Number 5- Let the Great World Spin- Colum McCann

 

In 1974- during the building of the World Trade Centre in New York City, a man managed to string a tightrope between the two towers, several hundred feet in the air.  He then spent a good amount of time walking between the towers and performing tricks. 

This stunt is the central event in this novel that ties together the lives of a selection of characters who witness or are affected by it.

We have an Irish monk called Corrigan who lives in the Bronx and tries to help the street walkers.  We have a selection of the girls he helps. Then there's a judge and his wife, still mourning their son who died overseas, an artist, and a photographer.

We follow all their lives, in some cases, just on the day of the sky walk, others we get to know from birth onwards.

I loved this book.  The characters are all beautifully drawn, and the narrative voice shifts in each chapter depending on whose story we're following.  Even the punctuation changes, some characters narrate their section with traditional quotes for speech marks, and other characters have speech on separate lines, indicated with a hyphen.

The prose is uniformly good throughout, regardless of which character is speaking. The insights into the lives of all segments of New York society all seem entirely convincing.

This is an easy first contender for book of the year. It's my first Colum McCann and probably won't be my last.