Book review: the rarity of a literary novel about telecoms

It’s not a thriller or a detective novel but an exploration of how modern communications has influenced our emotions and our relationships with others. It is set against the background of repairing the broken submarine cables which carry internet traffic from one country to another. There are echoes of Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now.

It is a very prescient book, published this year but must have been conceived and researched before worries about hostile states made cut cables a huge news story.

Repairing the cables is the job of the main character in the story, but neither he nor the narrator are able to fix the broken connections in their own lives. The book explores a very zeitgeist concern: electronically we are more connected but in human terms the opposite may be the case. Loneliness and cyber-bullying have become live political issues, the latter being at the heart of proposals to restrict children’s use of mobile phones or social media.

In the book, a source of fascination is that this maelstrom of human emotions  is carried through glass fibres the width of a hair buried at the bottom of the ocean where no light penetrates. Those in the telecoms industry will share the sense of wonder. 

A further irony is the main character’s hobby. He is a free diver, finding zen-like peace in the stillness of the ocean floor, his heartbeat reduced to the levels of a coma. 

For me the magic of the book was enhanced by listening to a Radio 4 adaptation on BBC Sounds on a stormy drive across the  highlands of Scotland. The plot thickened, a cable was cut and then the sound cut off as well! Was life imitating art? Had a cut cable deep underwater terminated my internet access? In fact the adaptation was only available for a month and at that moment had reached its expiry date. I had to buy the book to discover what happened. 

The author has done his research and even Telegeography gets a credit in the acknowledgements! My only criticism is that there is no mention of spectrum. We are available to help with the next project, Calum.