In May, at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, I was in the audience at the Athenaeum Theatre to see the novelist Colum McCann – possibly my favourite contemporary novelist – in conversation with ABC broadcaster Kate Evans. Here to promote his seventh novel Twist, he charmed the packed house with his humour and his appreciation of Evans’ intelligent questions, and of Australia itself, the friendliness of its people, and the Welcome to Country at the start of each of his public conversations.

McCann made it clear in this interview that he has no interest in writing memoir, or of putting himself in the story, but turns his curious eye on the other, seeking out or inventing infinitely complex or extraordinary characters. He immerses himself in a true story that has caught his imagination, one that reverberates with current global issues, researches it intimately, and then brings in his storytelling skills and verbal mastery.

For Twist, McCann’s investigative research involved joining a cable repair boat on the west coast of Africa, while it scoured the sea floor for the broken cables that need to be fixed if we are to keep on paying for our cup of coffee, booking our hotel room, or exchanging meaningful (or -less) texts with lovers or strangers. Almost all our digital data is transported to its destination through the optic cables that slide across the ocean floors.

Twist opens quietly, with a slightly jaded narrator, but slowly hauls you in, focussing your attention on the pivotal character, John Conway, aboard the cable-repair vessel the Georges Lecointe. The enigmatic Conway leads his team of divers and engineers on a mission to repair the underwater cables. The task is to reconnect the people of Africa and ultimately the world who have been disconnected from their mobile phones and the Internet.

Continents shift. Worlds collide. Races mingle. The repair boat trudges on up the west coast of Africa. Eye on the target. Fix the break. A whiff of the sea air and we are back with Moby Dick and the whale, a captain fixated on revenge. Or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which is also set off the coast of Africa, on a journey up the Congo River. In Twist, the Congo is flooding, shifting the sea floor and breaking the optic cables apart.

We are taken down by divers, the relentless Conway in particular, who ‘freedive’ (or breath-hold dive) to reach the ocean floor and haul up the cable to be fixed on deck. I first read an account of freediving in Australian Book Review, the Calibre Prize winning essay by Michael Adams ‘Salt Blood’ (ABR June-July 2017). Prior to that, Tim Winton’s Breath. It seems the extraordinary feat of using one breath to stay underwater for, say, ten minutes is apparently not so extraordinary. It is simply reverting to how babies survive in the womb and is practised in coastal communities around the world. And yet, outside the womb, it is a near-death experience.

The stakes are high. When darkness looms, even the most revered characters are suspect. And we are all guilty, addicted to our technology. The earth, and the oceans, are at risk. ‘It’s a story about connection,’ says the author. Yes, and so much more.