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- [00:01]
American Express
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- [00:37]
Charlie Gibson
Well, we're back again and we're delighted that you're back again. This is the bookcase with Kate and Charlie Gibson and. Well, I guess we don't need to introduce ourselves anymore. Kate, you're. You're the Kate part, I'm the Charlie part. Right.
- [00:50]
Kate
Listen, I would like to think that there are some first time listeners out there. If you are a first time listener, we welcome you and we welcome you to also listen into the back catalog of our shows. But yes, happy Thursday to all of you and I am the Kate part.
- [01:03]
Charlie Gibson
And if you're a first time listener, go get your relatives, put them in front of the, whatever you're listening on. We need ratings. We need.
- [01:13]
Kate
Yes, you go get your lasso and go lasso some people.
- [01:17]
Charlie Gibson
The book today is Twist Tw I S T Twist. It's written by Colin McCann and he is a wonderful writer. But Kate, I don't know how to characterize, I guess, this novel. It's beautifully, his prose is magnificent, but there are so many different themes in it.
- [01:34]
Kate
Yeah, I think that's the sign of a great book. You're looking at, you know, a little less than 250 pages and yet there are so many different levels to this book. It's about two terrific, memorable characters in a wonderful, very alive setting. It's a novel about the repair of cables under the ground that shuttle the world's digital information back and forth under the oceans. There are allusions to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. There are allusions to the Great Gatsby. There's a love story in here and there's magnificent writing and he does it all in less than 250 pages, which is really impressive, I have to say. This was a book that I thought did everything and more and stuck the landing. So I was really excited to talk to him.
- [02:25]
Charlie Gibson
You get all that and you also get what's behind door number three. And you get the, you get the special prizes for all the contestants. No, it's really very well done.
- [02:35]
Kate
And a version of this take home game. Yes, that's right.
- [02:39]
Charlie Gibson
And on the surface or beneath the surface really, the novel is about undersea lightning fast transmissions via fiber optic cable that transmit Information around the world in fractions of a second. More information, I was fascinated to learn from him is transmitted this way than even the cloud can match. But that connectivity for the world, McCann seems to feel, has advantages and disadvantages.
- [03:07]
Kate
I think when information travels that fast, and this is the age in which we are living, when news travels that fast, when messages travel that fast, when work emails travel that fast, when news about your kids travels that fast, you have to take in all of this stuff all the time that is part of today's modern world. And I think one of the things that McCann is saying with this book, amongst many, many other things, is we have this incredible. He says it in a new way, but it's not the first time I've heard this message that we are incredibly connected, and yet through all that connectivity, we are unbelievably isolated. And maybe part of that is because we are so inundated with information, with data, with content. You know, we've talked before about. In some ways, it's not really an economy of dollars anymore, is it? It's an economy of attention. You know, who can get your attention and how long they can hold it. I think that's also a byproduct of information overload.
- [04:04]
Charlie Gibson
The cables are a metaphor. These cables that go under the sea, which are no bigger than a garden hose, but these cables are vulnerable. They can get broken in the ocean depths, or as we've seen in the news recently, they can be sabotaged. McCann's protagonist is a deep sea cable rep. His name is John Conway, and he's not a benign figure. You know, right away at the beginning, as you'll hear in our conversation, that Conway is a mysterious figure. A lot going on, and it's sort of a mystery what Conway is. And as Kate mentioned, McCann has created Conway. He's reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. And there's another character reminiscent of the narrator of the Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway. So all, as Kate said, all that.
- [04:54]
Kate
I also think there's. I also think there's a touch of Gatsby in Conway. I do. I believe that as well. And as I say, it's amazing all of the things he can weave into this small tome. That was also a page turner. And who knew y'all a page turner about pipes in the ocean? Who knew?
- [05:13]
Charlie Gibson
Here's our conversation with Colm McCann. Colin McCann. It is a pleasure to have you in the bookcase. The new novel twist. Both Katie and I loved it. We think this is. Well, we Think you've outdone yourself, but you've done pretty well in the past as well.
