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Colum McCann
Bloomsbury 2009
August 1974. I was spending the summer fretting about the terrors that awaited me on my first day at grammar school, and picking up on bits and pieces from the outside world: Greece and Turkey coming close to war over Cyprus, Nixon resigning over Watergate. One thing that passed me by, however, was the central event of this fine novel: Phillippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the twin towers of the newly-built World Trade Center. There has been a fascination with this event since 11th September 2001, culminating in this novel and an excellent documentary film, and understandably so: less than thirty years after the thrilling, death-defying walk all those storeys up, the towers were in ruins and the image projected around the world this time was of a second plane destroying the second tower, not of a man on a wire. McCann structures his novel around the earlier event, telling stories of prostitutes, immigrants, computer nerds, bereaved mothers, and washed-up hippies, which eventually overlap. In this way he creates a vivid picture of a city, from the desolation of the Bronx to well-to-do Park Lane, at a particular moment in time: a couple of years after the end of the Vietnam war, several more since the Summer of Love, and in the very early days of the Internet. In the end the novel fast forwards 30 odd years: the USA is involved in another conflict, and the towers are gone. McCann attempts a bit of philosophising which doesn’t really convince: what do convince are the stories he tells and the sense of time and place he creates. This is a beautifully written, moving novel, which I highly recommend.
24th January 2010
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