"Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann

Winner of the US National Book Award in 2009. My book group voted unanimously that this was a hit.

Based on a true story, as they say. On the morning of 7th August 1974 (the day before President Richard Nixon announced that he would resign because of the Watergate scandal), Philippe Petit performed an illegal tightrope walk on a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. This novel tells the linked stories of a number of New Yorkers: mother and daughter prostitutes Tilly and Jazzlyn, Corrigan, a monk-in-the-world, bereaved mother Claire, her husband Judge Solomon and her friend Gloria, and Lara, a drug-taking artist. And the walker himself.

The chronology is non-linear and it took me a long time before I understood that all these individual narratives are linked not only by the tightrope walk but also intimately to one another. But this isn't a book in which the plot is centre-stage. This is much more about a slow exploration of the characters and their relationships with one another, and building this up into a portrait of New York in 1974 in all its beauty and its ugliness.

Corrigan is most important character who doesn't narrate; what we learn of him comes mostly from his brother, Cieran. Following the abandonment of the family by his father, Corrigan becomes a very religious boy who loves to hang out with the homeless, drinking with the down-and-outs. He reminded me very much of Sally Trench, author of the memoir Bury Me In My Boots. Having travelled from Dublin to New York, he becomes a friend of prostitutes, allowing them to urinate in the bathroom in his flat. He is a fascinating portrait of a modern-day St Francis. His scarcely-understanding brother says: "I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student - thirty six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten."  (All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here)

Another key character is Claire whose privileged world, living in an art-strewn penthouse apartment overlooking Center Park, is destroyed by the death of her only son in Vietnam. The depth of her sorrow hollowed me out. Colum McCann deserved awards just for this gut-wrenching portrayal of grief: "Death by drowning, death by snakebite, death by mortar, death by bullet wound, death by wooden stake, death by tunnel rat, death by bazooka, death by poison arrow, death by pipe bomb, death by piranha, death by food poisoning, death by Kalashnikov, death by RPG, death by best friend, death by syphilis, death by sorrow, death by hypothermia, death by quicksand, death by tracer, death by thrombosis, death by water torture, death by trip wire, death by pool cue, death by Russian roulette, death by punji trap, death by opiate, death by machete, death by motorbike, death by firing squad, death by gangrene, death by footsore, death by palsy, death by memory loss, death by claymore, death by scorpion, death by crack-up, death by Agent orange, death by rent boy, death by harpoon, death by nightstick, death by immolation, death by crocodile, death by electrocution, death by mercury, death by strangulation,  death by bowie knife, death by mescaline death by mushroom, death by lysergic acid, death by jeep smash, death by grenade trap, death by boredom, death by heartache, death by sniper, death by paper cuts, death by whoreknife, death by poker game, death by numbers, death by bureaucracy, death by carelessness, death by delay, death by avoidance, death by mathematics, death by carbon copy, death by eraser, death by filing error, death by penstroke, death by suppression, death by authority, death by isolation, death by incarceration, death by fratricide, death by suicide, death by genocide, death by Kennedy, death by LBJ, death by Nixon, death by Kissinger, death by Uncle Sam, death by Charlie, death by signature, death by silence, death by natural causes." (1: Miro, Miro, on the Wall) I don't normally enjoy what seems to be a common practice in American writing of offering lists. The book begins: "Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey." I don't think this list of streets adds anything; if its objective is to anchor the narrative in verisimilitude, it doesn't. But the list of deaths ... Wow!

Selected Quotes:

• "A flying chocolate wrapper touched against a fire hydrant. Taxi doors slammed. Bits of trash sparred in the darkest reaches of the alleyways. ... Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out into the street." (Those who saw him hushed)
• "She turned at the door and smiled. 'There'll be lawyers in heaven before you see somethin' so good again'." (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here)
• "When you're young, God sweeps you up. He holds you there, The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All those days when you can't hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again." (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here) 
• "I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student - thirty six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten."  (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here) Lots of tightrope-walking imagery although, of course, when you perform between the Twin Towers without a safety line you're never going to get up after you fall. The tightrope-walker is described elsewhere as an angel, or perhaps a demon, and Lucifer was the angel who fell to earth. There's also a mention of Dante and Jigsaw, a pimp, is buried in Potter's Field, which is a burial ground for paupers and the unknown, so named because in the Bible a Potter's Field was purchased to be a burial ground with the money that Judas had accepted for betraying Christ.
• "Nothing holy is free." (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here)
• "Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get." "I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student - thirty six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten."  (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here)
• "The overexamined life, Claire, it's not worth living." (1: Miro, Miro, on the Wall) A clever version of the maxim attributed to Socrates: that the unexamined life is not worth living.
• "He calls me his little honeybee sometimes. It started from an argument when he called me a WASP." (1: Miro, Miro, on the Wall)
• "If you stand in the same river for too long, even the banks will trickle past you." (A Fear of Love)
• "A row of smokers stood out in front of Metropolitan Hospital ... Each looked like his last cigarette, ashen and ready to fall."  (1: A Fear of Love)
• "It was the type of hospital that looked like it needed a hospital."  (1: A Fear of Love)
• "BEAUTY IS IN THE WALLET OF THE BEHOLDER" (1: A Fear of Love) 
• "Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable."  (1: A Fear of Love)
• "When I was seventeen, I had a body that Adam woulda dropped Eve for. ... and Jesus himself woulda been in the background saying, Adam, you're one lucky motherfucker." (2: This is the House that Horse Built)
• "I don't know who God is but if I meet Him anytime soon I'm going to get Him in the corner until He tells me the truth. ... And if he says Jazz ain't in heaven, if He says she didn't make it through, He's gonna get Himself an ass-kicking."  (2: This is the House that Horse Built)
• "It was so much like having sex with the wind. It complicated things and blew away and softly separated and slid back around him." (The Ringing Grooves of Change)
• "Every now and then the city shook its soul out." (3: Part of the Parts)
• "New York kept going forward precisely because it didn't give a good goddam about what it had left behind." (3: Part of the Parts)
• "When he was young and headstrong, he'd been sure that one day he'd be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that."  (3: Part of the Parts)
• "The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own." (3: Centavos) 
• "She wasn't a godly woman, mind; she used to say that the heart's future was in a spadeful of dirt." (3: All Hail and Hallelujah)
• "People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time." (3: All Hail and Hallelujah)
• "It was like they had spent their lives breathing each other's breath." (3: All Hail and Hallelujah)
• "Sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear." (4: Roaring Seaward, and I Go)
• "We stumble on, now, we drain the light from the dark, to make it last." (4: Roaring Seaward, and I Go)

A book to treasure for the writing and for the characterisation.

Colum McCann also wrote This Side of Brightness, also about New Yorkers

February 2024; 349 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God