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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann thrilled readers with a marvelous high-wire act of fiction that The New York Times Book Review called "an emotional tour de force." Now McCann demonstrates once again why he is one of the most acclaimed and essential authors of his generation with a soaring novel that spans continents, leaps centuries, and unites a cast of deftly rendered characters, both real and imagined. Newfoundland, 1919. Two aviators - Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown - set course for Ireland as they attempt the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, placing their trust in a modified bomber to heal the wounds of the Great War. Dublin, 1845 and '46. On an international lecture tour in support of his subversive autobiography, Frederick Douglass finds the Irish people sympathetic to the abolitionist cause - despite the fact that, as famine ravages the countryside, the poor suffer from hardships that are astonishing even to an American slave. New York, 1998. Leaving behind a young wife and newborn child, Senator George Mitchell departs for Belfast, where it has fallen to him, the son of an Irish-American father and a Lebanese mother, to shepherd Northern Ireland's notoriously bitter and volatile peace talks to an uncertain conclusion. These three iconic crossings are connected by a series of remarkable women whose personal stories are caught up in the swells of history. Beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan, who crosses paths with Frederick Douglass, the novel follows her daughter and granddaughter, Emily and Lottie, and culminates in the present-day story of Hannah Carson, in whom all the hopes and failures of previous generations live on. From the loughs of Ireland to the flatlands of Missouri and the windswept coast of Newfoundland, their journeys mirror the progress and shape of history. They each learn that even the most unassuming moments of grace have a way of rippling through time, space, and memory. The most mature work yet from an incomparable storyteller, TransAtlantic is a profound meditation on identity and history in a wide world that grows somehow smaller and more wondrous with each passing year.
Author Notes
Irish writer Colum McCann was born near Dublin in 1965 and graduated from the University of Texas with a B.A. degree. He has worked as a newspaper journalist in Ireland and written several short stories and bestselling novels. The short film of Everything in this Country Must was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005.
McCann's work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The Irish Times, La Repubblica, Die Zeit, Paris Match, the Guardian, and the Independent. He has won numerous awards, such as a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, the Irish Novel of the Year Award, and the 2002 Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award. In 2009 McCann was inducted into the Irish arts association Aosdana. He teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program at New York's Hunter College.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McCann's novel centers around three historical crossings from America to Ireland. Between 1845 and 1846, Frederick Douglass tours Ireland and England to promote the abolitionist movement, his autobiography, and to negotiate his freedom so he can safely return to America. In 1919, aviators Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown attempt the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic. And in 1998, Senator George Mitchell leaves for Belfast to negotiate a peace agreement. These three journeys are anchored by four generations of fictional women-from the Irish housemaid interacting with Douglass to Hannah Carson, whose doomed son grows up amid the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Narrator Geraldine Hughes delivers a masterful performance in which she subtly-but effectively-differentiates character voices. Hughes's narration is most riveting and authentic in the book's final section, about a woman who has lost her son to violence. A Random House hardcover. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books 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."
Guardian Review
Colum McCann left Dublin for New York aged 21 to write "the great Irish-American novel". In TransAtlantic he again dramatises Irish-American encounters and features elements of non-fiction, and a gravity-defying central metaphor. The story begins in 1919, with a re-creation of the first non-stop transatlantic flight: Alcock and Brown, two British airmen bruised by the war, flew from Newfoundland to County Galway in a converted bomber. The second encounter concerns the 1845 visit of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, born a slave and still technically the chattel of a Maryland landowner, to Ireland. The third tells of Senator George Mitchell's efforts to broker the Good Friday agreement of 1998. McCann is awriter in full rhapsodic mode. He coins a good phrase. Pondering the gulf between the British and Irish, Mitchell asks himself: "How did such a small sea ever come between them?" TransAtlantic is deft and well crafted. But the tone is a bit official, sententious and uplifting, redolent of a St Patrick's Day speech by a gifted US politician. - Theo Tait Colum McCann left Dublin for New York aged 21 to write "the great Irish-American novel". In TransAtlantic he again dramatises Irish-American encounters and features elements of non-fiction, and a gravity-defying central metaphor. - Theo Tait.
