Colum McCann’s “Transatlantic” is a beautiful, lyrical examination of the ties between the United States and Ireland, jumping through time to share the first non-stop transatlantic flight, an abolition tour by Frederick Douglass and Senator George Mitchell’s efforts to resolve “The Troubles.” The different sections hop through time, but we’re gradually introduced to the common characters that unite them, suffering along as a Potato Famine immigrant finds hope and tragedy in the United States and as a family loses their teen to IRA gunfire.

Stylistically, McCann relies on short, impressionistic sentences to take us into each character’s experiences as they happen. As their best–say, in the opening section where pilot Jackie Alcock and navigator Arthur Brown coax a World War I bomber from Newfoundland to Ireland, the style takes you into flight alongside them. But in other instances the approach can fragment, pulling you away from the momentum of the narrative. I found McCann’s writing to be great, but others may be put off by it.

Here’s a sample in the voice of Senator George Mitchell as he leads the Good Friday peace accords:

“It’s the tenacity of the fanatic that he wants to pitch himself against. There is, he knows, something akin to his own form of violence in the way he wants to hang on and fight. The way the terrorist might hide himself in a wet ditch all night. Cold and damp seeping down into the gunman’s boots, right up into the small of his back, along his spine, through his cranium, out his pores, so cold, so very cold, watching, waiting, until the stars are gone, and the morning chatters with a bit of light. He would like to outlast that man in the ditch, outwait the cold and the rain and the filth, and the opportunity for a bullet, remain down in the reeds, underwater, in the dark, breathing through a hollow piece of grass. To stay until the cold no longer matters. Fatigue conquering tedium. Match him breath for breath. Let the gunman grow so cold that he cannot pull the trigger and then allow the silhouette to trudge dejected over a hill. To filibuster the son of a bitch, and then watch him climb out the ditch and to thank him and shake his hand and escort him down the high-brambled laneway with the senatorial knife in his back.”

This introduces us to the other potential issue in the book, McCann appropriating a number of historical figures to tell their stories in his words. It’s an uneasy prospect; was this really how Frederick Douglass felt on his travels to Ireland, or has McCann turned him into a author’s dummy? To whom did the care and remoteness that marks his character belong?

I enjoyed the approach, and I think it’s handled well, but it is tough to judge. Still, I loved how the different stories staked their claims before being bound together in the greater narrative. A wonderful read.

Additional Quotes

“It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth. The Great War had concussed the world.”

“Two lovely beaming smiles from the front desk. Girls in silk scarves of red, white, and blue. Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs.”

“She had formed a distrust of men who carried Bibles. It seemed to her that they believed their own voices were somehow embedded there.”

“The truth of the matter is that the light at the end of the tunnel generally belongs to the pharmaceutical companies.”