Raised by a single mother, the two boys share a room, where Ciaran hears his little brother reciting prayers every night until morning. Ciaran tells the story of their upbringing, detailing his brother’s-whom everyone just calls “Corrigan”-early interest in religion.
That is what the world is” (Aleksander Hemon, The Lazarus Project).Ĭiaran and John Andrew Corrigan are brothers from Dublin, Ireland.
As a result, the book mimics one of the beautiful facts of human existence, as stated by its epigraph: “All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. In this way, Let the Great World Spin is a deeply thematic novel that presents a wide range of characters and stories without forcing them into chronological or situational uniformity. The other narratives-the stories that have nothing to do with Corrigan-are held together by the tightrope walk. He occupies a great deal of the novel, whether directly or indirectly, and the majority of the stories engage with either his life working with and befriending prostitutes in the Bronx or with his eventual death in a car crash. Corrigan, an Irishman who becomes a Catholic monk working in the Bronx, is an example of this. This is often brought to bear through the use of several key characters whose stories frequently stand out and resurface in the many others. At the same time, some of the stories, however disparate, actually do link up with one another.
Rather, they often simply overlap with it, even if just for a moment, creating something of a mosaic held together by the unifying event. Unconcerned with forging a linear storyline, the book loosely centers itself around Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers on August 7, 1974, though not all of the stories directly relate to this event. Let the Great World Spin is a polyphonic novel, which means that it is written from multiple different perspectives, ultimately following a large cast of characters.
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