- [05:34]
Colm McCann
Thank you so much.
- [05:35]
Charlie Gibson
This is a wonderful novel. It might seem a strange place to begin, but tell me about the importance of undersea cables in your book. What should we know about them, and what do they represent in your novel?
- [05:46]
Colm McCann
Well, I was amazed when I first came upon this story that my emails and my various phone calls and other things weren't going up into the air, into some wonderful cloud that lived up in the air and occasionally rained down some dark rain, but that instead, 95% of the world's intercontinental information was traveling under the sea at depths that we. We cannot hardly know, at the abyssal depths, in fact, places we have never been. So it struck me, how amazing is it that your voice and my voice and all of our voices together are actually traveling together into places that we do not know. And in the split second of an instant, we are there with one another. And these cables are only about the size of a. Of a garden hose. And the actual fiber optic which carries our voices within is only the size of an eyelash. And if that's not a miracle or a conundrum, I don't know what is.
- [06:51]
Charlie Gibson
You saw them as a metaphor.
- [06:53]
Colm McCann
Oh, they're a metaphor for sure. I mean, they wrap around the world. They can either wrap, you know, gloriously around the world and hold the world together, or they can be things that. That can tighten us. And so much of what goes through the cables is very important. We got $10 trillion of financial transactions per day, but we also have all the goofy stuff, the memes and the tiktoks and the things that I watch, like football videos and. And things like that. And it's amazing that converted into ones and zeros. And it seems to me that we're both connected and disconnected at the same time, because, you know, we are living in fairly. Fairly shattered times. And the fact that we can. We can hold the distances together through these wires is phenomenal. But the fact that we're not holding ourselves together is also a curiosity or a philosophical conundrum, in fact.
- [07:41]
Kate
But that's an incredible challenge, I would think, as a writer. I mean, I remember my father called me and he said, oh, gosh, I'm loving this book so much. And I said, all right, well, what's it about? And he said, pipes under the ocean. And I said, so I'm gonna be reading a novel about pipes under the ocean. And he goes, more or less. But, of course, now that I've read the book. I understand that it's so much more than that. But as a writer, you had to take these pipes under the ocean and turn them into something magical. The great white whale. You had to turn them of not one, but several characters. This is not the easiest elevator pitch in the world. So how did you go about it?
- [08:16]
Colm McCann
No, it's not the easiest elevator pitch. But I think people are stunned when they finally realize, you know, the truth about where our voices are going. But also I realized that we know really nothing about it. And when I did my investigations online, of course nobody had really written about it all that much. And I was stunned by that because it felt to me that know, I should know this stuff. I should know where. Where all my, you know, videos are going or my. Even my manuscripts are going. And yet I have no idea. So I got on a ship because the amazing thing about these cables are that they're cables and they're only small, as I said, but they. They get cut, they get ripped up by trawlers. They break at sea with underwater landslides or earthquakes, and they can also fall prey to sabotage. So I went out on a boat that was going out from South Africa, the Leon Thevenin, and asked them about the life that they spend at sea trying to repair these cables.
- [09:13]
Charlie Gibson
I did call Katie a third of the way through and I said I'm reading a novel about undersea fiber optic cables, which is not normally the stuff of which great novels are made, but it is an amazingly compelling story. A study of the man in charge of fixing those broken cables, John Conway. Tell me what a reader should know about Conway as he picks up or she picks up the novel Twist.
- [09:36]
Colm McCann
Well, thank you so much for being compelled by it. I mean, I suppose a writer's job is to make it look seamless, you know, and effortless, like a dancer on stage. And so my job is to try and explain all this stuff that's going on, but you only really explain it by having characters. Because in the end, the only thing that matters, beyond ideas, beyond alt band themes, beyond any sort of diatribe, the only thing that matters is us as human beings. And so your characters have to be compelling. Conway is a loner and he is mysterious and hard to pin down. And he ends up not too much of a giveaway, but he ends up being mysterious virtually all the way through. And I liked that about him. He sort of represents in somewhat the loneliness and the isolation of modern day man. And yet he's heroic at the same.
