Colum McCann, TWIST: A Novel
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[0:45]Column McCann is the author of Twist, a novel.
[0:48]Column is the internationally best-selling author of the novel's A Paragon, Transatlantic,
[0:53]Let the Great World Spin, Zoli, Dancer, Decided Brightness, and Song Dogs, as well as three
[0:59]critically acclaimed story collections, and two nonfiction books, Letters to a young writer
[1:04]and American mother.
[1:05]His fiction has been published in more than 40 languages.
[1:08]He has received many honors, including the National Book Award, the International Dublin
[1:12]Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Oscar nomination for his short film Everything
[1:18]in this country must.
[1:20]He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Irish Association
[1:24]of Artists, Ayostana, and he has received a Chevelier days out.
[1:29]It is Let the Award from the French government.
[1:32]In addition, he has won awards in Italy, Germany, and China.
[1:35]A contributor to the New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Paris Review.
[1:39]He is the co-founder of the Global Nonprofit Story Exchange Organization, Narrative Four.
[1:44]He lives with his family in New York.
[1:46]Welcome, Column.
[1:47]Thank you so much for coming on Totally Book to talk about your latest novel, Twist Congratulations.
[1:52]Thank you.
[1:53]It is nice to be totally booked.
[1:54]Aren't we all just totally booked all the time?
[1:58]Like everybody, crazy busy.
[2:00]I do feel that increasingly in life, we are all totally booked in every minute.
[2:05]And if it isn't taken up, then your Gmail is going to take it up or your TikTok or whatever
[2:10]else happens to be that every minute is booked until you hit the hay.
[2:15]It is true.
[2:16]Now what do we do with all that?
[2:17]I don't know.
[2:18]I don't know.
[2:20]I think we get less done and just a lot of fluff in and around it.
[2:24]It's the disease of our times.
[2:26]It's true.
[2:27]I feel like I read to get out of the Totally Booked mindset.
[2:32]Like reading for me is the only time I'm not looking at my phone to see what time it is and
[2:37]all of that.
[2:38]That is my only sacred space.
[2:40]Me too.
[2:41]And I love the physical book.
[2:42]Increasingly, I love just having the physical book.
[2:47]You know, not on the computer or any other device.
[2:52]Just to take it away, it feels like a bit of a friend, doesn't it?
[2:56]Totally.
[2:57]Yes.
[2:58]I know.
[2:59]I'm always like dog earring.
[3:00]I don't know.
[3:01]I haven't learned how to do that well enough online, I guess.
[3:02]So it doesn't have the same satisfaction.
[3:04]Anyway, to your story, which aside from the bout of complete seasickness on the boat
[3:10]where I felt like I was getting sick myself, just like imagining the four days of like
[3:15]vomiting and whatever.
[3:17]I found this to be just like, so utterly immersive and immersive water.
[3:22]Anyway, didn't mean to, anyway.
[3:23]But what a story and what a unique perspective on life when we go through life on land
[3:29]and don't spend that much time thinking about everything else below the surface, which
[3:34]is just mind boggling when you think about it a lot, which is of course like some of
[3:39]the things.
[3:40]So anyway, why don't you tell listeners what twist is really about now that I've sort
[3:43]of mangled it?
[3:44]Mind boggling because 95% of our world's intercontinental information goes under the sea.
[3:52]Now, I used to think before I started embarking on this book that everything bounced up into
[3:57]some sort of benevolent heavenly cloud and then got bounced back down and we're all
[4:03]working on radio waves and there was something comforting actually about that.
[4:08]It was going out of the atmosphere.
[4:10]No, actually, all of our information travels in the cold, wet, dark bottom of the sea
[4:19]in these very small tubes that are no bigger than the plumbing pipes at the peak of your
[4:23]toilet in wires inside those tubes that are no bigger than your eye lashes.
[4:29]So everything, even our conversation right now is bouncing down through fiber optic wires
[4:35]with billions of pulses of light per second translated then into ones and zeros and then
[4:42]translated back into a machine and then translated into our voices and our images.
