Readers were fired up after an eloquent appearance at the Atheneum Theatre on Saturday night as the Melbourne Writers Festival set off to a dramatic start.
Katherine Quinn was almost first in line to have her novel Twist signed by its Irish author Colum McCann. The festival turns fiction writers into celebrities and readers enjoy breaking out of their cocoons.
It was a case of spot the writer as McCann moved through the old-world foyer of the Atheneum to do his interview with ABC broadcaster Kate Evans.
After introducing the theme of the novel, McCann went to great pains to distinguish himself from the awkward protagonist of his latest book.
“I didn’t want him to be me,” McCann told the audience. “I don’t have a broken family.”
The issue of “who” rather than “what” haunts this novel of repair as the job of telling the story falls to an anti-hero journo with an obligatory drinking problem.
Twist is set on the coast of the Congo before, after and during a journey to mend the underwater cables that carry the internet.
The narrator is on his last legs, with an estranged son and an unstable past, and an assignment to write about cable repair.
“He was not at first a journalist,” McCann said. “That was too easy. Let’s make him an engineer … no. He surprised me. The story descends into sabotage. I began to like him.”
The combination of non-fiction and literary devices sets the scene for an underwater world of cable malfunctions kilometres beneath the surface of the ocean, following the old colonial slave routes.
“It was a tough novel to write,” McCann said, as his hero throws everything into hounding the guru of cable-fixing and his exotic wife, both free-divers with poise.
Are we slaves to the internet? This is the question the novel asks and answers in the eventual self-destructive actions of the cable-mender.
Fans were ecstatic about McCann’s performance. “It’s the best I’ve seen in a long time,” said one reader, a veteran of the Adelaide Writers’ Festival.
MWF now piggybacks on other festivals and McCann has been doing a circuit through Sydney and Byron Bay.
It’s difficult to be upbeat about a downbeat novel set on the flood-prone coast of Africa but McCann pulled off this feat by “paying homage to the ancestors” like T. S. Eliot and Beckett while sinking himself into the detritus of the current age.
Detail, research and the ability to talk about big picture issues like climate change in a modest way won over doubters to his pitch for repair.
“Pride and pity. You can’t put a fact around them. They’re part of the disease of our times.”
The Melbourne Writer’s Festival took place 8 – 11 may 2025. For more information, visit: www.mwf.com.au for details.
Images: Katherine Quinn lines up for a book signing with Colum McCann – photo by Rhonda Dredge | A happy fan makes it to the front of the line – photo by Rhonda Dredge
Words: Rhonda Dredge