In our wireless world, we may think the instant communication we take for granted depends on the satellites we look up at on nights when the skies are cloudless. In fact, our hyperconnected existence is bound together by thousands on thousands of miles of inconspicuous subsea fibreoptic cables snaking across the ocean floor.
Four of those critical undersea cables — lifelines for Africa’s internet connectivity — snapped off the coast of the Congo in 2023. Docked in Cape Town harbour at the time, the Léon Thévenin, the only vessel authorised to repair that segment of the cable, headed out to the break. An obscure news article about the event caught Colum McCann’s eye and became the inspiration for his closely researched, astounding new masterwork, Twist.
For McCann (Let the Great World Spin, 2009; Apeirogon, 2020), a writer concerned with what keeps humans together and what pulls us apart, it was only a matter of time before he turned to the crucial contradiction of technology — perceived as a means of connection, it’s also deeply alienating. What had him hooked was the sheer invisibility of it all.
We chat as he’s driving from Dublin to Galway on a promotional tour with his publicist. I ask him about his thoughts on the Mother City.
“It’s tough to go to Cape Town,” he says. “If you stay in one area or with certain people, you can convince yourself that Cape Town is actually one of the most beautiful places on Earth — it really is gorgeous. But there’s also a sort of understanding, which is interesting too — an understanding of history and an understanding of poverty, quite frankly. An understanding of politics. And I have to say, I like the light. The light in Cape Town is extraordinary.”
Twist blends genres — it’s part maritime adventure, part ecological parable, part psychological mystery. McCann says he’s fascinated by the tension between our technological interdependence and emotional isolation. Beneath the surface-level drama lies a deeper reflection on the fragility of our connections, both digital and human.
“We’re so hyperconnected, yet, paradoxically, so disconnected. Our relationship with technology is something we have to negotiate,” he says. “It’s a miracle, really — a beautiful one. Right now, I’m speaking to you. My voice is travelling through a local exchange, converted into ones and zeroes, moving through lines at the bottom of the ocean, touching Cornwall, once a major hub for submarine telegraph cables, before reaching Johannesburg. It’s extraordinary. But we have to ask: what is our relationship to the machine?”
Twist takes readers on a journey that’s as much about the literal depths of the sea as it is about the emotional depths of its characters. At the heart of the novel is Anthony Fennell, a middle-aged washed-up Irish writer (no reflection of him at all, McCann stresses), sent to report on a fibreoptic cable repair mission off the coast of Africa.
“I often lie awake wondering what might have been if I had done things just a little differently,” Fennell says at the beginning of the novel.
Fennell is assigned to shadow John Conway, a free-diving engineer and elusive mission chief aboard the Georges Lecointe, a ship tasked with mending the fragile threads of our hyperconnected world.
“We are all shards in the smash-up,” Fennell begins.
What starts as a straightforward assignment gradually unravels into something stranger and far more layered. Fennell is an outsider, grappling with his own estrangement — from his career, his family, and himself. Conway, meanwhile, is a man of mystery: charismatic, intense, but increasingly remote, especially as his personal life frays.
His partner Zanele, an SA actress preparing an unauthorised production of Waiting for Godot in the UK, becomes a bold and disruptive presence in the story, both anchor and catalyst for change. The slogan on her T-shirt, “Unreachable by Machine”, worn as she bids an inevitable farewell to Conway, speaks to her resistance to intrusion and her quiet assertion of autonomy.
“Zanele was an interesting character from the start; she suggested herself to me,” McCann says. “Nabokov said his characters were his galley slaves. For me, it’s the opposite. My characters are in control of me.”
Her decision to stage Godot, against the strict rules of the Beckett estate, becomes more than just an act of rebellion.
“She puts on the play, breaking all the rules, and that act alone says so much. But the reference runs deeper. There’s a kind of existential waiting that sits at the heart of the novel. These characters are in limbo, waiting for something that may never come.”
That sense of waiting plays out on multiple levels.
“Let us do something, while we have the chance,” Zanele urges, in a cutting critique of global inaction on climate change and inequality. “You know if the ocean was a bank, they’d have saved it a long time ago.”
“The heavy rains, the storms that bring down the cables,” McCann adds. “Godot is all about waiting, and here they are, waiting for the inevitable collapse.”
The slogan on her T-shirt, as she says an inevitable farewell to Conway, speaks to her resistance to technological intrusion and her assertion of autonomy.
When a catastrophic underwater landslide — “rupturing the eardrums of whatever was there to hear it” — snaps a crucial cable, the crew races to locate and repair it. The breakage becomes a powerful metaphor for human vulnerability: “A cable is a cable until it is broken, and then, like the rest of us, it becomes something else.”
It’s here that McCann’s themes of alienation, loss, obsession, and the aching search for meaning in an age of digital noise fully emerge.
I ask him about leaving Conway’s fate unresolved.
“He was always meant to be ambiguous,” he says. “I like ambiguity. I don’t want everything tied up neatly, because life isn’t neat. Some things, in the end, just don’t make sense.”
That sense of quiet disintegration runs throughout the novel.
“He’s a man who spends his life repairing things that will always break again,” McCann says. “There’s something quietly tragic about that, isn’t there?”
And at the core of it all, a deep sense of isolation.
“His story is really a portrait of loneliness,” he says. “He’s out there on the ocean, fixing cables that keep the world connected, while becoming more and more disconnected himself.”
The novel is full of literary echoes, most notably Moby-Dick and Heart of Darkness. Like Ishmael, Fennell boards a ship to the Congo not just for a story, but to find some version of truth. And like Joseph Conrad’s Marlow, he becomes increasingly obsessed with a man whose enigmatic nature speaks to deeper existential questions.
“The narrator, like Marlow, is both observer and participant,” McCann says. “He’s trying to make sense of Conway’s story, but in the end, he’s left with fragments.”
McCann also draws on Conrad’s idea of deep water as a space full of mystery and unease. In Heart of Darkness, it’s the Congo River that marks the descent into chaos; in Twist, it’s the ocean. It carries the cables that keep the world running, but it’s vast and indifferent — capable of swallowing men like Conway without a second thought.
There are clear nods to Apocalypse Now, too, especially in the surreal final chapters where Conway disappears, and Fennell is left to work out — or invent — what really happened. The thread from Heart of Darkness to Apocalypse Now, and on to Twist, is unmistakable: a journey into isolation, uncertainty, and a kind of madness.
There’s also a strong echo of The Great Gatsby.
“Like Gatsby, Conway is a tragic figure,” McCann says, “admired but unknowable. And like Gatsby, his downfall feels inevitable.”
The comparison runs deeper.
“Fennell is very much in the Nick Carraway mould — an unreliable narrator, watching, trying to understand, but ultimately powerless to change anything.”
And, perhaps most importantly, both Gatsby and Twist deal with illusion.
“Gatsby believes in the greenlight. Conway believes in the idea of permanence. But neither of them can hold on to it.”
If Let the Great World Spin celebrated the grace of high-wire acts, Twist dives instead into darker waters. Here, grace is harder to find — but so is truth. McCann invites us to question what lies beneath the stories we tell, the signals we send, and the lives we live.
“Maybe we need to start embracing uncertainty more,” he says. “We live in a time where everyone is so certain about what they feel or what they must say. But ‘I don’t know’ is sometimes the most honest response.”
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