McCann, who grew up in Dublin, and who has lived across Europe and in Mexico, settled in Manhattan more than a decade ago. In some senses, this new novel knocked at his door. He has been led before, by the nerve and grace of his style as much as anything, to gravity and its defiance in Dancer, his fictional imagining of how it might have felt to be Rudolf Nureyev, McCann put his prose through all kinds of disciplined flight. From his first collection of stories, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, Colum McCann's language has been all about precision and detail, the surprise of finding new ways never to put a foot wrong. Like Petit, the author had done some serious preparation of his own for this moment, this stepping out. Out into the void, never once losing faith. She moved on his skin like water… he held the bar in muscular memory and in one flow went forward …" The pole was 55 pounds, half the weight of a woman. He played out the aluminium pole along his hands. He paused there a moment, pulled the line tighter by the strength of his eyes.
His slippers were thin, the soles made of buffalo hide. The cable nested between his big and second toes for grip. First he slid his toes, then his sole, then his heel. "One foot on the wire – his better foot, the balancing foot. That breakfast time journey into space has, since 9/11, been widely mythologised, not least in Petit's own account, To Reach the Clouds, and the recent documentary, Man on Wire, but it has waited 35 years for its full poetic drama to be inhabited in the sinew and cadence of McCann's sentences: Colum McCann's story of interlocking lives in New York is structured on either side of this interlude, and bears no direct relation to it, but it is the brief impossibility of Petit's balancing act that holds it together. I n the exact centre of this novel, poised, is a 10-page account of Philippe Petit's preparation for his 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre.
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