The Visible and the Invisible in McCann’s Twist
Morris Caplin - There is a ship somewhere in the dark waters off the coast of Congo. The vessel rocks gently in the swell, its deck crowded with massive spools of fiber-optic cable. Below, at depths where sunlight never reaches, a break has occurred. Not a dramatic rupture—just a severed wire, invisible to everyone except those who understand that our entire digital world depends on it. This is where Colum McCann's latest novel, Twist, begins: in the unglamorous, unseen work of mending what has broken.
The setup is deceptively simple. Anthony Fannell, a journalist bearing the weight of personal fractures—a failed marriage, a son in Chile named Santiago with whom he has lost contact—accepts an assignment to write about the ships that repair submarine cables. These are the physical arteries of our supposedly ethereal internet, laid across the ocean floor like fragile veins carrying the lifeblood of global communication. To follow this story, Fennell travels to South Africa, where he meets John Conway, the mission leader preparing to sail aboard the Georges Lecointe to repair a severed cable.
The mission succeeds. The cable is fixed. The story should end.
But then Conway disappears. Weeks later, his skeleton is discovered on the beaches of Libya.
What happened? McCann offers no easy explanation, no tidy resolution. Instead, he leaves us with an unresolved mystery, a deliberate ambiguity that transforms the novel from a technical documentary into something approaching a conte philosophique—a philosophical tale that challenges us on multiple fronts, including the spiritual one. Conway, it seems, became a Luddite of the deep, a man who spent his life repairing the world's connections until something within him broke, sending him on a self-destructive journey that remains, purposefully, just beyond our comprehension.
The Web of Mystery
Around this central trunk, McCann weaves a tangle of symbolic threads. There is Zanele, the enigmatic South African actress who emerges from the violence and marginalization of the townships to perform—impossibly, wonderfully—in a London production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. She is Conway's companion, and her presence in the novel spreads what can only be called a fundamental ambiguity, a saying and not-saying that transforms ordinary dialogue into great literature. There is Fennell himself, inadequate and broken, trying to tell a story about connection while unable to reconnect with his own son.
But it is the dimension of mystery itself that seems to have prompted McCann to write this book. In the acknowledgments, the narrator quotes César Vallejo: "It is mystery that holds things together." This is not decorative philosophy. The word "mystery" appears throughout Twist in different forms and accents, like a musical motif that gains depth with each repetition. From the very beginning, Fennell states his purpose clearly: "I felt an urgent need to tell a story about bonds, grace, and reparation."
Bonds. Grace. Reparation. These are not the usual terms of technological journalism. They are the vocabulary of spiritual seeking, of a world that recognizes something sacred in the act of mending what has been broken.
The Disease of the Surface
The novel's most powerful critique comes through Zanele, whose voice cuts through the digital chatter with prophetic clarity. In a conversation about diving, cables, and ecological disasters—a discussion that somehow also encompasses Beckett's play as a denunciation of climate change—she delivers what might be the novel's thesis: "The evil of our times is that we spend too much time on the surface!"
It is a rich metaphor, spoken by a woman who understands depth both literally and figuratively. She knows the ocean floor where cables rest and the human depths where truth resides. She backs her diagnosis with devastating facts: four billion tons of industrial waste dumped into the oceans each year. Her judgment is unflinching: "If we had any sense, we would all die of shame."
But her critique extends beyond environmental catastrophe. She is diagnosing a spiritual condition, a willful ignorance of the depths—whether of the sea or of the soul—that sustain us. We are content, she suggests, to glide along the surface of our lives, tapping screens and streaming data, never pausing to consider the hidden infrastructure, both technological and moral, that makes our superficial existence possible.
McCann's spiritual antenna—his openness to what he calls mystery—allows him to transform this observation into something more than mere environmental lament. When Fennell recalls reading Oscar Wilde to his ex-wife, he quotes a line that becomes a kind of answer to Zanele's critique: "We are all in the mud, but some of us look up at the stars." There is that "we" that unites those who desire to strive for something more. As Fennell articulates: "It is often the invisible that most deeply stirs the imagination."
Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will
The concept of repair stirs Fennell's imagination throughout the novel. He invokes Gramsci's famous formulation—"pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will"—as a kind of working philosophy. The world is dark and disgusting, he acknowledges. There is no revelation in that fact. "So what?" he asks. "Perhaps something can still come from those interested in repair."
This is where McCann's novel transcends its premise and becomes something more: a meditation on repair as a form of hope, as a spiritual practice. The setting itself—the sea, the diving, the cables both concrete and symbolic, the connections and information and stories they transmit, all immaterial but real—constitutes a powerful vehicle for viewing our world, wounded by wars, pandemics, and terrorism, as something that needs repair, new connections, someone to take care of it. The work, McCann suggests, is to join the dots and reconnect what has become disconnected.
Perhaps it was time spent in Japan that gave McCann's narrator an appreciation for kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. The philosophy embedded in this practice—that breaks and wounds, when properly mended, offer more preciousness than the original artifact—becomes a governing metaphor for the novel. Relationships, like cables, like ceramic bowls, break. The question is whether we have the patience and skill to repair them, to make them more beautiful in their brokenness than they were in their original wholeness.
"Just because the truth is ignored," the narrator notes, "does not mean it is not true."
The Paradox of Connection
The great irony at the heart of Twist is embodied in Conway himself. He is a man who spends his life connecting the world, yet he remains profoundly disconnected from it. He carries an old flip phone for personal use—"I like machines that work"—while wearing a buzzing smartphone on his belt for professional obligations. He is a creature from the unplugged side, more attuned to the rhythms of manual labor and the dignity of those doing "the actual work of the world" than to the digital chatter he facilitates.
And yet, or perhaps because of this, he is the one who breaks. At the very moment he is at sea repairing a literal rupture in global communications, his relationship with Zanele is fracturing. Every story of connection, McCann seems to suggest, is also a story of rupture. As Fennell reflects: "A cable was a cable until it was broken, and then, like the rest of us, it became something else."
This becomes the novel's devastating insight: "We are all shards in the smash-up. Our lives, even the unruptured ones, bounce around on the seafloor. For a while we might brush tenderly against one another, but eventually, and inevitably, we collide and splinter."
A Pilgrimage of Reparation
The novel reads like a detective story, compelling in its narrative drive, even though we know from the beginning that Conway is dead. The mystery is not what happened but why—a question McCann deliberately leaves unanswered, trusting the reader's imagination to fill the space where explanation would cheapen the truth.
This choice echoes the speech McCann gave at the Vatican's Jubilee of Communication, which L'Osservatore Romano titled "A Pilgrimage of Reparation." In that address, he asked: "Will telling and listening to stories save the world? Maybe yes, maybe no... but it will certainly offer, if nothing else, a glimmer of light and understanding. And where there is a glimmer of light, there is the possibility that many more will appear, acting and working together, until at least part of the darkness is dispelled."
This is the hope Twist offers: not that we can prevent all ruptures, not that we can maintain permanent connection, but that we can learn to care for one another through the work of repair. "As the divide continues to widen," McCann said in that speech, "the very essence of repair lies in the need to get to know each other. And to really get to know each other, we must listen and communicate. And after listening, we must try to understand. Only then, with respect, joy, and courage, can we begin to trigger change."
The setting of the novel—at the intersection of physical cables and metaphysical connections—reveals this truth: our technological connections are not clean or abstract. They are deeply, irrevocably human, forged from sand, laid by hand, vulnerable to the raw power of nature, and reflective of our own fragile relationships.
Conway's final words, spoken before his disappearance, capture this paradox with heartbreaking precision: "Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken."
Yet McCann leaves us not with despair but with mystery. The novel insists that mystery—not explanation, not resolution—is what holds things together. The invisible depths beneath our superficial existence. The grace hidden in the work of repair. The possibility that even our brokenness, acknowledged and attended to, might become the source of a deeper connection than we could have achieved through seamless wholeness.
The cables run across the ocean floor. The data flows. And somewhere, always, someone is working to repair what has broken, to reconnect what has come apart. This is the work. This is the promise. This is the mystery that holds everything together.