Random House
Review by Walter Cummins
Although Colum McCann doesn’t refer to the 1948-49 Shannon-Weaver theory of communication, my remembering it helped me understand his novel Twist, in which the narrator, Anthony Fennell, a novelist and playwright suffering a creative writer’s block, accepts an assignment to witness and turn out an online magazine essay that describes the process of locating and repairing a broken undersea cable to restore functional communication throughout a part of the world.
Shannon and Weaver break down the communication process to the following sequence: the sender (source) originates the message; the transmitter (encoder) converts the message such as spoken words into electrical signals; the signals travel through a channel known as the medium; noise, exemplified by static and background sounds, is the interference that can distort the message; a receiver turns the signals back into a message for the intended recipient.
The theory identifies three kinds of problems. The technical considers how accurately the message can be transmitted. The semantic addresses how precisely the transmitted message conveys the intended meaning. Effectiveness measures how closely the received meaning achieves the intended behavior.
Shannon-Weaver finds useful applications of the theory in technical situations such as the transmission of telephone signals, but others have extended its application to human interactions such as conversation and writing. McCann dramatizes both sorts in the novel through the types of noise the characters confront. Much of the physical action involves the efforts of John Conway—the man in charge—and the crew of the cable repair vessel Georges Lecointe to find the broken cable under the sea in various parts of the world and then repair the break through a reconnection that involves a mending of wires. The detached wires are the source of literal noise and a failure of technical communication that can result in a great financial losses. The causes of the line breaks are usually attributed to some form of contorting and snapping, a literal application of the novel’s title, Twisted.
The sources of the human communication failures are multiple. One is the nature of the writers’ block suffered by Fennell. When it comes to creating novels and plays, he cannot access his imagination. When it’s turning out the article about the cable search he was hired to submit, he struggles to find the effective words. And there are actions he cannot write about because of promises to people or because he cannot face violating others’ privacy or reveal his emotions. For example, as much as he wants to reach out to the teenage son of his brief failed marriage, he struggles to find words. Finally, there is much he does not understand.
Fennell is hardly the only one who deliberately shuts out behaviors to share or discuss. In the last section of the novel Conway pretends to be deaf to hide his plan for a series of clandestine actions. In some cases, people cannot find alternatives to deliver messages. That’s a block Fennell encounters when he wants to reach Conway.
Fennell throughout the novel confronts the inhibitions of noise when he tries to communicate, from the technical breakdowns to the psychological inabilities to connect with another person, the technical usually involve some form of a twisted break, the psychological a different form of twisting.
Failing to write creatively, Fennell had hoped to make the cable repair essay a report of a clear mechanical process: “We go to sea, too, because there are rules out there to obey. Simple determinations. You have a job. A cable is broken. The ship leaves port. It travels to the break. You find the cable, lift it up, splice it, put new cable in. Return to port. Go home with the story intact. That’s not what happened, but that’s what you want.”
His hope for that essay mirrored his goal for a healing story for his return to creative writing, dwelling on the expression of a repair, which would result in the repair of his own life. By extension, although Fennell had promised not the write about Conway and his partner Zanele, much of what he considers in the words of this private narrative of his fascination for both of them, his hopes that they love each other, that Conway will master the cable, and that Zanele will succeed at performing in a woman’s version of Waiting for Godot at a small theater in Brighton.
Instead, the story he ends up telling is a story of accumulating noise. By disappearing and losing contact with Zanele, Conway destroys rather than repairs. After an attack with acid, Zanele becomes an international star living with the man who is most likely the father of her two children. In the final scene of the novel, Fennell and Zanele meet on a houseboat in Chelsea. Before he leaves, she suggests that they take a selfie to send his son in Chile. That makes him realize his has been a lifetime of dropped connections. Can he repair that connection? Will the received meaning achieve the intended behavior?
