This was my bookclub book last month. Very mixed reviews. I loved it although felt the final interweaving of all the strands was a bit forced at the end. There was no need to tie them ALL together.
Loved particularly Claire’s story. Hated the druggie. Corrigan annoyed me. Does that mean I bought into it? Go figure.
Didn’t feel a 9/11 connection at all – don’t know how anyone could. It would detract from the stories to try and make a link. Let them stand on their own.

Raptureponies: very excited to see what you think . . .

Sinead Ryan: I would have to agree that I too found the structure too contrivedi n the end. Claire’s story was also my favourite.

Gabrielle: Have you started it? Do tell!

Linda: I like how you put it – the twin towers being such a staple element of the lives of New Yorkers, and the impact when something occurs to interfere with them in some way.

was trying to avoid reading this one, but I suppose I will now. Have read others of his and there is always something missing. Can’t put my finger on it. here is a review from the Guardian which I thought is interesting.

James Buchan The Guardian, Saturday 12 September 2009 Article historyPhilippe Petit, a French street performer and high-wire artist, walked a tightrope between the unfinished World Trade Center towers in Battery Park, New York, during the morning rush hour of 7 August 1974. In a city oppressed by the oil crisis and industrial slump, the political scandal of Watergate and looming defeat in Vietnam, Petit’s courage and whimsy struck a deep chord and New York took Petit to its sentimental heart.

Petit’s walk or “coup”, as he called it, is the metaphor or donnée of Let the Great World Spin. The meaning of the walk, as befits a metaphor, cannot be precisely counted out. It is as if all New York yearns to find a way through the air across a city that is encumbered, regulated, time-kept, pecuniary, at best indifferent and at worst a leering bully. That the Twin Towers might prove irresistible to much rougher customers than Petit and his friends on 11 September 2001, McCann leaves to a hint or two, for which we may be thankful. Let the Great World Spin is not, whatever US critics say, a “9/11 novel”.

McCann, an Irishman now living in New York, is known for two collections of stories and a couple of novels including 2003’s Dancer, based on the exploits of another balletic exile in New York, Nureyev. Here he deploys a technique, much used in commercial fiction, in which characters are invented and manipulated to converge on a single point of space and history, such as a bank robbery or terror attack. Chief among McCann’s personnel are two Irish brothers. Ciaran flees an IRA bomb in Dublin to join his brother, Corrigan, a member of a Roman Catholic mendicant order with a mission among the whores who ply their trade under the Major Deegan Expressway in the South Bronx. Other characters include Claire Soderberg, mourning in her Park Avenue penthouse a son fallen in Vietnam, and her husband Solomon, a criminal-court judge.

McCann has a sympathetic talent for character and a flair for the lyric. Corrigan buys one of his flock under the Deegan a Coke: “Jazzlyn clapped her hands in delight, took it from him, pulled the ring off, sauntered away. A row of eighteen-wheelers was parked along the expressway. She popped her leg on the silver grille and sipped from the can, then suddenly threw the drink on the ground and climbed up into the truck. Halfway in the door she was already removing her swimsuit. Corrigan turned away. The cola lay in a black puddle in the gutter beneath her. It happened times in a row.” But note that even in this beautiful passage, “in delight”, “suddenly” and “already” are otiose. Every Irish writer has his own private battle with blarney, the war fought out in James Joyce between “The Dead” and Ulysses

There are wobbles, which remind the reader that McCann, too, is walking a tightrope. His history is American-sketchy. There is no hint of the principal preoccupations of the summer of 1974 in New York, which were the rise in the price of gasoline and the collapse of Wall Street. Two of his characters, downtown junkie artists, are given a 1927 Pontiac Landau, which is forever parked across the narrative. Classic cars should be avoided in fiction.

Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader. McCann’s first chapter reads like Time magazine at its most solemn and sentimental. (“Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey.”) The story proper, as in so many novels, begins some way into the second chapter.

In assembling his characters for their meeting with Petit and destiny, McCann must also relate their history up to that famous day. For all the troubled saintliness of Corrigan, or the numb fragility of Claire Soderberg, this approach, repeated 10 times, is a little monotonous. McCann describes Petit’s walk both in prose lyric and also in dialogue. Nothing in either version touched me like Petit’s flapping trousers and long hair in Jean-Louis Blondeau’s photographs from the north tower. More than anything I want to know: are flared trousers aerostatic?

• James Buchan’s latest novel is The Gate of Air (Maclehose Press)

Jasmine: I have to admit, I agree with much of your assessment of the book. Still, we appear to be in the minority, which is why I thought it a good choice for this month, a possibility to open up the debate about what makes good literature.

Aisling: Thanks for posting that excellent review. It made me seek out the YouTube I posted today, just to see what he meant about the flared trousers.

God, some people are being very snotty with their remarks! Thought this was an excellent choice of book, although it is not perfect – some of the strands, especially the graffiti and the internet portions felt extraneous and tacked-on. Read it when it first came out, thought it was fantastic, very moving, and unfairly overlooked by Irish critics. Interestingly, just finished another 9/11 novel, “Falling man” which possibly appeals to snootier critics, but I just found very cold and with an utter tin ear for dialogue. Treats 9/11 like a philosophical debate rather than a violent event. McCann showed much greater insight into human condition.

The book is about New York, and life. And in life nothing ever ends, the loose bits survive when we have passed on in friends, in relations. He’s a brilliant writer, the characters read true and the book is a stunning comment on our crazy world. Gabrielle.

So, Mairead, not sure about the whole copyright thing, but the picture credit on page 237 is, as you observantly point out, “Fernand Yunque Marcano” – the character in the chapter, “Tag”. It’s really clever, and I had to have someone point it out to me before I noticed it myself. As a journalist, though! i do wonder what the story is with copyright credits. Unless, of course, there really is someone called Fernand Yungque Marcano….

Mairead, you are dead right. It’s at the back of the book, the acknowledgement of the true photographer. Possibly that pic is so famous anyway that everyone knows who really took it. But a lovely in-joke. I wish novels had more pics in general.

Rosita I am interested in Colum’s response to your questions on his research into the charcters in the novel
It is a credit to him to be able to write so amazingly about lthe dark side of life in New York City and he an Irishman