TRANSATLANTICBy Colum McCann
Literary fiction
June
2013
Random House
ISBN: 978-1400069590
Waves come in and the tide
goes out. The sea ebbs and flows, but what changes does that result in? It is
only when taking long looks from a distance does it seem that anything has been
altered. But looking at a distance also can mean an impersonal point of view in
which individual grief does not matter and mourning is no more than another part
of life.
The same could be said about what happens in Colum McCann's
Transatlantic, which has been longlisted for this year's Man Booker
Prize. Men die, women mourn, women endure, women lose. Another generation comes
along, grows old in the blink of an eye and suffers grevious loss.
McCann uses the same type of storytelling that he used in
Let the Great
World Spin to write about life and death, especially death, on both sides
of the Atlantic. In both Northern Ireland and North America, great men stand out
and attempt great deeds.
In the years between the two great wars of the 20th century, two former
prisoners of war attenpt to fly from Newfoundland to Ireland. After they land,
the stage shifts to young Frederick Douglass before the Civil War as he visits
Dublin to speak and raise funds for the abolition movement. After he leaves,
it's more than 100 years later and George Mitchell is leaving New York, his
second wife and infant son to head toward the last stage of what will be known
as the Good Friday Accords.
In each of these set pieces, the famous men touch the lives of women who are
perhaps more extraordinary than they are, because they endure and they do so
without celebrity or honor, without recognition or reward.
As Alcock and Brown prepare for their flight across the Atlantic, in part to
win the prize money and in part to use the war-waging airplane when there are no
overt battlefields, Brown is given a letter to deliver by young photographer
Lottie Erlich. It is one her mother has written to someone in Ireland, a country
her own mother left decades ago after hearing Douglass speak. Young Lily was
inspired by Douglass and ends up as a nurse helping Union doctors in their
bloody work. She started following the army after her young son, turned down
twice already, goes off to fight. She ends up marrying one of the doctors but
death continues to follow Lily.
Her daughter, a bookworm, becomes a writer, is used by a man, and raises a
daughter of her own. They end up in Newfoundland, where the daughter hands off
the letter before they go back to Ireland. She marries an Ulsterman and stays to
raise a family. The daughter grows old, meets George Mitchell and wishes him
success because there has been one death too many in her extended family. Her
own daughter grows old and hopes the letter, which was not delivered nor opened,
but which finds its way back to her, will be worth enough money to save her
home.
Things that would be played up in most novels, such as how the various women
feel about the various deaths, how they find the strength to carry on, what it
means to them to be the ones who survive, even the letter and whether it saves
the home, are not important in this novel. Time goes on and there is no
tarrying.
A few setpieces do not make a novel, especially when many of
the setpieces have the flat emotionless style of reportage (the George Mitchell
section is particularly flat; as a friend remarked, you can almost see where
McCann took notes of what Mitchell said and where he added a wee bit of
flair).
Although I don't often specifically reflect on a book as being from a woman's
point of view, part of the flatness of the McCann was due to his standing back
and not looking at the lives of these women and the deaths of so many loved ones
they survived as a mother would look at them. That does not do justice to the
men who grieve for lost children and other loved ones, and is yet another reason
why the McCann did not work for me.
©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission
