When I set to read, well listen to, Transatlantic, I had prepared myself for a mediocre competition with McCann’s earlier widely-respected and seriously-loved (at least by me) novel Let the Great World Spin. In fact, I am set to teach the National Book Award-winning novel to my seniors this coming fall, so I set my expectations high for this more recent book, convinced that it would not measure up.
To add to this assumption was the fact a couple teacher friends, whose reading tastes I respect, had also panned the book, and, really, who wants to be the giddy ingenue choosing to love too much when other sophisticates have already told you not to waste your energy? (Perhaps I can tackle the psychology of rating books among friends who read in another post…) But because I was teaching McCann’s other novel, and Transatlantic had popped up as a suggested listen on my Audible account, I thought this might be a nice option for summer my walks.
Transatlantic begins with three seemingly separate stories about men who have bent the arc of history as they traveled from North America to Ireland: first, John Alcock and Arthur Brown successfully compete to fly across the Atlantic in 1919; second, Frederick Douglass crisscrosses the Emerald Isle in 1845, lecturing the Irish on the realities and travesty of American slavery while bearing witness to the emerging devastation of the potato famine and O’Connell’s fight for freedom; finally, former senator George Mitchell leaves his young wife and newborn son in New York City on a quest to find peace in the British Isles as they attempt to put the “Irish Question” to bed in 1998. Each story, in terms of character and action, seems detached from the others, yet the stories do feel connected in the way they bring the reader back and forth across the Atlantic, even conjuring up our own links to the island and its heritage. Just as everyone gets to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, this novel helps us all to recognize why that kinship exists even when we can’t trace our roots directly.
Each of the fictionalized accounts of these very real historical events engaged me enough because of how little I knew about them. While I must have known in theory someone else had flown a plane across the Atlantic before Charles Lindbergh, I had never given much thought to those forgotten trailblazers. Certainly, I had no clue Douglass had traveled beyond our shores and shared his Narrative with the Irish Quakers, Protestants, and Catholics. Having lived and studied in Dublin for a semester in 1996, however, I did know some of what Mitchell worked to accomplish in the Good Friday agreement. In some regards, just reading the first half of the novel would have been enough for me as I redrew the line of Irish history from the 19th century to today and recalled some of what the Irish people have faced and how much they have contributed.
Yet, what fascinates me most about listening to this novel was the use of a female Irish actress’ voice Geraldine Hughes to narrate the story. Generally, the gender of the narrator matches the gender of the author, especially when a first person narrator is not identified as being male or female. At first her feminine Irish accent intrigued me given that McCann is an Irishman living and teaching in New York and the novel is told via an omniscient, seemingly heterodiegetic (outside the story itself) narrator. I should have known, however, once the second half of the novel begins that I was in for a treat. Once McCann establishes his version of the facts behind these famous men and their travels, the novel then takes up the stories of the less noticeable women who populate and help contextualize what really happened.
It’s the shift towards this female perspective that justifies and explains the choice for Hughes a the narratorial voice of the audible version, and my delight in that decision ultimately confirmed my love for what McCann was attempting to do in this novel. While the experiences of men (even enslaved minorities) have always driven history, McCann reminds us the mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, and friends that ultimately influence and shape what happens above the waterline. Dropping below the surface with McCann’s female narrator, who does reveal herself towards the end of the novel, enables the reader to imagine the millions of unspoken and unheard stories that people our histories and remind us not only of the connections from one side of the Atlantic to the other, but from the near and public side of the gender divide to its lesser known and more private view where women quietly give voice to all our experiences.