Twist by Colum McCann

First published in Great Britain in 2025; published by ‎ Random House on March 25, 2025

My favorite writers are disproportionately Irish. Colum McCann is high on that list. His prose blends power and lyricism. His books capture larger truths than the small stories he tells.

The character who narrates Twist is a writer. Anthony Fennell tells the reader that after writing two novels he deems “minor successes,” he fell into “a clean, plain silence.” Fennell has become dissatisfied with his life in Dublin. “So much of my recent life had been lived between the lines. All the caution tape. All the average griefs. All the rusty desires.”

Feeling the need to get away, Fennell accepts an assignment to write an article about broken undersea cables. To that end, his editor arranges for him to accompany the crew of a cable repair ship. He travels to South Africa, where he meets John Conway, who leads cable repair missions. Members of Conway’s repair crew tell him that Conway’s biography has unexplained gaps. Intrigued, Fennell wants to learn more about Conway, but Conway is reticent when asked about his past. Fennell uses a phrase from Leonard Cohen to describe him: “Conway had that secret chord — the sort of man who was there and not there at the same time.”

While waiting for a cable to break, Fennell meets Conway’s beautiful partner Zanele, a South African woman who escaped the slums and was educated in the United States. Fennell regards Conway and Zanele as “the South Africa I had wanted to see, a couple crossing the lines, Black and white, the proof of the times, the ancient conventions dissolving.” Before the ship leaves harbor, Zanele departs for London, where she has a part in Waiting for Godot (much to the chagrin of Beckett’s estate, which is enforcing Beckett’s insistence that “the roles in the play were specifically not for women”). Fennell has the sense that something in Conway’s relationship with Zanele is broken but Conway will not speak to Fennell about his personal life until they have been at sea for weeks, when he finally loses patience with Conway's inquisitive nature.

Fennell’s interior voice also frets about his inability to establish a relationship with his “sloe-eyed son.” Fennell hasn’t seen his son, who now lives in Santiago, for five years. For reasons he can’t explain, Fennell denies that he has any children when Zanele asks him about his family. Conway fears that his son feels abandoned, although “his mother had been the one to actually leave, but it certainly felt that I had propelled her.”

Most of the story consists of Fennell’s observation of Conway and speculation about Zanele, mixed with fascinating descriptions of men at work. In addition to learning how undersea cables are repaired, Fennell ponders the international dependence on cables for news and all manner of information, “all the love notes, all the algorithms, all the financial dealings, the solicitations, the prescriptions, the solutions, the insinuations” — the list of things that travel under the sea continues for most of a page. Fennell develops a sense of wonder about cables and their traffic that a reader might find infectious.

After the groundwork has been laid, Twist takes a twist. All I will say is that Conway disappears, unexpectedly and without warning. Fennell foreshadows an eventful change in Conway’s life when, early in the novel, he explains that he is telling what he knows of Conway’s story to counter the impressions left by “the websites and platforms and rumor mills” that “will create paywalls out of the piles of shredded facts.” Fennell wants to set the record straight, although he can only speculate about Conway’s motivation for actions that earned him a degree of notoriety.

The primary theme of Twist is repair. The story sends its protagonist on a ship that repairs undersea cables, but the journey gives Fennell an opportunity to repair his life. But who is he kidding, he asks himself. “The idea of an actual repair was the sort of soul-destroying bullshit that I needed to strenuously avoid.” At sea, free from the alcohol that usually protects him from the pain of clear thought, Fennell has a chance to consider repairing his own life. What steps he will take, if any, are left for the closing pages.

Conway has a different take on repair. He has come to view repairs as temporary, perhaps pointless. He fixes one cable and another breaks. What good comes from repairing them? He doesn’t feel responsible for the evil that the internet enables, yet he acknowledges that “we’re just putting the ends together so people can ruin one another.”