- [10:33]
Charlie Gibson
Time too Colm you used foreshadowing right at the beginning, and we asked you to read what you wrote about John Conway on the first page.
- [10:43]
Colm McCann
I'm not here to make an elegy for John A. Conway or to create a praise song for how he spent his days. We all have our difficulties with the shape of the truth, and I'm not going to claim myself as any exception. But others have tried to tell Conway's story, and as far as I know, they got it largely wrong. For the most part, he moved quietly and without much fuss. But his was a lantern heart full of petrol, and when a match was put to it, it flared.
- [11:13]
Kate
This is a book where I'm fascinated about what came first. I mean, did you stumble across an article about these cables? Did you know you wanted to write a novel about what we're doing ecologically to the earth? Did you know you wanted to work in some. Joseph Conrad? How did all of those elements come and what came first?
- [11:33]
Colm McCann
Okay, so the big lie from writers is that they know what they're doing. Most of the time, we are operating on an absolute wing and a prayer. And if something happens that begins to take shape, then it begins to take shape. And a lot of it is about putting yourself in the chair and it's desire, stamina, perseverance, and seeing yourself through. Because, you know, it's all. You know, it's like a chunk of granite. And then eventually you're. You're chopping away. Sometimes you lop off the head, and then you have to make a smaller statue than what you began with. But. But you're an explorer, and what you do is that you explore this stuff as powerfully as you can. And for me to have an Irish character, in fact, two Irish characters, you know, on a boat on the west coast of Africa trying to figure out the world's communications. And of course, then the Congo river floods, and it takes out the cable, which is, you know, in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. They go up the river, but what's in the cable was really interesting to me, and what Conway, the fixer of the cable, thought was in the cable, and what happens to him when his life gets disrupted by the very thing that he fixes.
- [12:50]
Charlie Gibson
Column. At one point in Twist, well into the novel, your narrator Fennell writes about when he first saw the movie Apocalypse now, which owes so much to Joseph Conrad's great novella Heart of Darkness. Now not being too bright, I had an epiphany at that point, because till then, I hadn't thought of John Conway. Oh, Joseph Conrad. Very similar names, same initials. Coincidence? I think not, but I didn't get it until then. How did you envision Conway to be like Conrad's central character of Kurtz?
- [13:25]
Colm McCann
Well, there's a blending of all the characters there. There's Marlow, there's Kurtz. There's a scene in the novel that takes place where they're talking on the Thames. And so there's lots of individual echoes. There's some echoes, a little bit. Few echoes about the Great Gatsby, which I know you're a fan of recently, which was a lot of fun to listen to. The reason it's an echo of Great Gatsby is because you have a man who has a similar sort of voice to Nick Carraway. You know, in my younger and more vulnerable years, you know, my father told me, you know, and so my narrator sort of talks in the same way, but he's also in pursuit of a mysterious man whom he can't quite figure out. And there's elements of water, there's elements of all that pursuit that's going on. There's a slight love story going on in the background, too. There's a sort of Daisy like character, but she's. She's actually much smarter than all the guys put together. So there's a lot of things going on for me that I wanted to. To try to confront. But as I said, the novelist doesn't know what he's doing. So you only discover this stuff as you go along. I mean, we'd be tremendously smart if we were able to, like, sit down and write a novel as it is. But we're not that smart. That's the truth of it is. And you just try and you keep going. And part of it is, as I said, part of it is the sheer stamina of sitting with something and saying, I am going to bring this home. No matter what happens, I can get hit by a bus. I have a bus theory for novelists. And he's like, you know, your novel is good if you're coming towards the end of it and you make a pact with God and say, okay, God, just don't let the number nine bus hit me until I've finished my manuscript. After that, all bets are off. And, you know, that's when you can feel something happening in your soul and you got it right.
