‘Twist’ by Colum McCann (2025) – 239 pages
“It still astounded me that nearly all our information travels through tiny tubes at the bottom of the ocean. Billions of pulses of light carrying words and images and voices and texts and diagrams and formulas, a flow of pulsating light. In tubes made from glass.”
Fiber-optics is a fascinating little-discussed subject, the glass cables which span the world’s oceans and make the vast transfers of data on the internet possible. Satellites get all the publicity, but transmitting information via satellite is expensive and slow. Nearly all internet communication is done via fiber-optic glass cables on the bottom of the seas.
“The tubes are tiny. They are hollow. They weigh nothing. All they carry is light. I can’t presume to explain this.”
Most of the novel ‘Twist’ takes place on a ship that is sent out to repair these vital glass cables.
An underwater mudslide on the Congo River gains all kinds of debris as it moves along. This debris has damaged some of these underwater glass cables. Where the Congo meets the Atlantic, the power of the river current has created a canyon so deep in the Atlantic that divers cannot go to the bottom of the ocean where the cables lay, so they must use remote devices and grappling hooks to reach the cables.
Our narrator, Anthony Fennell, is a journalist who wants to do a story about the repair of these communication cables. John Conway, the captain of this cable repair ship, allows our narrator to stay aboard the ship on this repair mission.
But just how much of this internet traffic is helpful or valuable? Much of the traffic on the world-wide web is worthless and in many cases even harmful. Gossip, lies, conspiracy theories, character assassinations. Some sources suggest that as much as 30% to 40% of all data transferred across the internet is pornography.
“In my cabin, I allowed myself to descend again into the rabbit hole of the web, a tumble into the worst part of ourselves.”
“It was filthy and it was wrong and, like everyone else, I was consuming it willingly.”
Even the captain of the repair ship has very mixed opinions about the internet.
“And we’re just putting the ends together so people can ruin one another… Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.”
Later we find out just how conflicted the captain is.
This is a fascinating subject. However the main characters in this novel, who are the repair ship captain snd the captain’s actress girlfriend Zanele and the journalist narrator, did not really come alive for this reader.
Grade: B
Tony's Book World 
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