Conway questions the value of repair when he learns that Zanele has been attacked but is on the mend in England. “Everything gets fixed,” he says, “and we all stay broken.” As Fennell describes Conway’s relationship with Zanele: “They were rupturing. They were part of the broken things. We all are.”

The novel’s secondary theme is turbulence. Heisenberg tried “to mathematically determine the precise transition of a smoothly flowing liquid into a turbulent flow” without much success. The turbulence of life is no more easily explained. “Down below, the turbulence gathered. The Congo had unrecognized depths. All the things we didn’t know. All the things we were doing to ourselves. The manner in which we broke one another.” Conway’s turbulent relationship with Zanele may have been his undoing, the one thing Conway lacked the skill to repair.

Much like Moby-Dick, to which McCann pays tribute, Twist is built upon an ode to the sea. Life originated in hydrothermal vents deep beneath the ocean, but when Fennell comments upon our evolutionary ancestors crawling out of the sea hundreds of millions of years ago, he does so with humility. The sea is our birthplace yet we understand little of its depths. Zanele laments its use as a dumping ground — more destruction that we may never be able to repair.

Apart from its full characters and thought-provoking story, Twist earns my admiration for McCann’s ability to craft honest sentences with the sharpness of daggers. A few of my favorites:

“At a certain stage our aloneness loses its allure.”

“Just because the truth is ignored,” she said, “doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

“So much of who we are is who we cannot be.”

“The bottle does a good job of drinking the mind.”

“The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while.”

“Few of the stories we have inside ourselves ever get properly spoken.”

I can spend all day reading McCann and never feel that I’ve wasted a moment. Twist is a strong addition to his oeuvre.

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Galway's Edge by Ken Bruen

Published by Mysterious Press on March 4, 2025

Jack Taylor’s life is not quite as miserable in Galway’s Edge as it often seems to be. He takes a few beatings but his dog is left alone. He interacts with nuns but none of them are murdered. Two women break up with Taylor but he doesn’t have to kill either of them. Series fans will understand that any day without the death of a dog or nun or girlfriend counts as a good day for Taylor.

Taylor takes on his usual causes in Galway’s Edge. A vigilante group called Edge that has assisted Taylor in the past is now headed by five people, including a priest. Father Richard, special envoy to the Archdiocese of Galway, Tuam, and Athenry, asks Taylor to find the vigilante priest “and dissuade him of his activities.”

Father Richard thinks “Edge has mostly been a force for good, but lately, its members seem to have drifted off into matters personal, neglecting their purpose. The Vatican feels they are now more of a threat than a help.” Edge got on the wrong side of an Englishman named Benson when it rejected him for membership. He retaliates by doing away with Edge’s members. The church can’t have a British protestant going after Edge, so Father Richard hires Taylor to solve the problem.

Benson gets on Taylor’s wrong side by stealing a jeweled cross from a convent. Taylor enlists a thief to recover the cross and a hacker to make trouble for Benson. Taylor’s actions will doom at least one of those men. They will also doom a promising relationship with a new lover while making him unpopular with a neighbor who is shagging Benson.

Taylor visits two brothers who stole a client’s dog and introduces them to his hurly. He takes on a cop who is beating his wife. He takes on another kiddie fiddling priest. A cancer victim wants Taylor to kill him. In other words, the plot is typical of a Jack Taylor novel: seemingly random events all connect in the end.

Bruen’s unconventional writing style is all about the rhythm he creates with paragraph breaks. Bruen writes wonderful and surprising sentences. My favorite in Galway’s Edge: “I had to dial it back not to smack him in the mouth, but in my experience no good comes of beating the clergy, they keep coming back.”

Bruen grounds his stories in current events and references to pop culture. He quotes song lyrics, sentences from novels, and lines from movies that relate (more or less) to Taylor’s life. Taylor sometimes comments on the news. More often he lets the news sit — thousands of deaths caused by an earthquake in Turkey, a shortage of housing for refugees from Ukraine — to illustrate the larger tragedies that overshadow his smaller ones. There may be no character in crime fiction more tragic than Taylor, but he never loses his understanding that he is living a small life in a big world — and a good life, despite the beatings he takes, compared to earthquake victims or Ukrainian refugees.

