Told with McCann’s incomparable prose ... As a reader I am torn. I wish it didn’t need the Conrad skeleton at all. McCann has written a beautiful novel set in, and off the coast, of Africa — something few writers with his privilege and prestige have done ... Gorgeously written and sad and inspiring, a destination hard to imagine from the journey’s start.
Aa transcontinental fiber-optic cable that carries the great world’s messages, news, images, voices and ideas at the speed of light ... Plenty of genuinely gorgeous passages about the way people are translated into dots of light in our information-based economy ... But wonderful moments like that are continually diluted by passages of purple pomposity.
Feels narratively disheveled, with subplots warmed up and abandoned, and loose threads dangling as they do everywhere in life. But the parts are not the sum. McCann...clearly knows what he’s up to...and through various authorial wiles he has produced a work at once enigmatic and urgent ... And what are we to make of the whole? McCann’s ingenious tale within a tale.
Timely ... There are some excellent things in this novel. The account of the journey and the observations of the work on board the ship feel as if they must be rooted in McCann’s own reportage ... I loved the thoughtful, essayistic inquiries into nature and the environment, and the consciousness-raising voyage towards the broken cable. But I have to confess that I’m not entirely in sympathy with all McCann’s aesthetic decisions ... Lingers after you’ve put it down.
It’s chewy material, or at least it would be if Mr. McCann had resisted the impulse to poeticize it into total abstraction ... The ingratiating first-person plural...attempts a connection with the reader that the constant dorm-room philosophizing can’t sustain.
A tantalizing if ultimately dissatisfying addition to the discourse in that it’s a pandemic novel that doesn’t really want to discuss the pandemic ... Fennell muses that Conway’s 'descent into pure madness' is 'the only answer we have for reality,' which is nonsense. But perhaps our current era’s truest lasting legacy is excusing destructive men like him.
The book becomes… something else. A character study? An ecological thriller? Certainly it wasn’t the book I thought it was. But sometimes it’s best to take a breath and follow the line.
McCann loves unlikely circumstances, which his novels treat as a function of the unpredictability of the world at large. The pace of his prose carries the reader along, as does the sweep of his setting ... The world, in McCann’s books, is a place of grand gestures, words buoyed up with emotions, the expression of which break the surface of the everyday. Twist is made of these moments, its oxygenated prose minutely alive to the smallest variations in pressure between place and character ... A surprising, electric book.
McCann, a writer of ardent empathy and global perception, considers profound aspects of brokenness and repair in a breath-held novel pulsing with echoes of Joseph Conrad that freshly illuminate our time of polluted oceans, internet clamor, and perilous polarization.
