody who needs to communicate everything that's going on, because it's so hard to tell people what goes on in these cables. So he became a journalist and I began to like him again. And then he pursues this mysterious character who's out there, who, you know, has this background that is never quite fully fulfilled. I don't think it gives too much away to say that it's a novel of repair, but it's also a novel of sabotage.
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Kusha Navidar
It is so revealing to understand that the germ of this book, for you, the seed, was the pandemic and the idea of repair. What was it that led you then to, you know, what needs repair are these underwater cables?
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Colm McCann
What was that that discovered, like that discovery was huge for me. But, you know, I knew nothing about it. You know, I was completely ignorant and I just assumed, assumed that all our information flew and sort of like operated around us. And then I began to realize, oh, this is real stuff. There are people behind this. There are tubes behind us. And in fact, the glass tubes within the actual tube are no bigger than your eyelash. And this to me is also incredible. That light is shooting down these eyelash sized tubes. And I thought, there's something there that I have to try to get at. But also we're living in these tough times, right? We all know it, we see it around us. So it seems to me we always lived in tough times, though back in the 1950s, my father would have talked about tough times, you know, maybe 100 years before that. But what it seems to me is most interesting is that these tough times are exponential. So everything is shattering around us. And we reach down as people, novelists, whatever else it happens to be, we reach down to pick up the shattered pieces. And as we reach down to pick up the shattered piece itself, it shatters in another dozen different pieces.
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Kusha Navidar
So this shattering fractal, like it just.
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Colm McCann
Keeps shattering and quicker and quicker and closer and closer. And why do we feel panicked now? Why do we feel unease? Why do we feel anxious? I think it's because all this stuff is shattering in our fingertips and we don't have time to repair it the way that we want to.
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Kusha Navidar
It's faster and it's more in front of you. And yet in many ways, like you're saying it's 20,000 leagues under the sea.
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Colm McCann
Exactly. It's distant. It's so far away from us, and yet it's there at the same time.
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Kusha Navidar
It feels in our control, but it's so much out of our control.
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Colm McCann
Like the pandemic. Like the pandemic because we were. During the pandemic, we were meaningful and meaningless at the same time. Meaningless because we felt meaningless, but meaningful because every six feet mattered. Remember you went down to the grocery store and those six feet, they were incredibly important. And so we could be tiny and epic at the same time.
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Kusha Navidar
What a wonderful place to start with a novel of exploring the selves and the world around us. This is such a wonderful conversation. We're gonna have more of it. I'm speaking with author Colm McCann about his new novel Twist. It's about a writer covering the mysterious man in charge of fixing underwater cables that connect the world to the Internet. He's also speaking tonight at St. Joseph's University at 7:30. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to dive. Sorry for the pun, but we're going to dive more into the story and we might start with a little reading selection by you, Colm. Stay with us. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Kusha Navidar and we we are speaking with author Colm McCann about his new novel Twist. It's about a writer covering the mysterious man in charge of fixing underwater cables that connect the world to the Internet column's. Speaking tonight at St. Joseph's University. That's at 7:30pm but we're lucky to get to speak with him right now. Not just speak, but also maybe read. Colm, would you be willing to read a bit of the opening pages from the book for us?