I particularly enjoy Taylor’s discussion of the books he’s reading. “I have always found calm, solace, and comfort in books. When my mind is on fire and I’m not quelling it with booze, I rely on books,” he says. I don’t drink much these days, but I can relate to finding solace and comfort in books. I always find entertainment, if not comfort, in Bruen’s novels. Galway’s Edge isn’t as edgy as some, but it’s still a good read.

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Long Island by Colm Tóibín

Published by Scribner on May 7, 2024

I’m not always a fan of domestic drama, but I’m a huge fan of Colm Tóibín. He writes about couples in crisis with honesty rather than melodrama. Long Island is a sequel to Brooklyn, a continuation of that story of relationship uncertainty in the context of cultural clashes.

Readers of Brooklyn (or viewers of the movie) will recall that Eilis Lacey emigrated from Ireland to America, found a job, endured homesickness, met and married a young Italian man named Tony who was working as a plumber, returned to Ireland to attend her sister’s funeral, and found herself torn between remaining in Ireland (where both familiarity and a young Irishman named Jim Farrell appealed to her) and returning to her husband in Brooklyn. She decides in favor of her marriage, prompted in part by local gossip that makes it impossible to pretend she is single.

Twenty years later, Jim owns a pub in Enniscorthy. He is having a clandestine dalliance with Nancy Sheridan, a widow who owns a nearby chip shop. He has finally worked his way around to proposing, more or less, when Eilis comes back to visit her mother. Notwithstanding his relationship with Nancy, Jim cannot help revisiting the sense of loss he felt when Eilis left for America twenty years earlier.

During those twenty years, Tony and Eilis accomplished Tony’s dream of moving to Long Island. They built a home that was surrounded by the homes of Tony’s siblings and parents. Tony and Eilis had two kids and apparently had a steady marriage until it was rocked by news that Tony made a customer pregnant while fixing her leaking pipes. The customer’s husband wants nothing to do with Tony’s baby and threatens to leave it on Eilis’ doorstep after it is born. Eilis also wants nothing to do with the baby. She refuses to raise it and refuses to go along with Tony’s mother’s plan to raise the child.

After giving Tony an ultimatum, Eilis returns to Ireland to visit her aging mother, who has become no less intolerable during Eilis’ absence. She plans to have her children join her for her mother’s birthday celebration.

Eilis will, of course, encounter Jim. The novel’s drama comes from the choices Eilis must make — return to America and Tony, stay in Ireland with Jim, or return to America with Jim. Jim hasn’t stopped thinking about Eilis since she returned to America, but would he abandon his marriage plans with Nancy to be with Eilis? Would Eilis leave her family in America to be with Jim? The novel builds tension as it seems inevitable that Eilis and/or Nancy will learn that Jim has not been honest with either of them.

This sounds like a soap opera plot, and maybe it is, but Long Island is a character-driven novel that takes a deep dive into personalities that have been shaped by culture and family. Tóibín addresses the restrained emotional turmoil of his characters without resorting to contrivances.

The novel explores the relationship histories of Jim and Nancy as well as their relationship with each other. In a small town where everyone knows everything about everyone else, they have been surprisingly successful at keeping their late-night visits a secret. Yet secrets will out. Jim doesn’t want Nancy to know that she is his backup plan if he can’t convince Eilis to leave Tony. Nor does he want Eilis to know that he is sleeping with Nancy. In such a small community, is there any hope that Jim’s secrets will not be discovered?

Jim’s secrecy is motivated in part by the knowledge that Nancy will be subject to gossip if it becomes known that he left her for Eilis. The destructive nature of gossip and the impossibility of keeping secrets in a small Irish village was an important theme in Brooklyn that Tóibín reprises in the sequel.

