The Materiality of the Cloud: Unpacking Colum McCann’s Twist

In the tenth episode of The Irish Books Podcast, host Dr Chris Murray is joined by Dr Killian Quigley, an expert in environmental and oceanic humanities at the Australian Catholic University. Together, they dive into the depths of Colum McCann’s latest novel, Twist - a story of rupture, redemption, and the infrastructure that connects our digital world.

McCann, widely known for his complex, multi-layered narratives like Apeirogon, takes a structurally simpler but thematically rich approach in this "half-memoir" told by a struggling novelist.

A Story of Repair

The novel is narrated by Anthony Fennell, a Dublin-born novelist whose life is "teetering on the edge of something like shambles". Fennell takes a writing gig for a website documenting a seabed cable repair ship, the Georges Lecointe, based in South Africa.

• The Mission: Fennell follows an enigmatic Irish crew head named Conway to the coast of the Congo to repair a severed subsea cable.

• The Motivation: Fennell describes his desire to "live inside a story of repair," seeking a parallel between the fixing of global information systems and the mending of his own fractured relationships and alcoholism.

The Materiality of the Internet

One of the novel's most striking contributions is its confrontation with the "real material infrastructures" of the digital age.

• The Undersea Network: Dr Quigley notes that while we think of the internet as "ethereal" or "cloud-like," it actually relies on physical cables at the bottom of the ocean, often no larger than a garden hose.

• Underwater Avalanches: The "snap" that sets the plot in motion is caused by the Congo River "purging itself" in an underwater avalanche of sediment and human refuse including cars, cattle, and bones.

• Geopolitical Vulnerability: The novel touches on the increasing significance of these cables as sites of sabotage and conflict, echoing real-world stories from the Baltic Sea and Taiwan.

Literary and Cinematic Echoes

McCann weaves a dense web of intertextual references throughout Twist, drawing on a long tradition of oceanic literature.

• Conrad and Coppola: The journey toward the Congo evokes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, though McCann keeps the action on the oceanic periphery rather than entering the interior.

• The Modern Captain Nemo: Conway is described as a "Gatsby figure" and a modern-day Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas - an undersea misanthrope pushing back against a world system gone awry.

• Irish Identity and Whiteness: The discussion explores how Fennell navigates his "Irishness" in South Africa and Ghana, moving away from a "colonized position" toward a contemporary understanding of global whiteness .

Between Wonder and Terror

Ultimately, Twist is a novel that refuses to settle for easy binaries. McCann presents a world where we must live with both the technological marvel of sending a text message across the globe and the "moral horrors" of mineral extraction and climate change.

Listen to the full episode of The Irish Books Podcast to hear Chris Murray and Killian Quigley discuss the "meteoric" rise of Zanele, the "Goldilocks" search for meaning, and why we all live in a world of "cagey truths."

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The Irish Books Podcast is produced by Martin Franklin for East Coast Studio, with support from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Embassy of Ireland Australia, and Monash University

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Dark Balladry in the Wild West: Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter

 

In the tenth episode of The Irish Books Podcast, host Dr Chris Murray is joined by Maebh Long, the Eamon Cleary Chair in Irish Studies at the University of Otago, to discuss Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter.

Set in the copper-mining town of Butte, Montana, in 1891, the novel is a "love born of flames" a gritty, lyrical Western where the landscape of Ireland is superimposed onto the American frontier.

A Love Born of Flames

The narrative follows an Irish community in Butte, largely populated by laborers from County Cork. At the center is Tom Rourke, a "frustrated dreamer" and scribe who writes wooing letters for lonely miners. His life is upended by the arrival of Polly Gillespie, a mail-order bride of agency and strategy who has come to marry an official at the mines.

• The Meeting: Tom and Polly meet in a photography studio, where their eyes lock and they realise everything is going to change.

• The Flight: Soon, they are lovers on the run. After setting fire to a boarding house and stealing a horse and cash, they flee into the Montana wilderness, pursued by bounty hunters hired by Polly’s husband.

• The Mythic Echo: The podcast highlights how this story echoes ancient Irish folklore, specifically the tales of Dermot and Gráinne and Deirdre of the Sorrows - fated lovers fleeing an older, powerful king .

The Architecture of Style

Maebh Long emphasises that Barry is, above all, an "exquisite stylist". He crafts sentences that balance intellectual energy with "subversive comic play," aware of how "the overly serious sentence falls apart".

• Dark Balladry: Barry uses the term "dark balladry" to describe the pursuit of the lovers. Like a traditional ballad, the story focuses on mood and atmosphere over plot twists.

• Focalisation: The novel adroitly shifts between the direct perspectives of Tom, Polly, and even the lead bounty hunter, Jago Marak, using "focalisation" to ground the omniscient narrative in the characters' unique vocabularies .

• Contemporary Language: Barry intentionally uses anachronistic vocabulary like "dude" and "bullshit" to maintain the emotive force and social power of the dialogue.

Melancholia and the Death Drive

Unlike a traditional romance, The Heart in Winter is described as an exploration of "melancholic desire".

• Impending Doom: Tom and Polly’s joy is "mediated and mitigated by the knowledge of the mourning to come". They know their dream of a life in San Francisco is unlikely to be realised.

• Desire vs. Sex: While the novel contains "furious lovemaking," it is less about titillation and more about "violent, conflicted, confused, self-destructive drives of desire".

• The Brutal World: Butte is depicted as a space of "great opportunity, but also great loneliness," where miners have high wages but short life expectancies, dying in their thirties .

Literary Influences

The discussion locates Barry within a "stereotypical Trinity" of Irish literary greats: Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Flann O’Brien. From O'Brien, Barry draws the retrieval of folklore and the surreal presence of cowboys; from Joyce, the "drunken death drive" and perambulations through a city .

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The Irish Books Podcast is produced by Martin Franklin for East Coast Studio, with support from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Embassy of Ireland Australia, and Monash University

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