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Novelist Colum McCann Reads an Excerpt From 'TransAtlantic'
BOOK REVIEW
Cross Over
‘TransAtlantic,’ by Colum McCann
The New York Times
Erica Wagner
6/20/2013
Excerpt:
Colum McCann’s new novel, “TransAtlantic,” lifts off with a roar. The year is 1919, just after the end of the First World War: “It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth.” The war, McCann writes, had “concussed the world.” And yet here are two gentlemen, Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown, ready to set off in a modified bomber, a Vickers Vimy — “It looked as if it had borrowed its design from a form of dragonfly” — to fly the Atlantic, from St. John’s in Newfoundland all the way to Ireland. If they succeed, they’ll make history. They will make a brand-new world.
The novelist who takes on not just history but famous historical events has a hard row to hoe. Even if a reader doesn’t know that Alcock and Brown did indeed make it across the ocean, these days it takes only 10 seconds to Google their names, and the story’s spoiled. Except that in the hands of a novelist as skilled as McCann, it’s not: the wonder of this opening chapter is that his language, his close observation, his sense of the lives behind the history, will make even an aviation buff hold his breath. It’s not a talent unique to McCann, of course. Hilary Mantel managed the same trick at the end of “Bring Up the Bodies” — Henry wouldn’t really kill Anne Boleyn, would he? Beryl Bainbridge was a dab hand at this too, in novels like “The Birthday Boys,” about Captain Scott and his fateful journey to the South Pole, or “Every Man for Himself,” set aboard the Titanic. Making an oft-told tale seem newly minted is a rare and wondrous gift, and McCann locks the reader into “TransAtlantic” with this bold and bravura opening.
But “TransAtlantic” isn’t a novel about Alcock and Brown. It isn’t, strictly speaking, even a historical novel at all. Weaving invented characters’ lives into the events of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, it is very much a companion piece to McCann’s last novel, “Let the Great World Spin,” which won the National Book Award in 2009. As in that book, the narrative here doesn’t run clean from start to finish, like the pilots’ flight across the sea; rather, it’s a series of linked stories joined over time by a common thread. In “Let the Great World Spin,” that thread was a wire, a crossing made between the two towers of the World Trade Center one August morning in 1974. Here the bond is also a crossing, but one that’s broader and deeper through history and time. Over the course of seven chapters, each quite distinct yet integrated with the rest, McCann takes on the lives of men and women who have chosen to leap across the ocean from Ireland to the New World or back again. It’s a journey that the Dublin-born McCann — who now teaches creative writing at Hunter College in New York — knows well, and he uses that knowledge and sympathy to create real voyages of the imagination.
Each narrative inhabits the point of view of its central character. So after Alcock and Brown nose-dive into the Irish turf the novel jumps back to Dublin in the 1840s, and the visit to that city by Frederick Douglass — only seven years escaped from the bonds of slavery. After that, it’s forward to 1998, when Senator George Mitchell is in the midst of brokering the Good Friday Accords for peace in Northern Ireland; then back again, to 1863, as Lily Duggan tends the wounded of the American Civil War, hoping for a sight of her soldier son. Lily is the matriarch of the clan of women who are the other common thread of this novel; daughters and granddaughters cross and recross the water, their destinies bound by their times — but only rarely by men. Lily was, in 1845, a maid in the home where Douglass stayed in Dublin. The vision of freedom, of another life, is what inspires her to emigrate to America. This section of the book — which covers 26 years, and Lily’s complex journey into American life — feels like the heart of this novel; it would be wrong to give too much away about Lily’s adventures, for they are moving and startling in equal measure. McCann captures Lily’s clear, simple intelligence in plain words and direct storytelling. “She knew she was going with Jon Ehrlich,” he writes of her eventual marriage to the man who would again alter the course of her life. “He didn’t even question her when she sat up on the wagon and straightened out the folds in her dress. She looked straight ahead.” Lily’s gesture alone allows the reader into her heart.
McCann sets up a subtle parallel, or comparison, between Lily and Douglass — the early section that weaves their two stories together, however loosely, is one of the most powerful in the book. (And if you doubt the continuity between this novel and “Let the Great World Spin,” note how Douglass thinks of his life as a free man: “It was an exercise in balance. He would need to find the correct tension. A funambulist.”) Douglass, however extraordinary his own life may now seem to him, is celebrated and admired in Ireland, while Lily — who in Douglass’s own country would be seen as his superior simply because of her race — barely merits notice. Indeed, when she encounters Douglass again in Cork, on her way to America, he fails to recognize her: “She seemed so very different out of her uniform.” All servants look the same, don’t they? The tightrope on which both Douglass and Lily must find their balance is that of identity: can they remake themselves, cross to the other side and begin anew, without falling? Because if you fall, it’s a very long way down.
............................................