Tóibín also illustrates how people in relationships attempt to manipulate each other. Nancy, for example, wants to sell the chip shop and become a homemaker after she marries Jim, but she schemes to influence Jim with subtle suggestions until he believes the idea is his own. At the same time, characters are afraid to say what they are thinking, perhaps for fear of another person’s reaction, perhaps because they fear the consequences of speaking their desires into reality. The story ends with a dramatic act of manipulation that different readers might judge in different ways.

The novel’s other key relationship is Eilis’ with her mother. For twenty years, her mother never acknowledged the pictures that Eilis sent of her children. When she arrives in Ireland, her mother doesn’t want to hear anything about her life in America. Yet Eilis’ mother has always nurtured a hidden pride in the grandchildren she never met, even if she has bottled up her emotions and refuses to share them with her daughter. After Eilis’ mother meets her grandchildren, she believes it is her right to turn her daughter’s life upside down.

My first takeaway from Long Island in conjunction with Brooklyn is that every choice we make gives birth to a potential regret about the choice we didn’t make. Or if not regret, at least curiosity about the path life might have taken if we had chosen differently.

My second takeaway is that no matter how we try to make choices that shape our lives, other people make their own choices that alter the course we have planned. We may or may not have the courage or strength to resist those choices. The choices made by others may take on an irresistible force. The inability to take complete control of our destiny might turn out to be a surprising joy or a dreadful peril, but either way, Long Island makes clear that it is a reality of life. As always, Tóibín’s powerful illustration of great truths makes Long Island a captivating novel.

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Galway Confidential by Ken Bruen

Published by Mysterious Press on March 5, 2024

Jack Taylor wakes up from a coma after 18 months and, within minutes, has his first taste of Jameson. It makes him feel much better.

Jack entered the coma after being stabbed multiple times at the end of A Galway Epiphany. Upon awakening, Jack learns that his life was saved by a man named Rafferty. Rafferty has been visiting Jack after convincing the hospital nurses that he is Jack’s brother. Rafferty has taken an interest in Jack’s life — he explains that he produces a true crime podcast that often features Jack’s cases — and, after Jack's discharge, Rafferty tries to partner with him on a couple of investigations. This will prove to be bad both for Jack and Rafferty, although series fans know that having any sort of friendship with Jack is likely to invite danger.

The plot of Galway Confidential is fairly typical for a Jack Taylor novel, although it might be less shockingly violent than most. A former nun, Shiela Winston, wants to hire Jack to find the rogue who has been killing nuns in Galway. The Guards are doing little to solve the crime spree, as they are overwhelmed with protestors against lockdowns and vaccination policies.

In addition to investigating attacks on nuns, Jack searches out a couple of affluent youngsters who are setting fire to the homeless. Jack also meets up with Quinlan, an associate of Rafferty whose violent approach to problem solving is not as compatible with Jack’s as Quinlan believes.

During his investigations, Jack is contacted by an alcoholic priest. Jack forces the priest to dry out — perhaps an act of hypocrisy for someone who drinks as much as Jack — but again, any association with Jack isn’t likely to end well. The plot threads weave together in ways that readers have come to expect from Ken Bruen.

Bruen has a history of referencing books, television shows, and movies in the Jack Taylor novels. A character in Green Hell explains that the references ground the novels in “stuff” that the reader knows. Bruen makes fewer cultural references than usual in Galway Confidential (perhaps because Taylor has been in a coma and thus unable to consume culture), but he grounds the novel in current events, as well as events Jack missed while he was sleeping: the Brexit disaster, Boris Johnson’s resignation, the Queen’s death, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the influx of refugees into Ireland, inflation and other consequences of the pandemic. The implication is that Jack has good reason to drink.