Library Journal Review
Several crossings of the Atlantic Ocean by sea and by air frame the stories of four women of Irish ancestry in this well-written historical novel. The listener will come to appreciate the interconnected history of Ireland, Canada, and the United States from Frederick Douglass's 1845 visit to Dublin to U.S. Senator George Mitchell brokering peace in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s. The women's triumphs and tragedies, buttressed by McCann's (Let the Great World Spin) wonderful descriptions, are excellently narrated by Geraldine Hughes. -VERDICT The audio presentation of this novel is highly recommended for adult fiction collections. ["McCann's sixth novel 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," read the starred review of the New York Times best-selling Random hc, LJ 4/15/13.-Ed.]-Cliff -Glaviano, formerly with Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1919 cloudshadow It was a modified bomber. A Vickers Vimy. All wood and linen and wire. She was wide and lumbering, but Alcock still thought her a nippy little thing. He patted her each time he climbed onboard and slid into the cockpit beside Brown. One smooth motion of his body. Hand on the throttle, feet on the rudder bar, he could already feel himself aloft. What he liked most of all was rising up over the clouds and then flying in clean sunlight. He could lean out over the edge and see the shadowshift on the whiteness below, expanding and contracting on the surface of the clouds. Brown, the navigator, was more reserved--it embarrassed him to make such a fuss. He sat forward in the cockpit, keen on what clues the machine might give. He knew how to intuit the shape of the wind, yet he put his faith in what he could actually touch: the compasses, the charts, the spirit level tucked down at his feet. It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones. Alcock had piloted air-service fighters. Small bombs fell away from the undercarriage of his plane. A sudden lightness to the machine. A kick upwards into the night. He leaned out from his open cockpit and watched the mushroom of smoke rise below. His plane leveled out and turned towards home. At times like that, Alcock craved anonymity. He flew in the dark, his plane open to the stars. Then an airfield would appear below, the razor wire illuminated like the altar of a strange church. Brown had flown reconnaissance. He had a knack for the mathematics of flight. He could turn any sky into a series of numbers. Even on the ground he went on calculating, figuring out new ways to guide his planes home. Both men knew exactly what it meant to be shot down. The Turks caught Jack Alcock on a long-range bombing raid over Suvla Bay and pierced the plane with machine-gun fire, knocked off his port propeller. He and his two crewmen ditched at sea, swam to shore. They were marched naked to where the Turks had set up rows of little wooden cages for prisoners of war. Open to the weather. There was a Welshman beside him who had a map of the constellations, so Alcock practiced his navigation skills, stuck out under the nailheaded Turkish night: just one glance at the sky and he could tell exactly what time it was. Yet what Alcock wanted more than anything was to tinker with an engine. When he was moved to a detention camp in Kedos, he swapped his Red Cross chocolate for a dynamo, traded his shampoo for tractor parts, built a row of makeshift fans out of scrap wire, bamboo, bolts, batteries. Teddy Brown, too, had become a prisoner of war, forced to land in France while out on photographic reconnaissance. A bullet shattered his leg. Another ruptured the fuel tank. On the way down he threw out his camera, tore up his charts, scattered the pieces. He and his pilot slid their B.E.2c into a muddy wheatfield, cut the engine, held their hands up. The enemy came running out of the forest to drag them from the wreck. Brown could smell petrol leaking from the tanks. One of the Krauts had a lit cigarette in his lips. Brown was known for his reserve. Excuse me, he called out, but the German kept coming forward, the cigarette flaring. Nein, nein. A little cloud of smoke came from the German's mouth. Brown's pilot finally lifted his arms and roared: For fucksake, stop! The German paused in midstride, tilted his head back, paused, swallowed the burning cigarette, ran toward the airmen again. It was something that made Brown's son, Buster, laugh when he heard the story just before he, too, went to war, twenty years later. Excuse me. Nein, nein. As if the German had only the flap-end of his shirt sticking out, or had somehow neglected to tie his shoelace properly. Brown was shipped home before the armistice, then lost his hat high in the air over Piccadilly Circus. The girls wore red lipstick. The hems of their dresses rose almost to their knees. He wandered along the Thames, followed the river until it crawled upwards to the sky. Alcock didn't make it back to London until December. He watched men in black suits and bowler hats pick their way amid the rubble. He joined in a game of football in an alley off the Pimlico Road, knocking a round pigskin back and forth. But he could already sense himself aloft again. He lit a cigarette, watched the smoke curl high and away. When they met for the first time in the Vickers factory in Brook-lands, in early 1919, Alcock and Brown