View the complete review at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/bo...um-mccann.html
BOOK REVIEW
Cross Over
‘TransAtlantic,’ by Colum McCann
The New York Times
Erica Wagner
6/20/2013
Excerpt:
Colum McCann’s new novel, “TransAtlantic,” lifts off with a roar. The year is 1919, just after the end of the First World War: “It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth.” The war, McCann writes, had “concussed the world.” And yet here are two gentlemen, Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown, ready to set off in a modified bomber, a Vickers Vimy — “It looked as if it had borrowed its design from a form of dragonfly” — to fly the Atlantic, from St. John’s in Newfoundland all the way to Ireland. If they succeed, they’ll make history. They will make a brand-new world.
The novelist who takes on not just history but famous historical events has a hard row to hoe. Even if a reader doesn’t know that Alcock and Brown did indeed make it across the ocean, these days it takes only 10 seconds to Google their names, and the story’s spoiled. Except that in the hands of a novelist as skilled as McCann, it’s not: the wonder of this opening chapter is that his language, his close observation, his sense of the lives behind the history, will make even an aviation buff hold his breath. It’s not a talent unique to McCann, of course. Hilary Mantel managed the same trick at the end of “Bring Up the Bodies” — Henry wouldn’t really kill Anne Boleyn, would he? Beryl Bainbridge was a dab hand at this too, in novels like “The Birthday Boys,” about Captain Scott and his fateful journey to the South Pole, or “Every Man for Himself,” set aboard the Titanic. Making an oft-told tale seem newly minted is a rare and wondrous gift, and McCann locks the reader into “TransAtlantic” with this bold and bravura opening.
But “TransAtlantic” isn’t a novel about Alcock and Brown. It isn’t, strictly speaking, even a historical novel at all. Weaving invented characters’ lives into the events of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, it is very much a companion piece to McCann’s last novel, “Let the Great World Spin,” which won the National Book Award in 2009. As in that book, the narrative here doesn’t run clean from start to finish, like the pilots’ flight across the sea; rather, it’s a series of linked stories joined over time by a common thread. In “Let the Great World Spin,” that thread was a wire, a crossing made between the two towers of the World Trade Center one August morning in 1974. Here the bond is also a crossing, but one that’s broader and deeper through history and time. Over the course of seven chapters, each quite distinct yet integrated with the rest, McCann takes on the lives of men and women who have chosen to leap across the ocean from Ireland to the New World or back again. It’s a journey that the Dublin-born McCann — who now teaches creative writing at Hunter College in New York — knows well, and he uses that knowledge and sympathy to create real voyages of the imagination.
Each narrative inhabits the point of view of its central character. So after Alcock and Brown nose-dive into the Irish turf the novel jumps back to Dublin in the 1840s, and the visit to that city by Frederick Douglass — only seven years escaped from the bonds of slavery. After that, it’s forward to 1998, when Senator George Mitchell is in the midst of brokering the Good Friday Accords for peace in Northern Ireland; then back again, to 1863, as Lily Duggan tends the wounded of the American Civil War, hoping for a sight of her soldier son. Lily is the matriarch of the clan of women who are the other common thread of this novel; daughters and granddaughters cross and recross the water, their destinies bound by their times — but only rarely by men. Lily was, in 1845, a maid in the home where Douglass stayed in Dublin. The vision of freedom, of another life, is what inspires her to emigrate to America. This section of the book — which covers 26 years, and Lily’s complex journey into American life — feels like the heart of this novel; it would be wrong to give too much away about Lily’s adventures, for they are moving and startling in equal measure. McCann captures Lily’s clear, simple intelligence in plain words and direct storytelling. “She knew she was going with Jon Ehrlich,” he writes of her eventual marriage to the man who would again alter the course of her life. “He didn’t even question her when she sat up on the wagon and straightened out the folds in her dress. She looked straight ahead.” Lily’s gesture alone allows the reader into her heart.
McCann sets up a subtle parallel, or comparison, between Lily and Douglass — the early section that weaves their two stories together, however loosely, is one of the most powerful in the book. (And if you doubt the continuity between this novel and “Let the Great World Spin,” note how Douglass thinks of his life as a free man: “It was an exercise in balance. He would need to find the correct tension. A funambulist.”) Douglass, however extraordinary his own life may now seem to him, is celebrated and admired in Ireland, while Lily — who in Douglass’s own country would be seen as his superior simply because of her race — barely merits notice. Indeed, when she encounters Douglass again in Cork, on her way to America, he fails to recognize her: “She seemed so very different out of her uniform.” All servants look the same, don’t they? The tightrope on which both Douglass and Lily must find their balance is that of identity: can they remake themselves, cross to the other side and begin anew, without falling? Because if you fall, it’s a very long way down.
............................................
View the complete review at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/bo...um-mccann.html