Colum McCann, the author of TransAtlantic, is fond of quoting John Berger’s line that "never again will a single story be told as if it were the only one"; his novels embody the spirit of this line by touching on multiple storylines, wonderfully diverse perspectives and wide sympathies that ultimately converge at some remarkable human feat. TransAtlantic is a soaring novel that spans continents, leaps centuries, and somehow unites a cast of diverse yet realistically rendered characters, both real and imagined.
In TransAtlantic, McCann dramatizes three historical Irish-American encounters, featuring elements of nonfiction and a mind-blowing central metaphor. The novel begins in 1919 with a dramatization of the first nonstop transatlantic flight. Two aviators - Alcock and Brown - set course for a nonstop flight across the Atlantic to County Galway in a converted bomber.
The second transatlantic encounter is set in Dublin 1845 and 1846. On an international lecture tour to promote his subversive autobiography, Frederick Douglass finds that the Irish people are sympathetic towards the abolitionist movement- despite that as the Great Famine sweeps the country, the poor suffer from hardships that are horrific even to an American slave.
The third section, based heavily on the facts, dramatizes the story of Senator George Mitchell’s efforts to broker the Good Friday agreement of 1998. McCann gives a brief, admiring account of Mitchell’s efforts to oversee Northern Ireland’s notoriously bitter and volatile peace talks to put an end to a bloody era in Irish history.
These iconic nonfictional stories about great men are united by theme but not narrative; therefore, in the second half of TransAtlantic, McCann connects these events through a fictional family of remarkable women whose personal stories are caught up in the swells of history. Beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan, the novel follows her daughter and granddaughter, Emily and Lottie, and culminates in the modern-day story of Hannah Carson in whom all the hopes, dreams and failures of past generations live on. By virtue of being a maid at the house of Douglass’s host and publisher, Lily Duggan is inspired by Douglass and boards a coffin ship in pursuit of a new life in America. Her daughter, Emily, is a pioneering journalist who reports on the Alcock and Brown flight. Emily’s daughter Lottie, weds a Belfast man, and meets Senator Mitchell. Lottie’s daughter, Hannah, reflects on these experiences "We return to the lives of those who have gone before us," she writes, echoing the book's back-and-forth progress – "a perplexing Mobius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves". The journeys of each of these women reflect the progress and shape of history. They each come to the understanding that even the most unassuming moments of grace have a way of rippling through time, space and memory.
