I have spent too much time lately thinking about the network of fibre-optic cables that encircles the world. That’s because these fibres are the subject of my new piece (see “How buried cables are revealing Earth’s interior in incredible detail”), which explores how geoscientists are using them to map Earth’s interior. Naturally, when I learned that Colum McCann’s novel is about this very network, I had to read it.
The novel follows a journalist on assignment to write about what happens when the cables that carry the internet under the ocean break. He boards a ship sailing to fix a cable off the coast of West Africa. All the while, he struggles to understand the mission’s leader, Conway, a taciturn freediver from Ireland with plenty of “missing years”.
The plot is juicy and the writing lucid. But I most appreciated how McCann expertly transforms a horribly technical subject into a tale full of love and connection. “Everything gets fixed,” says Conway. “And we all stay broken.”
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