Twist

Review by Nick

Twist by Colum McCann is a meditation on the fragility of human connection—how we fracture, and how we attempt to make sense of the damage through cognitive dissonance, often reshaping our narratives to survive what we cannot fully understand. McCann uses the metaphor of a broken undersea cable as the vehicle for his narrative. These delicate glass tubes, which carry the weight of global communication, become emblems of our modern disconnection. When one ruptures, it triggers chaos on land; in McCann’s story, it mirrors the narrator’s own fractured relationships. The cable—unseen yet essential—symbolizes the invisible threads that bind us to one another, and the devastation that follows when those threads snap.

The story begins in Cape Town. The slanted light, the shanty towns tucked beneath overpasses, the oppressive heat, and the fractured infrastructure all contribute to a portrait of a city that is both beautiful and bruised by history. McCann captures not just the geography, but the emotional texture of Cape Town. A familiar Cape Town scene—a woman collecting money in traffic—becomes a symbol of presence without technology, of human dignity amid hardship. Though “not connected,” she is full of grace, offering a moment of clarity in a world of broken signals.

McCann’s prose is lyrical and deliberate. The pacing is unhurried—almost glacial—allowing space for reflection. There is a quiet depth and beauty in its restraint.

Anthony Fennell, McCann’s narrator, is a man adrift—divorced, alcoholic, estranged from his son. His journey to document the repair of a ruptured undersea cable echoes Heart of Darkness, using a descent into a fractured landscape to mirror internal collapse. But Twist deepens the inquiry: Fennell is caught between memory and reality, between the comfort of narrative and the chaos of truth. His fixation on Apocalypse Now—especially the contrast between Willard’s fictional breakdown and Martin Sheen’s real one—becomes a prism through which he interrogates his own unravelling. “One sequence, the invented, gets shot down the tube. The other, the real, gets lost in the haze.” He’s not just documenting a broken cable; he’s trying to understand how we live with broken narratives. How we keep going when the signal drops.

In the end, Twist asks not just how we lose connection, but how we respond to its absence. Fennell’s journey is a philosophical enquiry into meaning-making—how we construct stories to hold chaos at bay. But McCann also gestures toward the darker edge of this impulse. When dissonance is resolved through oversimplification or ideological rigidity, as Naomi Klein explores in her book Doppelganger, the result can be distortion rather than understanding. In such cases, the curated narrative doesn’t heal—it isolates.

Conway’s final act is not framed as ideological. It’s not a manifesto. It’s something quieter, more elemental: a refusal to reconcile the irreconcilable. His disconnection is not denial—it’s confrontation. Unlike the social media figures Klein describes, Conway doesn’t simplify the world to make it bearable.

This contrast deepens the ethical stakes of Twist. McCann doesn’t offer resolution. He offers rupture. And in doing so, he reminds us that the act of trying to understand—even when the signal drops—is what keeps us human. But there is an implicit warning: when we stop trying, when we choose fiction over truth, comfort over complexity, the disconnection doesn’t just persist—it multiplies.

Other Reviews

A darkly epic novel about connection, disconnection and destruction from the New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-winning, Booker Prize-longlisted author of Let the Great World Spin

Named a 2025 book to look out for by the Observer, Financial Times, Irish Times and New European

'Urgent and utterly compelling' KEVIN BARRY

'One of our greatest storytellers' ELIF SHAFAK

'A powerfully realist novel of men at sea - It speaks of the brokenness of our time, the successful and unsuccessful attempts at repairs, and the vulnerability of our world' SALMAN RUSHDIE

Publisher's Review

Anthony Fennell, a journalist, is in pursuit of a story buried at the bottom of the sea- the network of tiny fibre-optic tubes that carry the world's information across the ocean floor - and what happens when they break.

So he has travelled to Cape Town to board the George Lecointe, a cable repair vessel captained by Chief of Mission John Conway. Conway is a talented engineer and fearless freediver - and Fennell is quickly captivated by this mysterious, unnerving man and his beautiful partner, Zanele.

As the boat embarks along the west coast of Africa, Fennell learns the rhythms of life at sea, and finds his place among the band of drifters who make up the crew. But as the mission falters, tensions simmer - and Conway is thrown into crisis. A terrible, violent tragedy is unfolding in the life he has left behind on land; and, trapped out at sea, it seems as if the vast expanse of the ocean is closing in.

Then Conway disappears; and Fennell must set out to find him.
As taut and propulsive as a thriller, and a timeless exploration of narrative and truth, Twist is the work of a master storyteller at the height of his powers.

'Electrifying, propulsive ... A masterful exploration of the elemental forces at work just below the surface of all our lives' COLIN WALSH, author of Kala