[4:48]And suddenly it's there in point zero, zero, six of a second.
[4:52]If this is not a miracle, then I don't know what is, but these wires break and that's
[4:57]what the book is about the book is about the repair and sabotage of underwater cables
[5:04]and how we rely on communication and what happens when that communication breaks down.
[5:11]And it's kind of also a retelling of the heart of darkness in certain ways, Joseph Conrad's
[5:18]heart of darkness because information is power, information is what is at home now.
[5:22]The way we are owned is through the ownership of our information and all of that information
[5:28]amazingly is bouncing around on the seafloor.
[5:31]I actually couldn't believe that that is how the wires get fixed.
[5:36]Is that all true?
[5:37]There are these boats and they just like put things into the water and hope to find them.
[5:42]I mean, isn't it crazy?
[5:44]So it's a novel and there's a crew go out on a boat and the boat in the novel is called
[5:50]the Georges Lechamps, which is a Belgian ship, but I went out on a friendship called the
[5:55]Leon Tevonen and I was amazed.
[5:58]And yes, we can repair wires close to the shore with divers and even closer, further
[6:06]out from shore with what they call ROVs, which are remotely controlled vehicles.
[6:10]But after two kilometers, you cannot send a remote controlled vehicle that will fix these
[6:16]cables down.
[6:18]So these men and women who are out at sea, there's only 50 repair boats in the world.
[6:24]They have to troll the bottom of the ocean with basically what amounts to a grappling hook.
[6:30]And this, this cable may be lost, it may be buried, it could be a landslide, it could
[6:34]be an earthquake, it could have been a fishing trawler that snapped it.
[6:39]And sometimes if a cable gets snapped, it can take up to two months to fix it, which is
[6:45]an extraordinary length of time, particularly if that cable is important.
[6:50]And guess what?
[6:51]There are only about 400 working cables in the world.
[6:56]So if a few of them get disrupted at once, it can cause chaos.
[7:01]And in fact, there are ways and there are people who say that it is possible that the
[7:06]next 9-11 will happen underwater.
[7:10]And because our cables and our landing stations for the cables come in are so vulnerable
[7:16]to a potential sabotage.
[7:19]I feel like maybe we need to keep this quiet.
[7:21]Don't give anybody ideas, call them, it's all there on the ocean, anybody who wanted could
[7:30]easily do it.
[7:31]Okay, so I live in New York and I went out to a landing station during the pandemic granted.
[7:37]But I went out to a landing station in Long Island where I was able to access the back
[7:43]of the landing station, no problem, just walk the beach, walk up to the landing station
[7:47]where the cables come in and they get translated and put in underground.
[7:53]And I stood over the manhole cover, which I could have lifted up with a crowbar and touched
[8:00]the cables as they bring in the pulse of the world's information.
[8:05]It's amazing how little security there is and look, anybody who wants to know about this
[8:10]you can find the coordinates of the stations online and there might be a chain link
[8:17]fence around the landing station or there might be a camera, but there is no man's security
[8:24]and really it's quite easy to get startlingly easy to get at those cables.
[8:30]And so yeah, part of me was like, oh am I opening a secret, but no, it's been there for
[8:36]Long Island and some people, the Nostradamuses have been warning us about this for a little
[8:43]while now, but hopefully nothing will come up, but all you have to do is look at the news
[8:48]and in the past three months several cables in the Baltic Sea have been chopped by Chinese
[8:54]and Russian fishing vessels dragging their anchors as part of a proxy war that builds into
[9:02]what's happening with NATO and information gathering and all these also to scare people.
[9:10]Because guess what, look, I'm not a thriller writer, but this turned into a thriller for
[9:17]me.
[9:18]I began to realize that there are submarines, there are all sorts of activities going
[9:23]on under the water, listening devices and people, you know, who can drop certain devices
[9:30]on top of the cables down in the water and listen to what's going on now.
