Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth. Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London. When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel.
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.
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.
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.
