Review by New York Times Review
Colum McCanns 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. Lily's daughter is Emily, who becomes, against the odds, a journalist - you'll realize you've met her before, when she was a local reporter in Newfoundland covering Alcock and Brown's flight. But it's in the section set in 1929 that Emily's tale is truly told. Then we are taken to a lough just outside Belfast in 1978, the midst of the Troubles, and to Emily's daughter, Lottie. The final section takes us forward, to 2011, into the straitened circumstances of Hannah, Lottie's daughter, heading toward old age herself and struggling to cope now that the Celtic Tiger has tucked its tail between its legs and fled. IT'S only here, in the final chapter, that the novel shifts into the first person, and it's hard to see exactly why it does. This section and that belonging to George Mitchell are the novel's weakest. In the case of Mitchell (who is thanked in the acknowledgments) one senses, perhaps, too much caution in writing about a man still living; McCann's portrait of exhaustion brought about by endless airport lounges and endless cups of tea doesn't add to the reader's understanding of the peace process. "There are times he wishes he could knock an absolute simplicity into the process. Take it or leave it," an exhausted Mitchell thinks. After centuries of conflict - no kidding. And while McCann is skilled at creating convincing female characters, Hannah isn't one of them, in part because she seems insufficiently shaped by the sorrow that has afflicted her life. What these sections have in common is a sense that they are fulfilling a political or structural void, rather than an emotional or narrative need. But a book as ambitious and wideranging as this is bound to be a little inconsistent, and its strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. Over and over, McCann allows the reader to see through his characters' eyes: description serves instead of judgment. Douglass, who has known the misery of slavery, sees the approach of the potato famine in the Irish countryside: "The children looked like remnants of themselves. Spectral. Some were naked to the waist. Many of them had sores on their faces. None had shoes. He could see the structures of them through their skin. The bony residue of their lives." Ireland's past haunts and shapes this novel, yet McCann's stories offer us hope. When Arthur Brown first spies the Irish coast "rising up out of the sea, nonchalant as you like: wet rock, dark grass, stone tree light," he knows he'll remember this simple sight forever. "The miracle of the actual," he thinks. No small wonder, that. McCann's characters have chosen to leap across the ocean from Ireland to the New World or back again. Erica Wagner is the literary editor of The Times of London and the author, most recently, of the novel "Seizure."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 23, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In 1919, British aviators Alcock and Brown made the first nonstop transatlantic flight, from Newfoundland to Ireland. McCann, in his first novel since the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin (2009), imagines a letter handed to Brown by a young photographer, written by her mother, Emily, a local reporter covering the flight, to be delivered upon their landing to a family in Cork. Years earlier, while on a speaking tour in Ireland with the mission to raise money for the abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass forms a bond with young Isabel, the daughter of his host family in Cork. Lily, a young servant, emboldened by Douglass' visit, sets out for America, in the hope of a better life. About a century and a half later, former Senate majority leader George Mitchell is coaxed out of retirement to broker talks between the various factions, with the intention of getting a peace agreement by Good Friday. At the tennis club, he meets a woman in her nineties who, years earlier, had lost her grandson to the Troubles. It is Lily and her offspring's stories set across different times and in many different places that ultimately tie everything together, as McCann creates complex, vivid characters (historical and otherwise) while expertly mixing fact and fancy to create this emotionally involving and eminently memorable novel. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Prepub buzz about McCann's latest suggests it will be among the summer's leading literary fiction titles.--Segedin, Ben Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1919, two British veterans pilot a Vickers Vimy from Newfoundland to Ireland, becoming the first men to fly across the Atlantic, taking "the war out of the plane." In 1845, escaped American slave Frederick Douglass comes to Ireland at the start of the famine on a speaking tour, staying with Irish Quakers and inspiring their maid to seek her future in America. In 1998, decades into the Troubles, American Senator George Mitchell brokers the Good Friday Peace Accords. Darting in, past, and through these stories are generations of women, including the maid's descendants, Irish, American, Canadian, with sons lost to the civil wars of both continents. This is what interests McCann: lives made amid and despite violence; the hidden braids of places, times, and people; the way the old days "arrive back in the oddest ways, suddenly taut, breaking the surface." A beautiful writer, if overly partial to three-word phrases ("Kites of language. Clouds of logic") that can start to call attention to themselves, McCann won the National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin, which also linked disparate stories. This time though, while each story is interesting, the threads between them-especially in the last section, which features the maid's great-granddaughter-aren't pulled taut enough by shared meaning. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In 1846, Lily Duggan, a Dublin servant girl, embarks for New York City on a quest for personal freedom. Her journey initiates a family saga connecting the lives of four women with Frederick Douglass's Irish journey in 1845, British aviators Alcock and Brown's 1919 flight from Newfoundland to Ireland, and U.S. Senator George Mitchell's work on the 1998 Belfast Agreement. The lives of Lily and her descendants resonate with shared experiences and an elusive yearning for fulfillment that often expresses itself as a plea for justice. At other times, this desire occupies a vacant existence caused by loss. The story closes with Hannah Carson, Lily's great-granddaughter, nearly forced from the family cottage on Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland, surprised by the tenderness of strangers wishing to create with her something new from her longing for the past. VERDICT McCann's sixth novel (after Let the Great World Spin) is majestic and assures his status as one of the great prose stylists of contemporary fiction as he effortlessly weaves history and fiction into a tapestry depicting all of life's wonders, both ephemeral and foursquare.-John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A masterful and profoundly moving novel that employs exquisite language to explore the limits of language and the tricks of memory. It hardly seems possible that this novel, epic in ambition, is comparatively compact or that one so audacious in format (hopscotching back and forth across an ocean, centuries, generations) should sustain such narrative momentum. The award-winning McCann (Let the Great World Spin, 2009, etc.) interweaves historical and fictional truth as he connects the visit to Ireland in 1845 by Frederick Douglass, whose emancipation appeals on behalf of all his fellow slaves inspire a young Irish maid to seek her destiny in America, to the first trans-Atlantic flight almost 65 years later, carrying a mysterious letter that will ultimately (though perhaps anticlimactically) tie the various strands of the plot together. The novel's primary bloodline begins with Lily Duggan, the Irish maid inspired by Douglass, and her four generations of descendants, mainly women whose struggle for rights and search for identity parallels that of the slave whose hunger for freedom fed her own. Ultimately, as the last living descendant observes, "[t]he tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing mobius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves." The novel's narrative strategy runs deeper than literary gamesmanship, as the blurring of distinctions between past and present, and between one side of the ocean and the other, with the history of struggle, war and emancipation as a backdrop, represents the thematic thread that connects it all: "We prefigure our futures by imagining our pasts. To go back and forth. Across the waters. The past, the present, the elusive future. A nation. Everything constantly shifted by the present. The taut elastic of time." A beautifully written novel, an experience to savor.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