[9:34]Most of that, as you and I know, is flotsam and jetsam, whether it be, you know, your local
[9:41]soccer matcher, your tick, tuck, or the, the reams and terrible reams of pornography that
[9:46]go online and all of that is flowing in underwater, but there's also very sensitive military
[9:53]and financial data and, and, and there are, it is $10 trillion.
[10:00]worth of transactions go on every single day.
[10:05]And if somebody wanted to play a little with our heads,
[10:09]they would cut strategically, cut the cables
[10:12]because you don't want to cut your own.
[10:14]The United States is okay
[10:16]because we have so many cables
[10:18]and there's a thing called, there's a built-in recovery system.
[10:23]And if one cable gets cut, the other cables take up the slack.
[10:27]Might slow down a tiny bit, but in general it's okay.
[10:29]But a continent like Africa with so many countries
[10:33]within Africa is very vulnerable to an attack
[10:37]because there are actually only two main cables
[10:40]or lots of other little cables funneling off the two main cables.
[10:44]But if they were cut, Africa,
[10:46]and therefore really the rest of the world
[10:48]would be in serious trouble.
[10:51]And so there are men and women who go out on these boats.
[10:55]They spend weeks and weeks at sea
[10:57]and they fix our cables for it, using, guess what?
[11:01]Nuclear fusion, it's crazy.
[11:05]It's crazy.
[11:05]Oh my gosh.
[11:06]It's like I didn't think I had enough to worry about
[11:08]until I read your book.
[11:10]And now now my worries have expanded exponentially.
[11:14]I know, I mean, I feel bad.
[11:17]I kind of want to write something that here's the deal.
[11:20]I honestly set out to write about repair.
[11:22]Because I do think we live in broken times.
[11:25]I think you're correct.
[11:26]I think that the times we live in are, you know,
[11:29]they're anxiety inducing.
[11:31]And there is a brokenness and a shattering that's going on.
[11:34]And one of the things that I would like to be able to do
[11:36]as a novelist is to gather up all those little shattered pieces
[11:39]and make some sort of mosaic out of them.
[11:41]And in certain ways, that's what I do try to do.
[11:43]But in other ways, by highlighting this particular problem,
[11:48]I understand that it's an extra little corner of the mind
[11:52]that's going to be taken over wondering,
[11:53]is my internet going to go out and as not just internet,
[11:57]because we're really what we're talking about,
[11:59]is hospitals and all sorts of intimate health
[12:06]communications and all sorts of things that could be at risk.
[12:11]But the other thing is, let's praise the people who go out
[12:14]to see and let's remember that behind the internet,
[12:18]there actually is a hardware.
[12:21]There are cables and there are buildings and there are pipes
[12:26]and there are switches and a whole rim of things
[12:30]that we tend not to think about when it comes
[12:33]to our daily set of communications.
[12:35]So there are a lot of heroes out there who are doing the work.
[12:38]Have you seen the documentary about looking
[12:41]for Ernest Shackleton's boat, the endurance?
[12:45]I heard about it.
[12:46]You should watch it because it's about,
[12:49]it has some similar visuals, if you will,
[12:51]of boats and crews and waiting.
[12:54]And if you don't go right to the exact spot,
[12:57]you have to start again, the hours and hours of hoping
[13:00]and waiting and wondering if you everybody's sleeping
[13:02]and the tides and all of that.
[13:04]So I feel like I had that visual in my head
[13:08]with the things to this, but.
[13:10]But did you ever drop anything into the ocean
[13:14]like a coin or a ring or anything like that?
[13:18]You know how hard it is to find even in shallow water?
[13:21]Yes.
[13:22]Now imagine if you're searching for a wire,
[13:25]which is one and a half inches thick that has been snapped
[13:29]and then by a landslide.
[13:31]And then that landslide has covered it for,
[13:34]sometimes for kilometers and buried it down deep
[13:37]in the grass so that you can't actually find it.
[13:40]Now you can ping electronically to find the general location,
[13:44]but not the specific location.
[13:47]And so what they do, the lower a wire with a hook
[13:50]upon that wire and throw all the ocean floor
[13:53]called a cutting graph, no, when they find the wire,
[13:56]then they got a cutter, they got to bring it up.
