"Twist" by Colum McCann

A tale of connection and disconnection.

Journalist Anthony Fennell's latest assignment is to write about a boat which is repairing a broken undersea cable, one of those down which vast amounts of internet traffic flow, a significant element in the connectivity of southern Africa. He becomes fascinated by John Conway, the enigmatic Chief of Mission, a mystery man who has an instinctive connection the the crew. Then Conway goes rogue ... Following the byline, I give a detailed synopsis of the plot.

This is a beautifully written book with repeated echoes of Heart of Darkness, the classic anti-colonialism novel by Joseph Conrad.

The main theme seems to be the currently fashionable idea that the apparent connectivity of the internet actually serves to separate us humans from one another. The author also attacks the environmental destruction that has accompanied the consumer revolution and the neo-colonialist exploitation of the poor, here represented by the poor of Africa, that facilitates the comfortable lifestyles of the rich.

At first I thought that the name John Conway, who reminded me to some extent of Corrigan, the befriender of the destitute in McCann's novel Let The Great World Spin) had been chosen simply because his initials were the same as Joseph Conrad. Then I toyed with the idea that it was a tribute to the mathematician John Conway who was the creator of the Game of Life, a computer simulation in which cellular automaton obeying simple rules can create forms of increasing complexity, some of which can reproduce. Perhaps. Then I wondered whether it was linked to John Connor, the messianic hero of the Terminator film franchise (created by James Cameron, another JC) who leads humanity in its war against artificially intelligent robots. That seemed very likely. But John Conway, JC, and John Connor, JC, could also symbolise the ultimate JC = Jesus Christ. That would explain how Conway is instantly able to connect with people, who show him loyalty bordering on devotion. That would explain why he calls his partner's twins his children, although not his children. In the end he overturns the tables of the moneylenders in the temple. In the end he has to die.

I suspect that the character of Mister Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness is supposed to be Christ.

The theme of connectivity, and the chaos caused when connections are severed, is overt. The purpose of the mission is to mend a broken cable and restore connectivity to southern Africa. It starts in Cape Town, a city still stratified by the social divisions of apartheid. Fennell is estranged from his son, even, at one moment, denying him; his resolution is to write an old-fashioned letter to mend this breach. Conway's partner and her twins leave for England, a separation which is known to be permanent. It could be argued that the play in which she is to appear, 'Waiting for Godot' is about separation. But these disconnections are contrasted with the human communities depicted in the book: the homeless living underneath a flyover in Cape Town, the free-divers (Fennell is determined he won't dive but they eventually persuade him to swim with them), the tight-knit crew of the repair vessel, the scavengers in Accra, even the links Conway makes with the girl in the shopping mall and the hotel receptionist whose name isn't Chantal. Fennel, ever the outsider, can do little more than observe but Conway belongs.

Part One is bookended by quotes about connections. It starts, “We are all shards in the smash-up.” (1.1) and ends, “We are, indeed - you, me, us - shards in the smash-up.” (1.6) 

In the acknowledgements, McCann thanks both Joseph Conrad and T S Eliot. The links to Conrad's Heart of Darkness are multiple:

• The fact that it is the Congo river, the focus of the action in HoD, that causes the cable to snap.
• The bookending in part one echo the frame narrative structure used in HoD
• The extended consideration of Apocalypse Now, a film based on Heart of Darkness. Fennell is obsessed with the character played by Martin Sheen, who is there to neutralise the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Kurtz is the name of the antagonist in HoD), as it could be argued Fennell is, through his journalism, going to tame John Conway, the Kurtz character.
• The fact the operations are directed from Brussels, the capital city (unnamed, mentioned only as the ‘whited sepulchre’ in HoD) of the Empire which exploited the Congo. At the very end of the novel, London stands in for this ‘whited sepulchre’ (a biblical phrase from Matthew referring to a place that is outwardly beautiful but inwardly decaying: “London is sometimes so beautiful that it is difficult to remember that it is built on a whole empire of lies.” (Epilogue)
• The cable repair ship is called the Georges Lecointe. He was a famous Belgian naval commander who was in charge of a ship exploring the Antarctic.
• The final scene is on a houseboat in the Thames as the tide turns ... echoing the beginning and ending of the HoD frame narrative.

