Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann

May 03, 2019

Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann

1. What is your favourite/most moving quote from the novel?

2. Let the Great World Spin is told through the eyes of eleven different characters. What is the effect of this chorus of voices? Why do you think the author chose to tell the story this way?

3. If you had to choose a single character to narrate the whole book, who would it be, and why?

4. As McCann explains in the author's note, the book's title comes from "Locksley Hall", an 1835 poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. What does the title mean to you, and do you think it affects your relationship to the book as a reader? Would this be a different novel, do you think, if it had been called something else, like "The Walk"?

5. The novel opens with an extraordinary tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers. This is a fictionalization of a famous stunt by Philippe Petit in August 1974—yet the tightrope walker in the novel remains anonymous, unrelated to any of the other characters. What do you think the effect is of placing this historical fact into the fiction of the other characters’ stories?

6. How important do you think this historic walk is in the novel?

7. In the chapter titled “This Is the House That Horse Built” we get an intimate glimpse into the life of a New York prostitute in the 1970s. She considers herself a failure. Do you agree with her?

8. All but one of the chapters in Let the Great World Spin are set over the course of a couple of days in early August 1974. Why do you think McCann chose to jump thirty-two years, to 2006, for the final chapter? In what ways do these pages add to, complicate, or even change the story that came before?

9. What do you think Jaslyn discovers at the end of the novel?

10. It can be argued that Corrigan and Jazzlyn are the book’s two main characters, yet they die in the opening chapters. Why do you think McCann chose to allow their lives to be destroyed so early in the book? Why did he choose not to tell any of the story through their points of view? In what ways do you think that decision makes these two people more–or less–central and powerful in the story as a whole?

(Questions adapted from those issued by publisher.)

Click to read a blog entry that explains further the link between Tennyson and McCann.