[13:59]And then they got to bring the other end up
[14:00]and then they got to fuse them together with new wire.
[14:03]And it's actually the same process that they were using,
[14:05]believe it or not, in the 1850s and 1860s
[14:09]when the very first cables were set down.
[14:12]And in many ways, the principles are the same
[14:15]because the people who are behind that businessman,
[14:18]guess what their logo, their tag word was for themselves
[14:22]in the 1850s and 1860s.
[14:25]What?
[14:26]It was faster, faster, faster.
[14:29]Now you can just hear the bays also is in the mosques
[14:34]and the other people in the world
[14:36]and the business people saying,
[14:39]faster, faster, faster, if I can shave off a pico second
[14:44]or a million, million, million second,
[14:48]I will make tens of millions of dollars.
[14:51]So it is very much about speed.
[14:54]That connection between Hong Kong and London is slow
[14:57]or it gets interrupted.
[14:59]It can cause panic in all sorts of ways.
[15:01]And then the ultimate question is philosophically,
[15:04]is why do we rely on this?
[15:06]Mm.
[15:07]Is it the machines that are the problem
[15:10]or is it our relationship to the machines?
[15:14]And what you said earlier was really nice.
[15:16]You have to go away and to take a book
[15:19]and to not be beholden to the chips,
[15:24]the silicon chips that are beaming into my head
[15:27]is quite a lovely moment.
[15:29]And I think we have to rediscover some of that
[15:34]or else we're going to be in trouble.
[15:36]Yes, thank you.
[15:37]I agree.
[15:38]You mentioned earlier that this is in part about repair
[15:42]and it is also about the repair of one man.
[15:45]And you see that as he goes through recovering alcoholism,
[15:49]you see all of his past traumas, the loss of his mom,
[15:53]the sad image of her at the top of the stairs,
[15:56]which has been now emblazoned in my brain
[15:59]and his son being far away.
[16:01]I mean, there are lots of things
[16:02]that he is holding onto.
[16:03]And even when you show his progression
[16:06]of how it's going to easier for him to climb up the stairs.
[16:09]And he's not as winded.
[16:11]And you see the like lifting of the heaviness of him
[16:14]as he goes on this mission.
[16:15]Tell me a little bit about that character
[16:17]and his development.
[16:19]The character is interesting.
[16:20]Because I mean, often I write about other things
[16:24]and other places.
[16:25]Last book was a paragon.
[16:27]It was about an Israeli man and a Palestinian man
[16:29]who become friends.
[16:30]I've written about all sorts of different situations.
[16:32]There were so many people living in Europe
[16:36]and often I've gone elsewhere.
[16:38]I do go elsewhere with this book,
[16:40]but my main character is a sort of white middle-aged Irish man.
[16:45]So supposedly not too far from me.
[16:48]But he's actually, he was a difficult character
[16:51]to write to be honest with you.
[16:52]Because I was aware that I didn't want him to be like me.
[16:56]He's a little darker and he has a number of difficulties.
[17:03]But it was interesting because he spoke to me
[17:06]in all sorts of new ways.
[17:09]And I had to go chasing him at times.
[17:12]And his whole thing is that he's a bit like,
[17:15]well, he's a bit like J. Alfred Prufra
[17:17]from the T.S. Eliot poem.
[17:20]He's one of those lonely men and shirts
[17:22]that he is hanging out of windows.
[17:23]And the poem actually fits in beautifully with the novel.
[17:27]Do I dare to eat a peach?
[17:29]I've heard the mermaid singing each to each.
[17:31]I do not think they will sing to me.
[17:34]And then, of course, the last line of that poem
[17:36]is until human voices wake us.
[17:39]And we drown, referring to the bottom of the scene.
[17:42]So in many ways, I do use the Eliot.
[17:46]There's undertones of Eliot.
[17:47]There's undertones of Conrad.
[17:49]There's some vague undertones of great Gatsby
[17:53]that are going on.
[17:54]But ultimately, this is a very modern tale.
