In the National Book Award winner’s novel Twist (Random House, Mar.), a journalist in search of a story joins the crew of a cable repair ship.
How did you choose the setting?
I’ve been interested in the idea of communications and one of the things that I was really particularly interested in was repair, not just physical repair but human repair of the connections between us.
How did you conduct your research?
I spent a good few days on board with the crew of a cable repair ship docked in South Africa, finding out their stories and imagining what their life was like. And I was amazed about what I found. I mean the idea that our conversation right now is shooting down these tiny wires that are the size of your eyelash carrying this light that pulses billions of times per second.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness rings in your narrator’s head. Could you talk about how Conrad’s novella echoes in your book?
I didn’t set out to write a novel with the same structure as Conrad’s, but as the ship in Twist entered the waters of the Congo River, it just sort of began to emerge. All the old colonial routes are being followed by the wires themselves, and yet it’s a modern tale. There are cables being laid around Africa right now by Facebook and Google to a cost in the billions. Very little of that money will go to the economies there.
Why did you write the story from a journalist’s perspective?
He felt like the right vessel into which I should try to communicate. And I was guided a lot by the idea of the narrator of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway. I wanted a straightforward earnest voice of someone trying to make sense of the world, who has a penchant and desire to tell a story that is bigger than himself and yet at the same time trying to work out some of his own inner demons.
How does Twist compare to your other novels?
For me it’s a new sort of book in the sense that it’s quite straightforward and chronological. Often I write in a kaleidoscopic way and use several different narrators, but this one takes place with only one narrator. He’s a character who’s interested in the notion of repair and I think he achieves it, but he also talks about the difficulties of achieving a sort of balance when everything seems to be mashed together into one available form of communication. I think it is one of the stories of our times that we are so connected and yet so disconnected, and that we live in a world where we can make these spectacular leaps in fractions of a second and yet sometimes we don’t even know the person next door to us.
