Colum McCann on epic new novel Twist and the famous fan who left him humbled

If it sounds like he’s brought some odd bedfellows together, that’s right on brand for him. Connecting the world via stories is his life’s work, he says – and, indeed, the subject of his latest, Twist. "It’s a book about the repair and sabotage of underwater cables," he explains.

"Like most of us, I thought that the world’s internet traffic shot up in the air and was passed around by satellites before being beamed back down to us. But, actually, nearly all our intercontinental information is shooting through tubes in the darkness at the bottom of the sea."

Speaking over Zoom from his Manhattan apartment, he tells me, “You and I are bouncing through those tubes at this very second. I’m going through a black box at 60 Hudson Street, which is where everything from New York gets channelled through, then I go out to a landing station in either Long Island or New Jersey, then shoot underwater and land in Cornwall, whizzing up fibreoptic cables that in the UK mostly follow the railway lines. It’s miraculous, but these cables are very exposed.

"You could go down to the landing station in Cornwall, and more or less tread on the place where the cables come in from the sea. With a crowbar, you could probably lift up the manhole cover, drop some explosive in there, do some immediate damage. And Britain is one of those places that could be isolated quite easily.”

Even more potentially catastrophic, he says, is damage to cables at sea. “I’m worried this will become a new and prominent form of warfare. Around 10 trillion dollars worth of transactions go through those cables every day, so if ten or 11 cables get taken out, it’s a doomsday scenario. We could have an informational equivalent to 9/11. We never expected jet liners flying into skyscrapers, but we woke up one morning and it was so.”

By an odd quirk of timing – “a number of my friends joked, ‘You’ve got a pretty good marketing campaign for your book there!’” – the last few months have seen this threat become visible to the naked eye. Cables beneath the Baltic Sea appear to have been sabotaged several times, and in January the UK’s defence secretary revealed that a “Russian spy ship… [had been caught] mapping the UK’s critical underwater infrastructure”.

Given all that, it’s no surprise that there’s a side of Twist that’s not unlike a thriller (and there is, indeed, the odd twist), as a journalist goes out on a cable repair ship off the west coast of Africa. But there’s still the same relish of language, character and empathy that’s twice seen McCann make the Booker Prize long-list.

Several of his books have been adapted, too – American Mother as an audiobook read by Jamie Lee Curtis, Everything in this Country Must as a short film (hence that Oscar nod) – so Twist’s turn as Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime this week holds no terrors for him. He won’t be lending his own lovely Irish brogue to the affair, though: “When they were doing the audiobook for Let the Great World Spin, I wanted to be the reader for the first and last chapter, but they said, ‘We normally have actors, and made me do an audition. I did an hour in the booth and I didn’t get the job!”

More adaptations are planned. One of the world’s few indisputably A-list actors is interested in Twist; and JJ Abrams (director of, among others, two Star Wars films) is developing a movie version of Let the Great World Spin. Sting wanted to be involved, too, so he’s writing the music, but both Sting and Abrams have gone from fans to friends. “Sting’s become a pal – he’s just a genuine, down-to-earth person – and JJ’s a great friend: he let me use his cabin up in Maine to write Twist.”

But ask McCann whose endorsement means the most to him, from that list of heavyweights at the top of this article, and his answer is instant. "It’s a bit raw, because he’s sick now, but spending an hour with Pope Francis [after the Pontiff had read and loved the author’s 2020 novel Apeirogon, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] was humbling, and the fact he used some of my words in some of his masses is the greatest honour of all.

"Not because I’m a Catholic – I’m the world’s worst freaking Catholic – but because I’ve never seen anybody before who physically exudes the importance of listening to others. So getting to know those other [famous] people has been fantastic, too, but the most meaningful? I’m going to take Pope Francis, thanks."

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