[17:56]It takes place right now.
[17:58]And it's what's happening in the bottom of our,
[18:01]the bottom of our seas.
[18:02]Oh my gosh.
[18:03]There's also some humor when he meets Conway
[18:06]and or somebody who calls him and says,
[18:07]like, hey, hey, big guy or something.
[18:11]And you're like, okay, maybe I don't know a few,
[18:14]but I don't really like being referred to that way.
[18:17]Right, that's right, that's right.
[18:18]Yeah.
[18:19]You always got to have at least a touch of humor there.
[18:22]I mean, he is Irish after all.
[18:24]And he has to, even though he's heavy on the beer
[18:29]and all of these things, there are moments of recovery.
[18:33]And I don't want to give the game away, of course,
[18:35]but at the end of the book,
[18:37]I think he escapes with a sort of realization.
[18:42]It's not all with the eyes dotted and the tees crossed,
[18:46]but he does emerge from this situation
[18:50]with a sort of new knowledge about,
[18:51]because that's what books are about.
[18:53]Books are about the human heart.
[18:54]And, you know, what Faulkner talked about
[18:57]when he's talked about love and pride
[18:59]and being sacrificed and compassion.
[19:01]But as you say, also, I mean, you've got to live this life.
[19:05]You have to have a bit of fun, too.
[19:06]You have to have a sense of humor.
[19:07]You have to look at the world and even in all its darkness
[19:12]and find some little thread of light.
[19:14]So that's what I did with this character Anthony Fennel,
[19:17]but then there's another Irish character
[19:20]who is the captain or not the captain.
[19:21]He's the chief of mission, actually, on the ship,
[19:25]which is close to the captain.
[19:27]There's Captain and the chief of mission,
[19:29]and the chief of mission looks after the technical aspects
[19:31]of the wires.
[19:33]And he's a very mysterious character.
[19:36]And he sort of remains mysterious for a lot of the book,
[19:39]and that's sort of intentional.
[19:41]Because in many ways, what this book also talks about
[19:45]is what we don't know and what we can know.
[19:47]And despite all the ways that we look at each other
[19:51]and we communicate with each other,
[19:53]do we really know each other at the end?
[19:56]And how is it that we can get to know each other?
[19:59]Do we have to go back?
[20:00]to our sort of original selves in order to get, so even these two Irish guys who were
[20:07]out on the boat in the middle of nowhere together, they can't communicate in the ways that
[20:11]they really want to communicate.
[20:15]Can you do a quick background update?
[20:17]Like how did you become and I've obviously read your backstory and everything, but can
[20:21]you just share how you became this type of writer, author, novelist, nonprofit founder?
[20:28]Where did that come from?
[20:30]My favorite answer to any question nowadays is I don't know, because I actually think it's
[20:37]really honest, because a lot of the time we just don't know where this stuff came from,
[20:41]it sort of built up and I started out as a journalist and in my early 20s I started publishing
[20:46]books in my late 20s.
[20:48]This is book number 13 or 14 for me, I think it was 14 and I keep going on and I love
[20:54]exploring new territory, I love knocking myself off balance and even knocking my reader
[21:00]off balance with a different sort of story every time and even a different form.
[21:04]This is simpler, more straightforward, more chronological book than what I normally would
[21:10]write, but it's also apparently simple because at the end it's a bit of a head scratcher
[21:15]sort of intentionally, but I also am involved with this incredible foundation as you say
[21:21]and it's called narrative four, where we bring young people together from around the
[21:25]world to step into one another's shoes and to tell one another's stories and that is in
[21:31]this epidemic of loneliness and isolation which we're suffering.
[21:35]One of the most important things that I am involved in at any point, I mean it's really
[21:41]quite wonderful, so we're in 42 countries but we're all over the United States and then
[21:48]we're in Ireland and Mexico 12 countries in Africa and various other places and it's
[21:53]spectacular successful because in a good way because it just works and we love stories
[21:59]and stories can be fun and powerful, but also because it does break through those issues
[22:05]of stereotypes and borders and boundaries and young people are really searching for something
[22:10]that exists outside that small machine that we hold in our hands and often when we
[22:17]find them and it's the first time they've had a real chance to tell a story to somebody
[22:21]that they don't know.
