Have novels left something unsaid concerning the web of the previous fifteen years? It feels as if they’ve exhausted the terrain, however maybe they’ve simply made the identical factors time and again, their fragmented kinds conjuring a person expertise of damaged consideration, malaise, outrage, envy, and tedium. They’ve evoked the feel of e-mail exchanges; they’ve barged into the group chat; they’ve skewered the rhythms and argot of apps corresponding to Hinge and Slack. If we ever wanted fiction to make on-line phenomena coherent, we don’t now. The web is already part of us, within us; and possibly what stays for the digital novelist is to get exterior, to collect up the entire snarled mess of tubes and plunk it down on an examination desk.

“Twist,” by the Irish creator Colum McCann, initiatives an impatience with the concept that our particular person and subjective experiences of the web have rather more that means to yield. As a substitute, the e-book takes as its topic the underwater fibre-optic cables that relay laptop knowledge world wide. In McCann’s arms, the online is a tenuous factor, depending on cords concerning the diameter of a backyard hose. These strands, which conduct info as pulses of sunshine, have lengthy been susceptible to unintended harm by fishing trawlers and curious marine predators; extra lately, there are fears that they’ve been focused by saboteurs within the Baltic and the Taiwan Strait. In “Twist,” a cable off the Ghanaian coast has been severed, setting in movement a restore mission.

The cable’s fragility supplies the novel with each a premise and a central metaphor. Our narrator, Fennell, an Irish journalist, playwright, and creator in his late forties, has taken an project to embed with the crew of males who’re tasked with fixing the damaged filament. Fennell, who tirelessly scrapes the world for literary that means, is in search of “a narrative about connection, about grace, about restore.” Via his narration, “Twist” presses the cables into asserting the worth, violence, and frailty of human communication.

McCann is greatest identified for sweeping social novels held collectively by an organizing determine. Most famously, there’s “Let the Nice World Spin,” from 2009, which gained a Nationwide E book Award. Bounding the motion are two historic occasions: the acrobat Philippe Petit’s stroll throughout a tightrope strung between the Twin Towers, in 1974, and the autumn of the towers on September 11, 2001. These incidents—one an expression of striving within the sky, the opposite a horrific crashing-to-earth—kind the 2 poles of the novel, which comes down on the aspect of uplift. “The core cause for all of it was magnificence,” Petit thinks as his limbs information him out onto the wire. “Every little thing was rewritten when he was up within the air.”

“Let the Nice World Spin” reveals sure drawbacks and advantages to working with overarching symbols in fiction. The tightrope metaphor can really feel goofy and schematic, however there’s additionally the thrill of monitoring the unfurling of a grand assertion, and the frisson of questioning whether or not McCann’s gambit (like Petit’s) will succeed. McCann might be maudlin and stentorian; he gives the look of all the time in search of the epigrammatic utterance that makes you gasp. (“You possibly can rely the lifeless, however you may’t rely the associated fee,” one character writes. One other intones “there may be, I believe, a worry of affection. There’s a worry of affection.”) However “Let The Nice World Spin” was written within the aftermath of 9/11, when the absence of the towers was palpable, and this haunting lends a sort of weight to the e-book’s passages concerning the persistence of the human spirit. At his greatest, McCann does an assiduous, refined job of twining his metaphors by on a regular basis life. Chapters are set loosely in and round New York Metropolis and unfold from the views of assorted typecast denizens of the concrete jungle: a intercourse employee within the Bronx, a housewife in a Park Avenue penthouse. As McCann steers his characters into proximity with one another, the connections they create really feel as tenuous and daring as Petit’s stroll between the towers.

“Twist” attests to the truth that it’s simpler to construct a novel upon high-wire feats of death-defying athleticism than it’s to style one round fibre-optic cables on the backside of the ocean. A tightrope implies an individual; it’s like an instrument awaiting a musician. In “Let the Nice World Spin,” the cable virtually turned a part of Petit’s physique, a trembling extension of his vulnerability and flexile grace. However the tubes in “Twist” are inert and distant. They’re muffled in Kevlar and relaxation on the seafloor, as befits the bodily underpinnings of one thing gigantic and almost unattainable to grasp.

McCann compounds this issue by solely sparingly partaking with digital life. A personality has a brush with on-line message boards and the vile extremism they foster. Fennell, the reporter, composes textual content messages to an estranged son which he each longs and dreads to ship. However the web, for probably the most half, is approached as an abstraction, which intensifies the stress on the passages that convey offline actuality. These scenes—of characters exploring Cape City or navigating London or wandering round completely different elements of the boat—needs to be a file of vivid sensations and interpersonal drama. As a substitute, they’re thinky, muted, and limp.

McCann usually constructs his novels round a delicate action-hero sort, a person whose drive is tempered by a young spirituality. In “Let the Nice World Spin,” this specimen was Petit; in “Twist,” the function has been stuffed by Conway, the chief of the restore mission. Conway, an Irishman like Fennell, rides a bike, conjures up worshipful devotion in his crew, and may free-dive to extraordinary depths. He’s bodily match and “good-looking in a manner that appeared to puzzle him,” which made me ponder whether, like Aquaman, Conway just isn’t presupposed to be very vibrant. Nevertheless it’s extra that he has fallen out of step with the world, with its smallness and meanness. He’s grieving the top of his relationship with a South African actress named Zanele; he’s additionally mourning the local weather disaster, which appears to loom in his and in Fennell’s minds as an emblem of humanity’s fall from grace.

However Conway’s characterization is just too skinny to carry our curiosity. We see him principally by the eyes of Fennell, who has a journalist’s weak spot for cliché: “One thing about Conway . . . appeared buried away elsewhere,” Fennell thinks. “Some loneliness lodged in him.” Later, referring to Leonard Cohen’s music “Hallelujah,” he speculates that “Conway had that secret chord”; he was “the kind of man who was there and never there on the identical time.” “Let the Nice World Spin” performed productively with the dynamic of two brothers, one a sort of holy idiot and the opposite a wised-up bystander. In “Twist,” each essential characters really feel like avatars of their creator and of one another: romantics who’ve been upset by up to date society and who’re in search of one thing that can restore their religion.

The novel strikes extra briskly when the ship’s crew is launched. McCann’s present for ensemble writing hasn’t rusted. He has an ear for sensitive social interactions, particularly amongst males whose emotions are extra delicate than they’d wish to admit. A couple of sharp phrases zap Conway’s deputies to life: one in every of them, Ron, is “a good, compact man from Virginia, the one American onboard . . . elaborately, if predictably, tattooed.” However for probably the most half, as a substitute of characterization, we get theme-y philosophizing that appears to return from all over the place and nowhere. (“We’re creatures of nice change. Not a single atom in our our bodies at this time was there once we had been youngsters. Each little bit of us has been changed many instances over. We flake away and turn out to be new.”) Zanele, one of many story’s few girls, is especially ill-served by this tendency. McCann describes her much less as an individual than as one other one in every of his slender cords, “transferring upward by the water, in profile, in a wetsuit and a single lengthy black fin.” When she departs the motion, Fennell displays, “It was virtually as if in her absence she was extra acutely there.”