The unique centrepiece of this novel is the network of undersea cables that carry data around our now hyperconnected world. The book highlights how dependent our lives are on these underwater cables. Our voices and data are transmitted through pulses of light along fibre optic wires lying on the sea floor. Here they are prey to natural disasters. We know so little about this fundamental infrastructure and how vulnerable it can be.
But this book is about more than broken cables. Even more fascinating are the human connections, made and broken and never repaired.
The hero of the book is John Conway, an engineer and free diver who travels the world repairing essential cables when they break. The novel is narrated by an Irish journalist, Anthony Fennell who is struggling with broken relationships, writer’s block and drinking. He is writing an article about Conway’s cable repair boat but he wants to write about “connection, grace and repair”. Fennell sails with the all-male, multicultural crew up the west coast of Africa from Cape Town to the site of a cable break. Onboard for days, the book describes the difficulty of the work and the scale and beauty of the natural world and our ability to wreck it.
Conway has an amazing ability to hold his breath underwater and free dive for up to eight minutes. The passages describing this freediving are incredibly beautiful. Conway is a mysterious character with a few questionable blanks in his life story. His partner is a beautiful South African actor/director called Zanele who is in the UK staging Waiting for Godot. Fennell finds Conway completely fascinating and his unstated desire for Zanele makes them almost rivals.
The themes of the book are the fracturing and unravelling of cables as well as peoples’ emotions, relationships and lives. The plot weaves these themes together when the two rivals work to repair the cables that carry the news that may cause both Conway and Fennell’s lives to unravel.
Twist certainly lingers after you have finished it. McCann beautifully captures both the physical world and complicated and disconnected human emotions. He cleverly juxtaposes the trash that we receive on our phones with the never-ending pollution we spill into our ocean. But his primary focus is the human connections made and broken and sometimes not salvaged.
McCann is a meticulous writer and his prose is beautiful, lyrical and moving. A recommended read.
The review for the May edition of the Valley Voice will be Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Dream Count, is the fourth novel by this Nigerian-born author. She’s won multiple awards for her novels and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2015. This is Adichie’s first novel in ten years. The novel is four loosely interconnected narratives of four women during the COVID pandemic: Chiamaka; her best friend, Zikora, a lawyer; her go-getting banker cousin Omelogor; and her Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou. Terrible men are a recurring theme.
Read along with us and see if you agree with our review next month.