- [15:10]
Kate
But when is that realization process for you? So I guess then when you're writing, do you go, ooh, I can work a little Nick Carraway into here. Or is it when you're Reading it when you finished where you go. I worked a little, a little Nick Carraway into there. Look at that. I've got some game. Like, it doesn't sound like you're a pat on the backer, but like when are the moments where you realize, oh, I did put that in there.
- [15:30]
Colm McCann
Well, Nick Carraway came, came pretty early for me and I just thought my character has the same sort of voice. And I said, okay, that's really interesting. He's sort of a man who's searching, doing all this stuff. So, you know, the Heart of Darkness stuff didn't come for a long time until it seemed so obvious to me. Oh my gosh, they're on a boat. They're coming out of the Congo. It's like they're fixing something that's been ruptured for. And in fact, these very cables follow the old colonial shipping routes and the slaving routes. And there's something really profound about that. Now imagine if you wanted to sabotage the world's Internet and you knew how to go ahead and do that with, you know, these cutting grapnels and things like that. Ooh, you could really, you could really cause, cause some mayhem there. And not that I want to cause mayhem, but I did discover some ways and I'm surprised. Look, if I sent an email from here to my mother in Ireland. Now she's 98 years old, so she's, she's not really, you know, running down to look at her computer. But let's say it's my brother in Ireland. It goes from here down to a black box into the streets, down to 60 Hudson street where it gets sorted with all the other emails and then goes shoots out in fiber optic cables either to Long island or to New Jersey and then goes to a landing station, but basically looks like a bungalow that you'd walk past on any given day. It's a place without, it's a low little building without any windows. It's got a chain link fence and maybe has a few cameras on it. And that's where all the world's Internet is coming in. And then they go out, the cables go out under sea, right? And then go all the way to the west of Ireland. Then they follow these tracks, go to my brother's house, goes into another little black box and suddenly in.0006 of a second, I'm able to see him and talk to him now. Wow, that seems truly something beyond. It was something that I couldn't really comprehend and I still, even after spending a couple of years working on this novel, I still couldn't quite comprehend how amazing that is that all of this is getting converted into ones and zeros and then becomes light, that original thing, light and let there be light and then shoots down. That shoots down these cables and there are repeaters in the cables that knock it along to make it go faster. But you know, it basically approaches the speed of light, which is something that was said to be absolutely impossible.
- [17:58]
Kate
We're going to take a pause right here, but when we come back, more of our conversation with The Great Column McCann.
- [18:12]
American Express
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- [19:43]
Charlie Gibson
One of our favorite lines from the book, both Kate and I liked it column Everything gets fixed, but we all stay broken. The cables are broken obviously, but are your characters is Conway well, it feels.
- [19:58]
Colm McCann
To me that things are shattered. And were they shattered decades ago, centuries ago? Certainly there were. There was always these times when life got shattered around people and they had to pick it up and put it back together again. But now it seems to me that the shattering is happening at an exponential rate and everything is going so, so quickly, so that when you lean down to pick up some of the shattered pieces, to put them back together again, the actual shattered piece that you took up in your hand shatters in itself. And so my feeling is that the world is held together with stories. When you think about it, about how we meet each other and how we listen to one another and that's one of the things that's incredibly important to me. And, you know, in writing this story, I actually have a nonprofit organization called Narrative 4, which is very, very important to me. In fact, almost as important to me as anything I write now these days. It's about 10 years old, and it's a global nonprofit that brings young people together by sharing their stories. They step into one another's shoes and create community and change around storytelling, which is kind of amazing when it happens.
- [21:12]
Kate
Given all the amazing, profound things you just said. The question that I'm about to follow up sounds very pedestrian, but I do want to know, Twist, the title. What does it mean? And when did it become the title and why?