[22:24]This is really powerful, it becomes an act of empathy and not only do they tell their
[22:29]story but they hear their own story told back to them by the other person so guess
[22:34]what?
[22:35]Like we'll bring the kids together from places like say and this is a real example and
[22:40]the South Bronx and Eastern Kentucky.
[22:43]Now these kids are terrified of one another, they're completely terrified because these kids
[22:50]are black and or immigrant, these kids are white and or Cherokee, these kids are urban,
[22:55]these kids are rural, these kids are blue politically, these kids are red, they'll go
[22:58]on and on and on but guess what?
[23:02]When you get in a room and they exchange not an idea because ideas are polemical but
[23:07]a personal story, that's when they begin to melt and begin to understand in a curious
[23:14]way actually that the world is messy and that the messiness isn't is a good thing because
[23:23]that young girl in the South Bronx who's wearing a hijab that you just thought has only
[23:27]one train of thought and is suddenly revealed to somebody who has beneath her hijab a pair
[23:34]of iPods and she's listening to Beyonce and guess what?
[23:38]The young boy is driving the pickup truck with the rifle in the back rack down the
[23:42]Kentucky roads, he's also listening to Beyonce and there's this point of weird commonality
[23:48]where they come together and say oh maybe you're not as different to me as I thought
[23:52]we were and this is the crux of where our actual repair will come in because I do believe
[23:59]that like the cables we have been sabotaged in a way yes we've had to sabotage the sabotage
[24:05]of an alien thing almost in the pandemic but we've also been isolated by corporations
[24:12]and by people who own the information and by people who make a lot of money by keeping
[24:17]us fearful and fearful of one another and when that fear breaks down and it can do so
[24:23]through stories and through literature that's when something really magical can happen
[24:29]so you know and stories can be dangerous to you and I know that stories can take away
[24:34]your house or your country or your mortgage or your identity but stories can also be super
[24:40]powerful and healing and miraculous when they are you know properly asserted and shared with
[24:48]one another that's my hope I'm an optimist in the face of all the evidence only because
[24:56]I'm actually a pessimist first I feel like you need to go into government or something I feel
[25:02]like you have to like get in there and start making like big changes and spreading this everywhere
[25:08]and like scaling this in as big a way as humanly possible I would love to do that I mean
[25:14]but can you imagine you know trying to get like members of congress to sit up it would only
[25:20]take an hour it would only take an hour because really that they are polemical but if they
[25:25]knew just a tiny bit about one another whether they're red nor blue or green or purple or whatever
[25:31]else that happens to be for example it becomes very difficult to slam a missile into a marketplace
[25:38]when you know the name and the story of the woman who is you know managing the marketplace and
[25:46]or if you know even just a tiny bit about her or even her culture but you know we're invested
[25:54]in you know our governments are invested in you know extending our ignorance that this sounds
[26:00]you know almost like one you know conspiracy theory is not it's not I mean people are making money
[26:07]off of keeping us apart from one another and you know one of the things that we can do is
[26:16]well you know all the great philosophers say at the end of their lives you know all the great
[26:24]to be kind to be kind to be kind and that's kind of the philosophy that I think that we could
[26:29]practice so much more I love that oh my gosh thank you thank you for leaving this on a hopeful
[26:34]inspiring note to counteract the fear and the worry thank you so much and I am just ridiculously
[26:42]impressed by you and your intellect and the kindness and you know we just we need a lot more of that
[26:49]so thank you well thank you thank you and thank you for the chance to talk and and and good
[26:54]luck and I hope we talk again soon me too that would be great all right best of luck okay bye bye
[26:59]bye bye bye thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi formerly momstone have time to read
[27:05]books if you loved the show tell a friend leave a review follow me on instagram at Zibi Owens
[27:12]and spread the word thanks so much oh and bye the books