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Colm McCann
I would love to. Thank you for asking. So this is From Twist in January 2019, I boarded the Georges Leconte, a cable repair vessel for a struggling novelist and an occasional playwright. It was a relief to step away from the burden of invention onto a ship that would take me out to the west coast of Africa, a place I'd never been before. The center of the world was slipping. My career felt stagnant and frankly, at my age I was unsure what fiction or drama could do anymore. I thought I would spend a few weeks on the ship, then return to Dublin and write a long form journalistic piece, shake out the cobwebs. My first two novels had been minor successes and I had written a couple of plays, but in recent years I'd fallen into a clean, plain silence. The days had piled into weeks and the weeks had piled into months. Not much sang to me, no characters, no plot lines. The world did not beckon, nor did it greatly reward as a cure. I had thought that I would try to write a simple love story for the stage, but it turned out to be a soliloquy of solitude, not a love story at all. I shut the laptop one morning. All my characters slipped into a chasm. I cast around for new ideas, but mostly it was fall and echo, echo and fall. Everything felt out of season. I was drinking heavily, breaking covenants, refusing my obligations to the page. I bought myself an antique typewriter in an attempt to get back to basics, but the keys stuck and the carriage return broke. So many of my days had been a haze. In my most recent novel I had been treading memory, the farmhouse, a small red light from the Sacred Heart, my father rising early to tend the farm, my mother trapped by shadows on the landing, my rural, rural upbringing, my escape to London, the sunsets over the Thames, the journey home, the descent into suburban Dublin where the street lamps flickered. Some of the novel had been autobiographical, but the fictional elements were truer. All the truth my father told me, but none of the honesty. I recall him stepping rather apologetically from the Galway Theatre where the book was launched. Rain on the cobblestones, exit Ghost. I had a feeling that I had exhausted myself and that if I was ever going to write again, I would have to get out into the world. What I Needed was a story about connection, about grace, about repair.
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Kusha Navidar
There's that word repair.
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Colm McCann
Yeah.
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Kusha Navidar
What started the whole novel and this idea for you, that was Colm McCann reading an excerpt from his new novel, Twist. That was the main character, Fennel, writer, journalist, going out to the sea in search of something to write about repair. Why does he want to take this assignment so very away, so very far away from home and out to sea? Do you think he's running from something?
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Colm McCann
Yeah, he's broken. A lot of us are broken. You know, we've had this epidemic of loneliness and isolation. Maybe not so much for my age. I mean, I'm 60 now. But for. Certainly for the younger generations, you can see this stuff that is going on. But Fennel is an illustration of those sort of lonely men in shirt sleeves in T.S. eliot's poem, the Love Song of a Jail for Prufrock. Lonely men in shirt sleeves hanging out of windows. And. And. And he goes to see, you know, to hear the mermaids singing, each to each, and they do not sing to him. And in the end, the human voices wake him and he drowns. So there are a lot of literary illusions going on there and what I just said. But you know what? He's a man who wants connection, because I think we all want connection, no matter how broken we happen to be. He has a son who is in. Away in South America, who he hasn't seen in many years. He's been drinking. Him. He says the bottle does a good job of drinking the mind. And, you know, and his mind has been disappearing from. He's looking for some sort of soul to bring him back to sanity, really. So he goes out and finds a broken cable, and the broken cable becomes a metaphor for our broken sel. And we can fix it. Yeah, but can we really fix all the things that are going on? Is technology the thing that is going to allow us to return to our human goodness?
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Kusha Navidar
As I'm sitting here listening to you, so many thoughts of my own life are running through my head where it's like we're talking through technology right now. And the whole point of my job that I love is to find that connection. And it is so you gotta use technology, but it also comes at a cost, and it is so nuanced. And in Fennel's case, he's looking for someone, as you said, in many ways, one of those people that he finds is Conway, his subject, who's in charge of these missions to repair cables. Fennel describes Conway as the kind of man who would join a Monastery. What sense does this give us of Conway's personality?
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Colm McCann
Well, this is the weird thing that the character who fixes the Internet for us has a flip phone, and he looks like he should be wearing carpenter pants and sandals. And he has this sort of, like, sort of era about him that he stepped out of a Leonard Cohen song, like Hallelujah or something. Like, he's Jeff Buckley.
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Kusha Navidar
He knows the secret chord.
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Colm McCann
He knows the secret chord. He does know the secret chord. And here's the interesting thing to me. You know, Niels Bohr, the scientist, talked about, like, achieving a truth. And at the very opposite end of that truth, the opposing end of that truth is an equal truth that exists at the same time. So, like, you know, this character knows that technology is bad, yes, but also, technology is good. And our problem is not the phone. You know, our phone is plastic and sand and silicon and wires and whatever else it happens to be. It's made of things. Our problem is our relationship to the phone and the little squirts of dopamine that come down into our heads from the men behind the curtains. And who are the men behind the curtains? Quite frankly, it's the Elon Musks and the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world who are controlling a lot of this. Now, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I do know that we have to check our own relationship to technology and look at it, and if we can understand that our voices are traveling at the bottom of the sea down to the, you know, the abyssal zone, into the actual abyss. But there's something beautiful about that, too, that there's this notion that there are two opposing truths. And Fitzgerald said that the essence of intelligence was the ability to hold.
