By Kavita Mistry
by Cathryn Conroy (Dublin, Ohio): This is a literary novel about connection…brokenness…and repair on multiple levels. And while the symbolism and themes mostly work, in the end it just feels quite heavy and cumbersome.
Written by Colum McCann, this is the story of a down-on-his-luck Irish writer named Anthony Fennell. Unable to focus on his creative fiction, he decides to write a magazine article about the miles and miles and miles of relatively fragile undersea cables that connect our Internet. Yes the “cloud” is mostly in the ocean, and when those cables break, which happens due to natural disasters, such as underwater volcanoes and landslides, as well as accidental and rogue encounters with ships, someone has to fix it. The cables are far too deep for divers, so ships atop the sea must send down grappling hooks to do the work. It’s difficult, treacherous, and demands highly skilled people. Fennell hops aboard a ship in South Africa that is heading out to repair three different breaks.
While Fennell narrates the book in the first person, the novel is really about John Conway, the mission specialist who is charge of finding and repairing the cable. He is young, handsome, and troubled. And he is not at all who he says he is.
This is a story about survival—physically and psychologically. Just like the cable at the bottom of the ocean that is ruptured, both Fennell and Conway’s lives are ruptured with trauma and in need of repair. As Conway says at one point in the novel, “Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.”
Still, the storyline can feel slow, although it is highlighted in parts with surprising dramatic tension…and then goes back to being slow. In addition, the writing is dense with a lot packed into a relatively short book.
The novel explores a profound topic about the human psyche, but ultimately it just gets weighed down.