- [21:27]
Colm McCann
In fact, I was called in to the CEO of the publishing company, which shall remain unnamed, and told unceremoniously to change the title of the novel because nobody would know what it means. And I agree, nobody would know what it means. But if they read it, they would absolutely know what it means, because it's a shape with a countably infinite number of sides. And twists seemed so right, because, look, we all think of cables that are twisted together, but there are no twists in these particular cables. They're all concentric rings. It's quite fascinating. But twist, then had to be something around our human nature. You know, what. What do we do? And will there be a twist in the novel? And for the first time ever, I sort of. I've sort of written something that approaches a mystery. I surprised myself. I was like, what the hell am I doing? We talked earlier, a little bit earlier, about people seeing. Nabokov actually famously quoted that his characters were his galley slaves. You know, he could get them to do whatever he wanted. I'm unfortunately not that person. The characters have a hold of me, and I'm not sure where they are gonna take me. And I know that sounds mysterious and mystical and all those things, but sometimes it's just a pain in the rear end. You know, you want them to do some things, and they won't do it for you.
- [22:52]
Charlie Gibson
Well, it is highly improper for somebody to say to a writer what I thought you meant with the title.
- [22:58]
Colm McCann
Oh, please.
- [22:59]
Charlie Gibson
But once I had that epiphan that John Conway, Joseph Conrad. And I'm referring back to Heart of Darkness, the darkness that Conrad writes about that is in the hearts of every man and the twists that are part of our character and how our characters are twisted. I thought that's what you meant. But anyway, that's me.
- [23:19]
Kate
No, maybe now that you. Now that I'm thinking about it. It goes back to a passage in the book, too, where he says, there's a little madness in all of us. There's a little insanity in all of us, and there's a little bit. There's a little bit inside of us that is twisted, as it were.
- [23:32]
Colm McCann
No, really, you know, a novel is not finished until it is properly read. And when people sort of negotiate it with you. I feel that I finish my novel and then it goes out into the world, and I'm really happy to hear from people about what it happens to be.
- [23:49]
Charlie Gibson
I'm struck by what you said a moment ago, that with all the complexities of the modern world and the way things happen instantaneously through fiber optic cables, et cetera, that what holds us together as stories. And you say that in the acknowledgments. It struck me, as I finished this novel that this was a chance for me to directly thank my readers. The distance between us is only a story, and a novel is never complete without each of us bridging that distance. This is possibly more true with this novel than anything else I have ever written. Why is it more true in this novel?
- [24:25]
Colm McCann
When I finished this novel, I knew that there was going to be an aftertaste to the book. It was a different book, probably for many of my readers. It was chronological. It had a single narrator. It was trying to tell a story that seems like a mystery. And I felt that I actually needed that. I also felt that we need that sort of thing now. We need stories, whether they're good or bad or indifferent. But I also felt that I hadn't properly thanked my readers because, you know, there are people out there who, you know, come to your readings or write you letters or, you know, tell you that such and such a novel was profoundly impactful on their lives. Can you imagine how wonderful that feels? Literature allows us to step into the shoes of those who we wouldn't have known. And there's something really, truly magical in that. And that's why I think we got to keep triumphing our writers, even the ones who are going to the darkest, darkest places, because that's very, very necessary.
- [25:30]
Charlie Gibson
I want to come back to a final question about Twist. I went to the Wikipedia page on. Oh, yeah, Colin McCann. I apologize. That is what passes for research these days, going to the Wikipedia page. And I'm guilty of that. It's shameful. But you're quoted there in an interview saying it is our job as writers to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're Going to be a fiction writer. Why not take on something that means something? Did you feel that? Was that in your mind with Twist? And you can be fulsome here. Please be fulsome. How did you want Twist to be epic and small at the same time?
