The first thing I noticed is how beautifully it’s written. This confidently brilliant novel with its original form. There’s a documentary quality about TransAtlantic, as if you were watching an important series on PBS. The book opens where it ends, in 2012, as if its prologue is really its epilogue, only you can’t realize that yet, because you haven’t read the story. But after you’ve read this significant novel, then turn back to the past, which is really the future, and you will realize who the “she” is that the text starts off talking about.
2012, 1919, 1845-46, 1998, 1863-89, 1929, 1978, 2011: that’s the sequence of years in TransAtlantic’s chapters. Lily, Emily, Lottie, and Hannah: the succession of women, at least four generations of story in 259 pages in the autographed ARC that I was provided.
In ‘1919”, I didn’t realize that the first transatlantic flight was from Newfoundland to Ireland. There’s a photo of the biplane, looking pretty weird, on my ARC. In “1845-46”, I had no idea that Frederick Douglass gave a speaking tour of Ireland and how well he was received. In “1998”, which is about Senator George Mitchell’s successful leadership of the Good Friday Peace negotiations, I was both impressed and fascinated that for background, McCann went to Senator Mitchell and Mrs. Mitchell, who then appear in the book as what? Fictional characters?
So there’s a lot about exchanges, transfusions of life and of history, that kicks off with that 1919 biplane epic. But a deeper human exchange antedates that. It starts mid-book with Lily, who’s just a nobody, a housemaid in a middle class establishment in Dublin, who nullifies her “nobody” status by deciding she wants for something more and undertakes a harsh boat trip to America while her native land is at the verge of its potato famine. The pendulum swings back later with Emily and Lottie’s return to Ireland.
“We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing Möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves”.
Our lives are a net of connections whose significance is in turn lost and revealed, or revealed and lost again. What’s real for us, what encapsulates our feelings and sense of the rightness or injustice of our circumstances is a kind of paper chain that has left us tenuously entwined with the lives of those who have gone before us. Contacts are broken, we forget them or never realise that they existed, but somehow those ties are ready to resurface, like some lost curio beneath the surface of the water that suddenly bobs up. The lives of countries or of family histories are real. History is palpable. Its heart beats, whether you can sense that pulse or not.
There’s a letter, sealed and to be delivered, that starts its journey towards the beginning of this story and survives somehow, passed down, for nearly a hundred years without being opened. It’s McCann’s wonderful metaphor for the salience of history. Of the living presence of the past in our present, whether we can acknowledge it or not.
Colum McCann in TransAtlantic writes with a lunar grace. The rhythms of his sentences, breaking at times into a fresh, unencumbered prose poetry, are tidal. He’s a naturally articulate writer, like a fresh salt breeze offshore.
I wonder for how long one must train oneself to be a master, before writing as Colum McCann does, as if just writing. “The flick of ink across a page.”
