Colum McCann once again demonstrates his ambition and skill as a storyteller
It's probably about time we agreed to give Colum McCann his own eponymous adjective. It would make sense, at any rate, to refer to a particular kind of audacious fictional gesture as "McCannian". In his last book, the hugely successful Let the Great World Spin , a cluster of fictions were tied together by the sublime spectacle of Philippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Centre. TransAtlantic opens in similarly McCannian fashion, with another airborne overture of grand historical significance. The recklessly affirmative act with which this book begins is the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic, from Newfoundland to Galway, by the British pilots Alcock and Brown in 1919. It's the sort of expertly constructed set-piece McCann is particularly good at, and his imagistically lucid prose nicely captures the craziness and excitement of the moment.
The journey is significant not only for its collapsing of the distance between America and Europe, but also for the way in which it separates the technology of flight from the wartime machinery of violence. The plane, McCann reminds us, was a Vickers Vimy, designed as an instrument of death: "They were using the bomber in a brand-new way: taking the war out of the plane, stripping the whole thing of its penchant for violence." Just as Petit's leisurely stroll between the Twin Towers is superimposed against an audacious act of a very different sort that would take place there 27 years later, Alcock and Brown's crossing is presented as a gesture of symbolic postwar decommissioning.
The flight lays down a template – a parabolic pattern, as it were – for a sequence of crossings and transitions in the novel. The first half reimagines interludes in the lives of real historical characters – the postwar flight of Alcock and Brown; [social reformer] Frederick Douglass's time in the famine-racked Ireland of the 1840s; and George Mitchell's tenure at Stormont as the US special envoy in the Good Friday Agreement negotiations. (Mitchell himself is thanked in the acknowledgements, as is one Tony Blair – McCann's ambition clearly extends even to his recruitment of research assistants.) The second half shifts into pure fiction, but the stories of its four protagonists – an Irish maid, inspired by Douglass to emigrate to America, and three successive generations of her female descendants – form a narrative strand that loosely links the parts of the first half together. There are various losses and redemptions, from the American civil war to the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland and to the financial crisis of our own present moment.
The book is vast in scope, but not in length – it clocks in at fewer than 300 pages – and so there's a fair amount of negative space in play here. We are given interludes, aftermaths, climaxes without buildups. TransAtlantic, in this sense, is a sort of epic in graceful shorthand. "What was a life anyway?" as one character asks. "An accumulation of small shelves of incident. Stacked at odd angles to each other."
At its best, as in the superbly rendered early scene of Alcock and Brown's flight, the prose is poetically vivid. Often, though, it's clear that McCann is the type of novelist who is uncomfortable writing a sentence that couldn't be removed from its context and still be identified as literature. So for instance instead of simply telling us that one character's suit didn't fit him properly, he writes that "his body seemed foreign to the cut of it"; and rather than tell us that another prefers her own company, he writes that she "gravitated towards aloneness" – which is both inflated and ungainly, more strained than estranging. But it's easy to forgive McCann these small irritations of style, because his ambition and skill as a storyteller is such that the disconnected parts of this narrative seem to integrate into something large and subtly cohesive and humane.
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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