TRANSATLANTIC by Colum McCann (fic)

Colum McCann won the National Book Award for his previous book, Let the Great World Spin.  If you have not read any of his novels, that is the book to begin with.  McCann often chooses an important historical event as a starting point for his story.   His various characters are all affected in some way by the event and then connected to each other as the writer spins his tale.

Transatlantic begins in 1919 with an account of two veterans of the Great War as they prepare to be the first to fly across the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Great Britain.  Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown were real people who accomplished this record feat, landing in Ireland.  McCann's characters are beautifully drawn and fully believable.  Their story is the first of seven chapters, each with a lifelike main character who reveals his/her story through his own viewpoint. Each character makes a transatlantic crossing along the way. As they prepare for their historic flight, Alcock and Brown meet Emily Ehrlich and her daughter Lottie.  Emily is a reporter who has gained some renown for her colorful dispatches. These two women will reappear as we trace their ancestors and descendants.

The reader is then whisked to Dublin in 1840 for an interesting and little known account of the great Frederick Douglas and his connection to the Irish unrest and potato famine. While in Ireland, he stays with a Quaker family, and his path crosses that of Lily Duggan, an ancestor of Emily and Lottie.

Another section of the book shows us Senator George Mitchell of Maine in 1998, working on behalf of the Clinton administration to broker a peace accord between the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.  The reader can feel his stress and fatigue as his efforts begin to show progress.  In a quiet moment, his path crosses that of Lottie who is now over 90 years of age and her daughter, Hannah.  How they came to be living in the land of their ancestors is told in the next section of the book.

Through Lottie and Hannah, we discover the story of Lily Duggan and how she came to be in the United States.  We find her nursing soldiers in the American Civil War in 1863, as her only son is killed in battle.  Lily makes another life and eventual career for herself when she marries again and has six children. 

Once again we circle back to Emily, Lottie, and finally in 2011, Lottie's daughter Hannah.  The book ends with Hannah's story in Ireland.  She is deeply connected to her home and land.  As we leave her story, she is thinking, "There isn't a story in the world that isn't in part, at least, addressed to the past."  This is certainly true of the characters we meet in this book.

McCann writes in spare poetic sentences.  He rarely uses conjunctions, though some snuck in the final chapters of the book.  He is a masterful story teller whose characters come alive to the reader.  I recommend this book as an enjoyable well written story which weaves history and characters, some real some invented, into a realistic tale of lives impacting each other.