A day in a balanced life

Man on Wire. Photo / Supplied

Summer, 1974. Between the barely-completed towers of New York's World Trade Centre, a wire stretches. Along it, 110 storeys above the ground, a man is walking, jogging, lying down, dancing. He's acrobat and juggler Philippe Petit, defying gravity and the law in his buffalo-skin slippers.

Far below him, Manhattan rushes and roars. For most people, it's "another day, another dolor" till the sight in the sky transfixes - and in some cases transforms - them as they tread the tightropes of their own existences. Petit's walk becomes a focus and a rather laboured metaphor for several frayed lives. There's the drug addict trying to keep her rehabilitation aloft. The mother of a Vietnam casualty resents what she sees as an insult to human precariousness.

An Irish priest working with junkies and prostitutes in the housing projects treats it as a revelation of blessing and beauty. Against the background of a US where Nixon is being impeached, an oil crisis looms, New York City is bankrupt and the Bronx is a war zone, these onlookers connect in all sorts of ways. One takes part in another's death; one grieves alongside another; one sentences a couple to prison.

Around them teems a hectic city of garbage strikes, hookers in hot pants, explosions of graffiti in the subways which one character devotes himself to documenting. McCann covers the social spectrum, from scorch-marked doorways and elevators with used needles to Alencon lace and cream carpets on Park Avenue.

Plus there's Ireland, from which some participants come, and to which one returns to make a fortune on the emerging internet. It's a novel stuffed with eccentricities and craziness: a coyote trotting through inner-city streets; a man who knocks bricks out of buildings so they look different; telephone hackers cruising the nation's lines. The sections with Petit are the most engrossing. He spends most of his savings to make the whole clandestine event possible; faces helicopters and voices screaming at him to jump; turns his head away from photographers.

We could have more of him. We could have less of some others. The lengthy backgrounds for each sometimes clog the plot, as well as making you lose sight of other characters. They all talk, aloud or to themselves, for pages on end. The writing is lyrical, reckless, occasionally careless.

When it works, you're in the presence of a one-off. When it doesn't, you feel you're in the presence of a show-off.

Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury $37.99)
Reviewed by David Hill

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.