The author Colum McCann recently travelled through Europe to publicize his latest novel « Let the Great World Spin ». On the French leg of his tour he was awarded the Chevalier des arts et lettres from the French government as well as picking up the prix littéraire de Deauville. Jean O’Sullivan spoke to him him on the phone somewhere between Grenoble and Paris, over the rattle of the train and the loud chatter of his entourage.

In « Let the Great World Spin » as well as in your earlier novel, « This Side of Brightness », you identify strongly with the homeless, the drunks, the cast-offs « the whores, the hustlers, the hopeless ». Writing about people who live on the margins is a particular strength of yours. Can you explain why ?

Colum McCann : Perhaps there is something peculiarly Irish about empathy with down-and-outs, or maybe its a generational thing. People like the late Frank McCourt also had a depth of vision for what was around them – in fact, I only recently wrote a tribute to him in the Irish Daily Mail. I grew up with the notion that ‘the other’ matters. For example, I don’t particularly want to write about myself.

What was your own background like?
Colum McCann : I had a very suburban-style, middle-class upbringing=2 0- although both my parents were poor. Today I live a very ordinary life. Happiness doesn’t make exciting reading, though. You know what Tolstoy said: “Happy families are all alike but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Or to quote Montaigne: “Happiness writes white”.

The priest character in « Let the Great World Spin » sees these battered lives as important and worthwhile. Is he like you?

Colum McCann : I wish I could be that good! He’s a sort of broken saint. One would always aspire to do good things. I’d be more like the brother, standing back and looking at things and not engaging directly with them. The people in forgotten corners are deeply valuable: this is my elemental belief and I try to bring it out.

The novel is not just about the down-and-out characters – for example, you write about a fabulously wealthy woman character as well...

Colum McCann : The Park Avenue matron was an attempt to describe the feelings of a bereaved character who also has wealth and privilege. Her grief is no less valid because she’s rich.

A great empathy with all your characters characterizes your work...

Colum McCann : The inclination to empathy or idealism is often ridiculed – cynicism is so much easier than hope. When it comes down to it the biggest political failure of recent years, especially in the United States, has been a failure of empathy. This is what sent=2 0them into Afghanistan and Iraq. All literature is about empathy and understanding the other. Whether it changes or even shifts things is another question. I have to believe it does.

Colum McCann : “Let the Great World Spin” An adopted New Yorker, Colum McCann already showed us, in “This Side of Brightness”, how he could bring his teeming imagination to bear on that equally teeming city and fix it in tense, muscular prose. That novel took place almost entirely underneath the streets of Manhattan and evoked a strange, unsettling world hidden from the view of the bustling crowds above. His new book sets its sights even higher, in every sense. “Let the Great World Spin” begins with a massive build-up: a commotion of police and fire trucks around the World Trade Centre and a crowd transfixed below. “The whole August morning was blown right open”, we read. August? No, the date is not 9/11/2001 but 8/7/74, the date of Philippe Petit’s audacious tightrope walk between the still unfinished towers… and the explosion that comes a few pages later is not in New York but in Kildare Street in Dublin. McCann deals in uncomfortable truths; “Many of the watchers realized with a shiver that… they really wanted to witness a great fall”. After this tour de force, McCann’s narrative swoops from the dizzying space between the Twin Towers to the metal plate between two subway cars, from Sandymount Strand to=2 0Vietnam. He slowly weaves together the lives of disparate people affected directly or indirectly by Petit”s tightrope walk: the hookers, the priest, the Park Avenue matron, the 14-year-old hacker, the obsessive photographer - and the most unexpected connections become manifest. The title comes from Tennyson’s poem Locksley Hall: “Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change”. A faithful evocation of Nixon’s America in the 1970s, “Let the Great World Spin” also apprehends – but never spells out – the shape of life-changing things to come, from the birth of the Internet (referenced as the Arpanet, its original military application) to the cataclysm of 11 September 2001 which inevitably overshadows the delicate descriptions of Petit’s acrobatics on the wire between the Towers in 1974. New York City “…accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.” Shot through the novel, those “little shocks of good” brighten the lives of the homeless, the drunks, the cast-offs, “the whores, the hustlers, the hopeless”, that McCann excels at describing as he weaves strands of change, hope and redemption through his astonishing book.