Author Colum McCann's novel 'Twist' explores isolation in the internet age

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: So, how lost are we without our devices? Or, putting it more simply, as novelist Colum McCann might, just how isolated are we?

His new novel asks big questions through a story of characters literally at sea.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown has this profile of the book and its writer for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: In the murky depths of the sea, an unknown world of life, but also down there, the wires that carry much of the information that enriches, ruins, control so much of our lives.

And that astounded novelist Colum McCann.

Colum McCann, Author, “Twist”: I stumbled upon a story about a boat that goes out to fix the Internet. And I was like, what in the world does that mean? How can a boat fix the Internet? Because I felt everything was up in the air.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes, satellites and — yes.

Colum McCann: Satellites, clouds. My e-mails went up into some sort of heavenly atmosphere and rained down their darkness on the world.

But, no, no, no, in fact, 95 percent of the world’s intercontinental information travels at the bottom of the sea.

Jeffrey Brown: From that fact came a novel, “Twist,” part adventure and love story, part meditation on broken lives and the impossibility of fixing them.

Here’s how it begins.

Colum McCann: “We are all shards in the smash-up. Our lives, even the unruptured ones, bounce around on the seafloor. For a while, we might brush tenderly against one another, but, eventually and inevitably, we collide and splinter.”

Jeffrey Brown: So this is a novel about repair and what cannot be repaired?

Colum McCann: Yes. Yes, it’s a novel about brokenness. It’s a novel about sabotage. It’s a novel about repair.

Look, I wanted desperately to write about repair, because I do think that repair is the theme of our times, and that we’re searching, desperately searching for some form of repair to come along and hold us together.

Jeffrey Brown: The Irish-born New York-based McCann, whom we met recently in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the Zane Bennett Contemporary Art Gallery, is known for vivid writing and storytelling that burrows into big, real-world subjects.

Among his novels, “Let the Great World Spin,” a fictionalized account of Philippe Petit, the French acrobat who tightrope to cross the Twin Towers in 1974. It won the National Book Award for fiction in 2009, capturing a sense of loss after 9/11.

2013’s “TransAtlantic,” a series of linked stories and lives bound by a world-changing flight. And “Apeirogon” from 2020, which explored the suffering, loss, and pain of the Middle East in a fragmentary novel based on two real lives, one Israeli, one Palestinian.

Colum McCann: Well, I love the tiny and the epic together. I think the tiny becomes the epic. I think the local becomes the universal. I do think it’s the job of the writer, or at least my job, to find those supposedly tiny little lives that actually have an incredible influence on the world in general.

Jeffrey Brown: In “Twist,” he takes on a fractured, divided world in which so many of us are lost and lonely in our own screens, but in a concrete, unexpected setting, the people who repair undersea cables when they’re damaged through storms or other causes, including potentially sabotage.

Colum McCann: My main character, who’s not me, but is an Irish journalist and sort of a middle-aged man who goes out to sea, he’s broken. And he’s looking for some form of personal repair. He thinks he can find it out on this boat, but he doesn’t necessarily find it.

So, yes, there’s some big themes. There’s climate that’s in there, climate change that’s in there, communication that’s in there. But, ultimately, I want people to have read the story about these human beings who are struggling to make their own form of meaning.

Jeffrey Brown: There’s one very long paragraph description of everything running through the cables, every kind of communication, all the information in a personal life, and it ends with somebody saying or writing, “I love you, or, then again, maybe not.”

Colum McCann: “Then again, maybe not.”

Jeffrey Brown: Right? So it’s got it all.

Colum McCann: Well, it’s the contradictions. I am really interested in this world of contradictions, the binary things, the connection, the disconnection, the love, the hate, the peace engagements, the wars that are going on around us.

And the fact that these cables have this sort of smash-up, as I say, of all these things operating all at once carried by light, of all things, it feels almost biblical. And I’m still astounded by it.

Jeffrey Brown: Even as he continues to write, McCann has taken on a more public role over the years, and as much as any leading writer today, he’s engaged with his times.

Colum McCann: One of the ways that leads towards change is the ability to tell our own story, yes.

Jeffrey Brown: Especially with the power of story to help bring people together across divides of war, politics, class.

We joined him in Santa Fe for a gathering of Narrative 4, the organization he co-founded in 2013 to teach young people to write stories of their lives and share them with others with whom they would otherwise never connect. That work has taken McCann around the world, from war zones to meeting such figures as Pope Francis, and to collaborations with artists in other fields, including Sting.

Colum McCann: You know, I do like the world. I like people. I like meeting people. I like listening to their stories, and I like acknowledging that they matter.

Jeffrey Brown: But as the shards splinter, to use your language, as we’re in this period of incredible divisions, incredible threats and uncertainties, does it change your sense of your own role?

Colum McCann: Look, I don’t say that writers have to engage on a political level. I don’t say that writers have to engage on a social level. Somebody might write a beautiful novel about a cup of tea, and, if they do, well and good.

But, for me personally, I do want to figure out what’s going on. I mean, half my life is writing now. The other half of my life is being out in the world, meeting people, going to schools, going to colleges, and sort of being part of a movement that understands that we have to know each other.

Jeffrey Brown: In an upcoming report, we will look more in-depth at the work of Narrative 4 and the power of shared storytelling in repairing a divided world, a focus of Colin McCann’s latest novel, “Twist,” as well.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Santa Fe, New Mexico.