A great novelist can bring such depth, insight and detail to fictional lives and imagined events that they come to represent profound truths about the world; but at the same time, real-life events can be so implausible, so ludicrous, that you'd raise an eyebrow if you encountered them in a novel. Colum McCann's superb book Let the Great World Spin provides a demonstration of this paradoxical relationship between fiction and fact.
Here are some of the things that happen in this multi-layered work, set in New York in 1974. A high-society woman grieves for her young son, killed in Vietnam, and seeks solace in the company of other women who have suffered similar losses. An Irish priest from Dublin risks his life and sanity to work amid the downtrodden. A Bronx prostitute is racked by guilt about not having been able to give her daughter a better life. A freak car accident abruptly cuts short two lives and brings two other people together. And a man strings a tightrope between the uppermost reaches of the newly constructed Twin Towers and proceeds to walk and run across it, more than 1,300 feet above the ground.
Dizzying associations
Only the last — and most improbable — of these stories is, literally, “true”. One morning in August 1974 the Frenchman Philippe Petit sneaked into the World Trade Centre and performed the extraordinary feat that would later be hailed as “the artistic crime of the century”, while a city watched him, open-mouthed. (His motivation? More or less the same as Edmund Hillary's for wanting to climb Everest. The towers were there.)
McCann uses this real-life incident — with its dizzying associations for anyone who tries to imagine it — as the backdrop for a narrative about people who are metaphorically “spinning” towards each other. Petit isn't the focus of Let the Great World Spin – in fact, the book never even names him — but in McCann's hands, the crazy man skipping across the sky becomes an expression of the possibilities as well as the fragility of life.
The book's multiple narratives are about people whose actions will, in various ways, affect each other: Corrigan the monk and his brother Ciaran; a bohemian artist named Lara and her husband Blaine; Claire the socialite and Gloria the working-class black woman, who develop an unlikely friendship; Claire's husband Solomon, the judge who presides over the tightrope-walker's trial; and Tillie, a 38-year-old prostitute who worked the streets to keep her daughter Jazzlyn off them. A couple of smaller, more tangential narratives — one involving young telephone hackers, another about an enterprising photographer — weave through the larger ones. All the stories are engrossing in themselves, but their real worth lies in how they come together.
Different voices
Much like Petit shifting his weight from one foot to the other, McCann moves between the first person and the third person, sometimes giving us the same event as seen through different eyes; a device that demonstrates how individual choices, made under the shadow of various pressures and biases, can be life-altering. His use of language is so precise and interrelated that one phrase often echoes and recalls another. For example, the word “spin” is used in different contexts, in key passages: a van spins from one side of the road to the other during a deadly accident; trying to keep her dead son alive, Claire “spun off into her own little world of wires and computers and electric gadgets”. The simple sentence “Out he went”, as Petit begins his walk in the book's prologue, finds its complement in the equally sparse “In they come”, later in the book, just as a group of women, safely ensconced in an Upper East Side apartment, are about to begin talking about the “man in the air”.
Though the Twin Towers are mere background here, Let the Great World Spin derives some of its power from the reader's knowledge of what will eventually happen to these giant structures. In the prologue, during an intense description of the first groups of people on the ground who notice the walker about to begin his feat, there is this: “Many of the watchers realized with a shiver that no matter what they said, they really wanted to witness a great fall, see someone arc downward all that distance…to give the Wednesday an electricity, a meaning.” The resonance with 9/11, with the morbid voyeurism associated with that event, is difficult to miss, as is the sense that strangers who happen to witness something momentous together can find a deep connection, even if briefly. But ultimately, the great achievement of this book is that it shows us the big picture — a vibrant city viewed from 110 stories up, looking impersonal and distant from that height — while at the same time placing us at ground level, allowing us to breathe in the hopes, fears and disappointments of the people who make up that city; to share in tragedies as well as redemption.
Let the Great World Spin; Colum McCann, Bloomsbury, £5.99