The Hollow Men is a poem by T S Eliot which has the epigraph: “Mistah Kurtz - he dead” (a line from HoD). The hollow men are effigies stuffed with straw such as are burned on bonfires as ‘Guys’ on bonfire night; Guy Fawkes, like Conway, was a terrorist who wanted to blow things up but I think that Fennell, alcoholic and adrift, is the archetypal 'hollow' man. The poem ends with the famous lines: “This is the way the world ends ... Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Selected quotes:

• “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.” (1.1)
• “Rain on the cobblestones. Exit ghost.” (1.1)
• “The clouds sped away from them. Even the sky seemed segregated.” (1.1)
• “He mentioned a little hole-in-the-wall bar down in the docklands where he said that not a single moment cloned itself.” (1.1)
• “We can only ever locate the middle when we get to the end.” (1.2)
• “It was not a city built for walkers. The pavements were cracked. At times the concrete just disappeared. At the highway underpass shopping trolleys were tethered to the ground by rope and chain. Tents were ranged like mushrooms. A little scarf of smoke came up from a cooking pot. A lean dog slinked sideways. Grey water leaked from a rotted length of gutter pipe. Every now and then a shadow moved among the tents.” (1.3)
• “I paraded around, hair askew, shirt ambitiously undone, waiting for the wine to be uncorked.” (1.3)
• “His physicist friends who were well aware that you could not locate the speed and the position simultaneously, and that the only good answer is the uncertain one.” (1.3)
• “The booze had slowed me down, crawled into my cranium, pulled a curtain across my perception. The bottle does a good job of drinking the mind.” (1.3)
• “There were all the lights that I had blown out in my life. All the times that I'd been the stage actor in the wrong play.” (1.3)
• “I looked east again but there was nothing but the ocean and the ocean and the ocean.” (1.4)
• “Young, I had wanted to be old, and old now, young.” (2.1)
• “Conway's story still reached beyond my ribcage and turned my heart a notch backwards. Each time I thought of him, there was a squeeze of the arteries.” (Epilogue)
• “Envy is a dark ink.” (Epilogue)

June 2025; 235 pages

Published in the UK by Bloomsbury in 2025

McCann also wrote This Side of Brightness.

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

A detailed synopsis of the plot. Spoiler alerts!

Journalist Anthony Fennell travels to Cape Town: his assignment to travel on a cable repair ship. He meets John Conway, the Chief of Mission, who will be in charge of the repair. While waiting for a cable break to occur, he goes to Conway’s home and meets his partner Zanele, an actress, and his twin children. Zanele is about to travel to Brighton in England to star in ‘Waiting for Godot’, the Samuel Beckett play, in defiance of the author’s wishes that the leads should only be played by men. While waiting in port, Fennell also goes with Conway and a group of his friends and watches them free-diving to place grave stones in memory of dead divers at the bottom of the sea. One of the divers, a Polish woman, tells Fennell that Conway has missing years and that Zanele’s children aren’t his. Another of the divers has a PhD for research into fluid dynamics, particularly the point of turbulence.

Then the River Congo floods and the detritus swept out to sea remodels the sea bed and breaks a cable. Fennell is in a shopping mall when this happens and notices first that the shops can’t take anything but cash and the ATMs aren’t working. Then he realises that his phone has no signal. He can’t even check out of his hotel. He rushes to the boat and goes aboard.

He then spends several days being terribly seasick in port and the boat is trapped there by a storm. Finally, the storm abates sufficiently so that it can leave harbour and Fennell starts feeling better. He begins to learn more about the characters on the ship as they slowly crawl up the coast of Africa to where three cables are broken.

Fennell starts to handwrite a letter to his estranged son whom he denied when he talked to Zanele (another Christ motif?). News comes that one of the shipmates has lost his mother; there is a service and they move on. News then comes that Conway’s partner Zanele has been attacked on stage: acid was thrown at her. Fennell tries to find out more about Conway and learns that he had another name: Alastair Banks. Conway restricts Fennell’s internet privileges (the ship has a limited satellite connection) and Fennell gets grumpy about it.

The process of mending the first two cables, deep underwater, is slow and difficult but successful and they head into Accra before going to mend a much shallower cable.

Conway disappears. We learn later that he has gone rogue.

Fennell also leaves the ship to go and live in a beach condo in Accra, writing his story; his cleaner (who has a maths degree) tells him that Conway has salvaged the broken cable and given it to the poor who are breaking it down for its materials.

Conway, in hiding, goes to Alexandria in Egypt and sabotages two internet cables by free diving down to them and using a thermite bomb. He is killed by the second bomb.

After he has died, dummy bombs turn up all over the world.

Fennell goes to talk to Zanele on her houseboat in the Thames.