took one look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate. The obliteration of memory. The creation of a new moment, raw, dynamic, warless. It was as if they wanted to take their older bodies and put their younger hearts inside. They didn't want to remember the bombs that had dudded out, or the crash or burn, or the cellblocks they had been locked into, or what species of abyss they had seen in the dark. Instead they talked about the Vickers Vimy. A nippy little thing. The prevailing winds blew east from Newfoundland, pushing hard and fast across the Atlantic. Eighteen hundred miles of ocean. The men came by ship from England, rented rooms in the Cochrane Hotel, waited for the Vimy to arrive at the docks. It came boxed in forty-seven large wooden crates. Late spring. A whip of frost still in the air. Alcock and Brown hired a crew to drag the crates up from the harbor. They strapped the boxes to horses and carts, assembled the plane in the field. The meadow sat on the outskirts of St. John's, on a half-hill, with a level surface of three hundred yards, a swamp at one end, and a pine forest at the other. Days of welding, soldering, sanding, stitching. The bomb bays were replaced by extra petrol tanks. That's what pleased Brown the most. They were using the bomber in a brand-new way: taking the war out of the plane, stripping the whole thing of its penchant for carnage. To level out the meadow, they crimped blasting caps to fuses, shattered boulders with dynamite, leveled walls and fences, removed hillocks. It was summertime but still there was a chill in the air. Flocks of birds moved fluidly across the sky. After fourteen days the field was ready. To most people it was simply another patch of land, but to the two pilots it was a fabulous aerodrome. They paced the grass runway, watched the breeze in the trees, looked for clues in the weather. Crowds of rubberneckers flocked to see the Vimy. Some had never ridden in a motorcar, let alone seen a plane before. From a distance it looked as if it had borrowed its design from a form of dragonfly. It was 42.7 feet long, 15.25 feet high, with a wingspan of 68 feet. It weighed 13,000 pounds when the 870 gallons of petrol and the 40 gallons of oil were loaded. Eleven pounds per square foot. The cloth framework had thousands of individual stitches. The bomb spaces were replaced by enough fuel for 30 hours of flying. It had a maximum speed of 103 miles per hour, not counting the wind, a cruising speed of 90 mph and a landing speed of 45 mph. There were two water-cooled Rolls-Royce Eagle VIII engines of 360 horsepower and a turnover rate of 1,080 revs per minute, with twelve cylinders in two banks of six, each engine driving a four-bladed wooden propeller. The onlookers ran their hands along the struts, tapped the steel, pinged the taut linen of the wings with their umbrellas. Kids crayoned their names on the underside of the fuselage. Photographers pulled black hoods over their lenses. Alcock mugged for the camera, shaded his hand to his eyes like an ancient explorer. Tally-ho! he shouted, before jumping the nine feet to the wet grass below. The newspapers said anything was possible now. The world was made tiny. The League of Nations was being formed in Paris. W. E. B. Du Bois convened the Pan-African Congress with delegates from fifteen countries. Jazz records could be heard in Rome. Radio enthusiasts used vacuum tubes to transmit signals hundreds of miles. Some day soon it might be possible to read the daily edition of the San Francisco Examiner in Edinburgh or Salzburg or Sydney or Stockholm. In London, Lord Northcliffe of the Daily Mail had offered £10,000 to the first men to land on one side of the Atlantic or the other. At least four other teams wanted to try. Hawker and Grieve had already crashed into the water. Others, like Brackley and Kerr, were positioned in airfields along the coast, waiting for the weather to turn. The flight had to be done in seventy-two hours. Nonstop. There were rumors of a rich Texan who wanted to try, and a Hungarian prince and, worst of all, a German from the Luftstreitkräfte who had specialized in long-range bombing during the war. The features editor of the Daily Mail, a junior of Lord Northcliffe's, was said to have developed an ulcer thinking about a possible German victory. --A Kraut! A bloody Kraut! God save us! He dispatched reporters to find out if it was possible that the enemy, even after defeat, could possibly be ahead in the race. On Fleet Street, down at the stone, where the hot type was laid, he paced back and forth, working the prospective headlines over and over. On the inside of his jacket his wife had stitched a Union Jack, which he rubbed like a prayer cloth. --Come on boys, he muttered to himself. Hup two. On home now, back to Blighty. Every morning the two airmen woke in the Cochrane Hotel, had their breakfast of porridge, eggs, bacon, toast. Then they drove through the steep streets, out the Forest Road, towards a field of grass sleeved with ice. The wind blew bitter blasts off the sea. They rigged wires into their flight suits so they could run warmth from a battery, and they stitched extra fur on the inside flaps of their helmets, their gloves, their boots. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from TransAtlantic by Colum Mccann All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
