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The award-winning Irish author Colum McCann was born in Dublin in 1965 and worked as a journalist before moving to the US and turning his hand to books. His novels include Let the Great World Spin, which won the 2011 International Dublin literary award, and 2020’s Apeirogon, which took a kaleidoscopic view of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Last year he co-wrote the memoir American Mother with Diane Foley, whose son, US journalist James Foley, was murdered by Islamic State in Syria in 2014. In his latest novel, Twist (published on 6 March), an Irish journalist on a cable repair ship off the west coast of Africa is confronted by questions of environmental destruction, information overload and colonialism. McCann lives in New York with his wife Allison and their three children.
Undersea communications cables are underexplored in fiction. What prompted you to write about them?
In the early part of the pandemic, I was thinking a lot about the notion of repair, because things were shattering around us fairly frequently. Somewhere I fell upon the story of the Léon Thévenin, a cable repair ship out of South Africa. Like everybody else, I thought that [digital] information went up from our phones and hit these satellites and came back down. I was really taken by the notion that it all happens in the bottom of the deep black sea. Bizarrely, since I started writing it, undersea cables are now being cut left, right and centre – the Houthis in the Red Sea, the Russians and Chinese in the Baltic. We’re going to be talking about it a lot more in the years to come.
It’s amazing how vulnerable these cables are to attack – all our ultra-modern communications being funnelled through these flimsy tubes draped across the seafloor.
Yes. Close to shore you can send down a remotely operated vehicle to fix a break, but beyond that, you’re going back to the 19th century. You’re throwing a rope down with a grappling hook on the end and hoping for the best.
The narrator makes several references to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. What’s the resonance there for you?
On very obvious levels, [Twist] is a man on a quest on a boat. The cable break occurs after the Congo River floods and flushes all of its refuse out to sea. It’s interesting that the cables we’ve laid down follow almost exactly the old colonial shipping routes. So all of those little echoes began to kick in.
You tackle big subjects… do you think novels can make a difference?
I don’t think it’s within [a novel’s] scope to change this stuff. But what it does is put a little crack in the wall, and then other people make the crack bigger, and then sometimes the wall comes tumbling down. I don’t call on novelists to necessarily be activists or to write about the big issues of the day. But for me personally, yeah, I think I do have to. The Israel and Palestine situation in Apeirogon was a big subject to take on. And, of course, there’s a danger in doing so, but the hope is that, in some small way, you disrupt conventional thinking. Novelists are not as important as we were 50 years ago. I find that you have to work out of a reckless inner need more than ever. It dilates my nostrils a little bit and I like that. I like having my back against the wall.
Apeirogon told the story of Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, two real-life Israeli and Palestinian friends who work together for peace. Are you still in touch with them?
I talk to Rami and Bassam at least once a week, and I filter a lot of how I feel about [the current] situation through them, because I’m sitting here in New York, not in the West Bank or Jerusalem. They will say that they are heartbroken and very angry and very, very scared. I was talking to Bassam’s son Arab recently, and he was stopped at a checkpoint and a gun was put to his head. There are things happening in the West Bank that Bassam tells me about that send absolute shivers down my spine. I too am heartbroken and angry and confused. There are times I think about writing a second Apeirogon book. But imagine going into that right now. You’re really entering into something that’s very, very raw and complex. But maybe that’s the place where I should go.
You taught creative writing for a long time, and you’ve published a book of writing advice. If you were to boil it all down to one key point, what would it be?
I love this phrase by the novelist Aleksandar Hemon: “It’s all shit until it isn’t.” Which is really interesting, because it’s all about sitting down and working at the coalface and doing it again and again. It’s the refusal to give up, the refusal to let the story beat you. Every single book that I’ve ever written, I have given up. It’s almost like a necessary part of the process – you’ve got to cause yourself grief in order to understand what it is that it actually means to you.
Read any good books recently?
I just read Frankenstein for the first time and it blew me away. It’s a perfect metaphor for where we are now, the monster that we are creating and the guilt that’s involved. I’m reading a book called One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by the Egyptian-Canadian writer Omar El Akkad about the current situation in Israel and Palestine: it’s very good, very necessary, and it pulls absolutely no punches whatsoever. I’ve also been reading Louise Kennedy’s The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, and I really liked The Convoy by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, about her escape from the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
I see you have a photograph of Edna O’Brien on your shelf. She once told the New York Times that if she could choose anyone to write her life story, she’d choose you.
Yeah, that was so nice. I travelled a lot with her. In fact she gave me my very first reading back in London in the early 90s when my first book was coming out. It was a bit of a disaster – I read for far too long – but she became a friend. Her influence has entered the air in many ways. It’ll be interesting to see how young writers, especially young women writers of Ireland, will take up her mantle in the next few years.
What do you need in order to write?
A perfect day would be getting up at 4am and, without checking the soccer results or my email, getting straight down to it. I’d stop to walk the dog and do a few chores, then go back to work until about midday. In the afternoon I’d do some editing, and then maybe have a glass of wine at about 4pm, meet a few pals. Then late in the evening I’d get a bit more editing done. That would be a perfect day for me.
Is that how it usually happens?
No, of course not [laughs].
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Twist by Colum McCann is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99) on 6 March. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