Jack Taylor novels are quick reads. Bruen’s minimalist writing style tells the story in short paragraphs that surround dramatic moments with quirkiness. Bruen’s notion of a long sentence is: “He had the kind of face that you know has never really been walloped properly but I could amend that.” Dialog is crisp, in part because Taylor rarely speaks unless he can’t prevent himself from responding to idiocy with sarcasm. Galway Confidential is an unremarkable entry in a remarkable series but since every Jack Taylor novel is darkly entertaining, my recommendation is nearly automatic.

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This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack

First published in Great Britain in 2023; published by ‎ Soho Press on January 2, 2024

John Nealon grew up with an understanding that farming “was a glutinous realm, throbbing with pain across cycles of death and renewal that were tinted with green shit and blood-veined mucus.” When his father died, Nealon sold the cattle and rented out the farmland, keeping the house as his residence when he’s not traveling. Nealon studied art, demonstrated serious potential, and squandered his talent by devoting his days to alcohol and weed.

In the east of Ireland, Nealon met Olewyn. He either rescued or kidnapped her as she was riding a heroin high. He brought her back to his village in the west of Ireland. They married and Olweyn became pregnant. Nealon built a studio, furnished it with paints and canvasses, then watched his dreams die. “In the neatness and order of his new studio, Nealon recognized not a new beginning but an end, a memorial to everything he had already done and a lament to all those things his imagination now refused to reach for.” He spent the following years working as a carpenter.

Then Nealon was arrested and remanded to prison to await trial. After a ten-month detention in prison, Nealon’s trial was “set at naught by bad grammar and poor spelling.” The prosecution’s case collapsed and Nealon returned home to find an empty house. Nealon’s backstory is revealed in “separate strands and lurching incidents” as Nealon contemplates his life and lonely home.

As the novel begins, Nealon has no idea where his wife and child have gone. Instead of being greeted by his family, he is greeted by his ringing phone. A series of conversations with a stranger follow. The stranger seems to know everything about Nealon, including the precise moment Nealon enters his home and the location of his electrical main. The stranger wants to meet. The stranger hints that he knows the location of Nealon’s wife and child, so Nealon agrees to meet him.

Nealon conducts a paranoid search of his body and clothing for a transmitter, without result. How does the stranger seem to know his every move? An undefined threat, perhaps related to terrorism, has Ireland on high alert. Soldiers patrol the streets and set up checkpoints on local roads. Is the stranger related to the national threat? Nealon worries about his wife and son in this frightening historical moment. But perhaps it is not the moment that frightens them. Perhaps Nealon is the threat. Nealon comes to understand that they “should not be within psychic distance of him for fear the black radiance of his accumulated circumstances may shrivel and waste them.”

The story comes together during Nealon’s meeting with the stranger. Small observational details that seemed unimportant to the narrative suddenly gain new meaning. It takes some time to learn what Nealon might or might not have done that prompts the meeting. Nealon is accused of extraordinary crimes, improbably committed for altruistic purposes. Could the accusations be true? Is the terrorist threat a real thing? Mike McCormack leaves the reader with the stranger’s opinions but no clear answers.

At the meeting’s conclusion, Nealon has an epiphany. McCormack does not spell out Nealon’s conclusions or the reasoning that brings Nealon to a new understanding of his life. The stranger gives Nealon a choice, but the choice and its consequences are just as unclear as the stranger’s identity. Perhaps the choice involves a return to, or renunciation of, the past. Readers who like to discuss ambiguous literature will find enough material in This Plague of Souls to fuel a lengthy debate.

Despite (or because of) its puzzling and frustrating plot, This Plague of Souls is a joy to read, if only for the sharpness of McCormack’s prose and the depth of Nealon’s isolated existence. Perhaps a second reading would help my comprehension of the novel’s ending and the point that McCormack wanted to make. I will leave it to more scholarly minds to undertake that analysis. I’m happy to have experienced the story and its telling.

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