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Kusha Navidar
To hold two equally distinct truths in the mind at the same time.
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Colm McCann
Exactly. And that's our job. And I think it's a job of our youngsters nowadays, too. I love the idea of young people getting together, talking to each other and telling stories and communicating and with compassion. In fact, I have an organization called Narrative 4, which is a global nonprofit that. That brings together young people to tell stories across the divides. It's really quite beautiful.
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Kusha Navidar
Wow. Are you using this book as part of that work?
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Colm McCann
At all my books, everything is part of that work. I mean, for me, it seems to me that our job is. Now, look, the distance between you and me is a story. The distance between you and our listeners. It's only a story if we can begin to bring. The world is held together with molecules. Yes, of course, scientists already know that. Really? Secretly, it's also held together with stories. And we meet one another with these stories. Not like didactic things like I'm blue and you're red or I'm this and whatever, but personal stories that connect us where we can. We can actually see across the divide and get into a floodplain of sort of understanding. You know, we're not in different channels all the way. We're in a big plane where we can meet one another. Does that sound naive?
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Kusha Navidar
It sounds romantic and it sounds like a good thing to work for. Of course, I've always thought of it as, like, physically we are connected by atoms, and spiritually we're connected by stories. And both are.
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Colm McCann
Well, that's a beautiful way to put it.
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Kusha Navidar
Well, I kind of just reiterated what you were saying, so I can't take full credit, but yeah. No, no, no, listeners, we're Talking to Colm McCann, the author in his new novel Twist. It's about a writer covering the mysterious man in charge of fixing underwater cables that connect the world to the Internet. Colm is speaking tonight at St. Joseph's University at 7:30, looking at the clock. We got time for just a couple more questions. There is one text that I want to point out that I think you'll get a kick out of. The text says, does he read the audiobook? I want to listen to that. Will he be reading the audiobook?
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Colm McCann
Yeah, yeah. The audiobook came out yesterday, so I'm very happy to do that.
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Kusha Navidar
That's wonderful. So, listeners, if you're enjoying the conversation right now and you want to discover the story audibly, I mean, there you go. It's a wonderful voice to connect with it. I also want to talk a little bit about the sea in general. The sea. Sea seems like such a rich place to do stories for you as we're wrapping up here. Why do you think that is? Why is the sea such a fertile place for these stories?
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Colm McCann
Well, it's so mysterious, right? You know, we go out to sea. The minute we go out to sea, we're always like, looking home. So many of us want to go out to sea. Like I say, personally, I'm an explorer when I do stories. And I want to go out and I want to find some sort of Galapagos of the imagination, and I want to go, go, go. But we're always looking for land. You know, we can't entirely exist. That's the. And that's what's kind of beautiful about it. We go out and we embrace the mystery out there because we want to come home.
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Kusha Navidar
That's so interesting. You see the same thing in music, actually. You always start on the tonic and then you go out somewhere, like the minor, where things are a little bit unclear, and then you come back just like the lunar cycle. Or that. It's very human, but natural, I think. Right?
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Colm McCann
Exactly, exactly. And I love this notion of also the season violent and dangerous. Look, stories are dangerous and violent too. You know, when I talk about, like, you know, all of us coming together and the violins come out, let me be entirely clear that stories can take your house away. Stories can take your country away. Stories can take your identity away. These things in the wrong hands can be dangerous. In the right hands, they can work absolute miracles.
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Kusha Navidar
We've been talking to Colm McCann. He's the author of the new novel Twist. It's about a writer covering the mysterious man in charge of fixing underwater cables that connect the world to the Internet. He is speaking tonight at St. Joseph's University at 7:30pm Colm, we could keep talking for hours, and I really wish we could. We gotta call it there, though. Thank you so much for your work and thank you for hanging out with us.
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Colm McCann
Thank you so much. I appreciate it greatly.
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Ira Flatow
This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship wnyc. Org.