Comment seems almost superfluous. Colum McCann’s fifth novel Let The Great World Spin has already been garlanded as one of the books of the year, receiving rave reviews in the US (where, significantly, it was published before it appeared in the writer’s home country); the jacket comes with heavyweight blurbs from Richard Price, David Eggers and Peter Carey, and most importantly, the thing’s flying out of the book stores.
A panoramic tale of ‘70s New York, the book juxtaposes the stories of an Irish street missionary in the Bronx, a gaggle of prostitutes, an Upper East side housewife, a Fitzgeraldian artist with a bad drug habit, and a 13-year-old graffiti photographer. Rainy Irish realism it ain’t.
“It’s funny, I was talking to my dad and I was telling him that this is a 9/11 novel,” McCann says on a late August afternoon in the Stag’s Head in Dublin, an hour before the book’s Irish launch, “and I discovered halfway through that the two main human towers of the novel collapse in the opening chapters, but neither of them get a voice. And my father said, ‘Ah, that’s not what it is at all!’”
The phrase ‘9/11 novel’ is enough to give any writer, never mind reader, a dose of the runs, but McCann’s novel works chiefly because it’s a pre-history. The tour-de-force opening chapter takes as its focal point Philippe Petit’s famous highwire walk between the Towers in August 1974. Was McCann aware while writing the book that James Marsh was making a documentary of that event?
“No, it frightened the shite out of me. I was about two years into my own project when I heard it was coming, and that it was a brilliant documentary. I went to see it on the West Side of Manhattan, and I was literally shaking walking in. John Berger is one of the great writers of our time, but he says, ‘Never again will a single story be told as if it was the only one,’ which is a lovely way of thinking that it doesn’t matter, stories are stories. And they didn’t push the 9/11 stuff at all, it was more of a caper, so it was a completely different approach.”
How long did he spend working on that opening section?
“The first five pages? Not too long actually, that wrote itself fairly quickly. The Tillie section, the hooker section later on, that took a lot longer in terms of getting all the slang right.”
One of my favourite parts of the book is the portrait of Claire, the privileged judge’s wife who lost her son in Vietnam. Through telling his story, she also delineates the birth of the internet, recounting her son’s work tabulating casualty statistics using interconnected military computer systems.
“I found it very difficult to find information about it,” McCann admits. “I’m sort of surprised. I’m sure someone out there has done it and done it well. You’d think it’d be real Pynchon territory, right? Who’s your man who has done all the internet books?”
William Gibson. Even he was operating very much on inspired guesswork. He wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter.
“You’ve read his work? See, there are huge holes in what I have and haven’t read.”
Well, Gibson was excluded from the approved mainstream literary canon for years, but since Pattern Recognition and Spook Country they’ve attempted to bring him into the fold as a latter day DeDillo.
“Yeah, behave yourself! Have their been any Irish writers who’ve gone into this stuff?”
Mike McCormack.
“Yeah, yeah, Mike does. But part of the joy of doing this sort of stuff is it’s like going to University again, and you can live within your mannered middle-class life and be elsewhere at the same time, and have fun doing it too. I teach at Hunter College in New York with Peter Carey and when I talk to my students I say, ‘Listen, everybody tells you you should write about what you know, but I say you should write what you don’t know.’ And they say, ‘That’s logically and philosophically impossible,’ and I say, ‘Yes, of course you’re right, it is impossible, but in making the leap towards what you supposedly don’t know, you discover things that are hidden within yourself.’ And I wanted to know about Claire. I also wanted to write about Vietnam because I knew it would map over into Iraq in certain ways. “And then I thought, ‘How would I do Vietnam differently from (Tim O’Brien’s) The Things They Carried?’ There’s so much great fiction written about Vietnam. So for me the question is, ‘How do I say this in a new and fresh way but still speak to that era?’ In ‘74 the first emails were sent, the phone phreakers phreaked into the World Trade Centre from California – if you want to interpret the book on an allegorical level, they fit into what the internet happens to be now. In real life Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both Blue-Boxed as teenagers. That was fascinating to me.”
As far back as Songdogs and This Side Of Brightness, McCann was adamant that he wouldn’t be ghettoised as an Irish writer. But even in the mid-90s, there were very few native writers who completely bypassed the old sod and took the reader to a mythic but very real underworld...
“...or were outside the traditional boundaries of the Irish novel. I don’t know who your set of heroes would be, but for a writer’s imagination, I would like Michael Ondaatje: born in Sri Lanka, educated in England, moves to Toronto, becomes a Canadian citizen. His book about Buddy Bolden (Coming Through Slaughter) is one of my absolute favourite books. When I come upon the word ‘Slaughter’ at the end of the book and I realise it’s just a fuckin’ town? Hallelujah, y’know? But that’s an interesting model for me, and I imagine for an increasing number of Irish writers, as in, what are these boundaries? Are these national boundaries or gender boundaries or boundaries of the imagination? Where can you go and what stories should you have access to? I don’t see that there’s all that much you shouldn’t be allowed go at, if you’re honest to the experience and break your own heart in the process of doing it. And throw it away.”