- [26:05]
Colm McCann
Well, I mean, the fibers are so incredibly small, and yet what they carry is absolutely epic. They carry all the strands of human desire and even of human nature. But the human, the one human that's out on a lonely boat in the middle of nowhere is also tiny. And yet his world can be epic. I do think of us during the pandemic when we felt both meaningful and meaningless at the same time. Primarily meaningless. But we were also very meaningful because when you went down to the grocery store, every six feet mattered an enormous amount, and our interactions mattered enormous amount. And I do believe that we have these two things that are almost, you know, opposite ideas, and yet they are both true and honest. It's like, technology is good, technology's bad, and you've got to be able to cleave the distance in between them with twist. That was something that I was absolutely trying to do.
- [27:08]
Charlie Gibson
Colin McCann, it's a pleasure to have you in the bookcase.
- [27:12]
Colm McCann
Such a pleasure for me.
- [27:13]
Charlie Gibson
I've written a great character in John Conway. It is a beautifully written book, and it is important in that it does address some of the major issues of the world. Not bad to cram all that into 250 pages. Nice job. I hope many, many will read this. So our thanks to Colin McCann. The book, again, is Twist. Highly recommended by the two of us. It really is. I don't want to overblow it, Kate, but I think this is really an extraordinary literary accomplishment.
- [27:45]
Kate
Yeah, I think so, too. Again, it's one of those books where, you know, it's really good because to me, it succeeds on several levels. On one level, I'm fascinated by the fact that he managed to create a page turner about a subject where if you heard the elevator pitch, you're like, wow, that sounds dull as rocks. So, you know, good luck with that. I'm amazed that the two characters in this book really stay with me. The writing really stays with me. There were times where I thought, how's he gonna end this? He ends it beautifully. And it speaks also to. There are so many things in the modern world that I use every day in technology. Television, the Internet. And in some ways, all of those things are miracles. Like. Yes. Are they isolating us as a society? Yes. But in some way, I'm like, it's Amazing that these things work. That stuff gets piped in from whatever and light pulses and zeros and ones. And he manages to capture how that is both mysterious and frustrating and magical all at the same time.
- [28:43]
Charlie Gibson
Yeah, it is. But I thought at the same time. I was fascinated by the Conway character, as you heard him do in the reading that we had in the midst of our conversation. He tells you right away that Conway is a very enigmatic figure and you are fascinated with what this character is going to do and what he does. At the end, you will put the book down and think to yourself, why did he do that? How did he do that? And what was his motivation? What was he thinking? All of that is going to be in your head and Conway is a character who's going to stick with you.
- [29:15]
Kate
Well, it kind of reminds me of that conversation we had with Kaveh Akbar, because this was very much a book. Remember, he said that there are times where you start a book and you go, wow, the writer is trying something really ambitious. I want to read this just to see if they can pull it off. And then eventually the writing is so good that you just get caught up in the ride and all of a sudden you're on the ride and then the book is over and you think, wow, I don't even know if I paid attention to how he pulled that off because the ride was so good. And I think this is a book like that. When I started it, I thought, okay, sure, try me. And then I was just. I was on that boat with the two of them and caught up in the beauty of the language. Really, I loved this book.
- [29:55]
Charlie Gibson
And we hope, we hope you'll get wide readership Twist by Colin McCann, the folks who make this podcast possible. And then we come back with a coda from Colin McCann.
- [30:05]
Kate
The bookcase with Kate and Charlie Gibson is a production of ABC Audio and Good Morning America. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions. Our executive producers are Laura Mayer and Simone Swink. We want to make mention of Taylor Rhodes, Amanda McMaster and Sabrina Cole at Good Morning America as well as Josh Cohan from ABC Audio. Please follow the bookcase wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to listen, rate and review. If you'd like to find any of the books mentioned in this episode, we have them linked in the episode description.
- [30:36]
Colm McCann
For me, one of the great sayings in the world comes from A series of 6th century Arabic poems, pre Islamic, that were hung in the marketplaces called the Malakot. And one of the lines is it applies to everything that we're thinking about today is that is there any hope that this desolation can bring us any solace? And I think it's an amazing, amazing thing to look at everything that's going on in the world. And is there any hope that this particular desolation or series of desolations that we're going through can bring us any hope? It's a good question.
- [31:18]
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