Walking The High-Wire

Colum McCann's wonderful novel Let The Great World Spin - weaving together the threads of the lives of New Yorkers connected in loose ways by Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974 - deserved to have won the National Book Award this week. Humane and compassionate, it rendered the beauty and fragility of human lives and, particularly in the characters of radical monk Corrigan and opera-loving Gloria, conveyed the everyday beauty of people motivated to help and care for those in desparate need of it.
The book seems to have been written not just in homage to Petit's astounding, beautiful act of artistic defiance, but in its spirit. Nothing could match Petit's act, whereby he appeared to transcend the limits of what a human is capable of as he didn't simply walk, but danced, on a wire stretched so far above bystanders that he seemed like a speck in the sky. It was unforgettable and unrepeatable: an act of perfect, illegal funambulation that seemed like an enchantment and could only have been performed by a magician. Petit's own account, To Reach The Clouds, is a breathlessly inspiring account of a unique obsession. James Marsh's 2008 Man On Wire, filmed like a heist movie, is full of spell-binding images that show the impossible being achieved by painstaking degrees.
Let The Great World Spin's main characters never leave the ground, although he evokes Petit as he prepares for the walk in a state between rapture and workmanlike concentration. But McCann makes the reader see how an act of beauty can be transformative and redemptive, and the figure of Petit, almost invisible as he balances over the world below, is a symbol of hope in the world McCann evokes of unbelievable pain and equally inconceivable compassion.