In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

There have been very few reading experiences I've had where I finished a book and immediately turned back to the first page to read it all again. But this novel has such compelling subject matter and central characters that I wanted to experience the story a second time to see how it all fit together. There's still a lot about it which feels mysterious and which I'm thinking about, but it's left a lasting impression and really compelled me to re-view the world around me. Not to get too grandiose about it, but I feel like we naturally get so caught in focusing on our immediate environment and our daily lives that we can easily forget how enormous the universe is around us and how infinitesimally small life can be. It's usually only when we suddenly see the starry night sky when it's not obscured by light pollution or notice tiny creatures thriving in a rock pool that we remember the relative scale of the world around us. For me this happened late one evening while driving with the top down in Death Valley and I saw the glowing immensity of the stars in the sky. Reading “In Ascension” gave me a similar sense of awe. It pulled me out of myself to think about the depths of time and space. It shows how an individual is relatively small amidst this vastness, but also that everyone is an integral part of it.

This novel could definitely be called science fiction, but I think of it more as an environmental novel and a psychological investigation into the meaning of life. The story centres around Leigh, a scientist who studies the marine world and cultivates a strain of algae as a sustainable food source. When technological advances mean that deep space travel is possible her discovery is used for an important application. However, this is more than a professional interest for Leigh because she's always felt a deep connection with the scope of life on Earth. She survived an extremely difficult childhood. During this time she wasn't necessarily drawn to suicide, but took respite in the knowledge that her own existence was the result of chance and there's a powerful section when her life hangs in the balance. This is one of those instances in my reading where the scene and all the emotion wrapped up in it are etched in my memory. It's such a moving moment where her own life feels intensely precarious and she realises how dynamically alive the world is around her. This also inspires a sense of wonder which leads her to exploring the furthest depths of the ocean and the farthest reaches of outer space. I've always been entranced by documentaries about these remote regions of our world and the universe so I found this to be utterly compelling. It's an imaginative journey of discovery that's about the origins of life and the reason for our existence. It's also about the fragility of our environment. It's about the price paid when the progress of our civilization is driven by capitalist enterprises.

Even though this book is about such big issues and questions, it's also such a personal story. Leigh is a complex character who is intensely dedicated to her work and is really driven by curiosity. It's so interesting following her transformation and what she finds venturing so deeply into the unknown. She's in many ways quite straightforward in her desires, but she also bears an immense hurt which distances her from others. She's very solitary and prone to isolation. This creates tension between her and her family especially as her ageing mother is in need. But she also feels a strong connection to all life. In some ways she's utterly anonymous while also possibly possessing immense importance. I won't give any spoilers but the novel takes a surprising turn later on when the narrative shifts to another character and suddenly we're given an entirely new perspective on both Leigh and events surrounding her. I began to question how reliable Leigh really is as a narrator and how much I could trust the reality of what is being shown. This is partly what inspired me to go right back to the beginning of this novel. The story has a circular quality as well which comes to feel so profound and made me want to float around in it for longer. That's what reading this novel is like. It's like being suspended in this character's consciousness as the immensity of life and time and the world unfurls.

So this book made a big impression on me. Martin MacInnes is such a fascinating writer in how he pursues ambiguities surrounding life's big mysteries, but in a way which is continuously compelling and unpretentious. His debut novel “Infinite Ground” similarly delved into questions to do with the nature of being and our connection to one another. I feel like “In Ascension” explores these questions in a much grander way with not only excellent detail (this novel clearly required a great deal of technical research) but it also shows a wider scope of imagination. It provides answers and a definite conclusion, but also instills a sense of wonder which has left me so much to ponder. It's a book that I know will be well worth reading again and again. I'm sometimes asked what makes me permanently keep a book on my shelves and this is a great example of a novel I know I'll really enjoy returning to. It makes me want to buy a cabin in some remote location where I can clearly see the stars at night and spend all day reading this and my other favourite books over and over.

Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes

It begins like a caper story. A young man named Carlos went missing from a family dinner when he stepped out to use the bathroom and never returned. An investigator is given the case to track him down. But his search almost immediately folds in upon itself when he starts searching the restaurant/Carlos’ office and interviewing people connected to him. The woman he speaks to who he believes is Carlos’ mother is not really his mother and many people at his office are only actors hired to look like productive employees. A scientist named Isabella analyzes traces of Carlos’ biological makeup and expounds upon an increasingly improbably multitude of chemical factors which could have led to him departing. The borders of reality collapse as the investigator struggles to analyse, research and report. Nothing is what it seems. The closer you look at things the more the world becomes an absurdist fantasy. Martin MacInnes’ compelling debut novel is a story of existential crisis and irreconcilable loss.

There’s a wonderful fluidity to MacInnes’ writing so that, although his narrative makes surprising tonal shifts from the comic to the horrific to exhaustively detailed analysis, I felt entranced by his skewed perspective of the world. It all resonates with how the investigator is not just searching for a missing person but for a way to wholly capture experience. By the time all the details are accounted for, time has moved on and the moment has passed and we must mull over it all again trying to faithfully recreate/understand it. If you think of these things as obsessively as the investigator then “it was a marvel, he thought, that any of them managed to do it all, to get from one day to another, to keep everything going just like that.” The novel artfully expresses the fallibility of memory and the clunky mechanics of consciousness. It’s interesting reading this so soon after César Aira (a quote on the cover compares this novel to his work) because Aira equally uses dream-like logic as a way of highlighting the futility of accurately representing reality.

The investigator frequently looks for a more primal understandings of human motivation and behaviour as a way of explaining our actions. Many chapters of this novel are prefaced with quotes from a fictional book about tribal behaviour. The second half of “Infinite Ground” entails the investigator’s travel to “the interior” of a forest where he believes Carlos has slipped away to. Here he embarks on tours to find others who have become lost in this wilderness as well as searching for more authentic modes of life. Hilariously reality here turns out to be as simulated as that in urban life. This is also where the investigator becomes more psychologically revealing as his civility is stripped slowly away. Some time ago he lost his wife and instead of dealing with her loss he seems inspired by Isabella’s proposition that “If it were up to me I would spend my whole life digging up the lost civilization of a single vanished person. There would be no end to the project, Inspector. No end to what may be discovered.” Instead of narrowing down possibilities, the investigator opens his mind to an infinite amount of them. It becomes apparent that “He was out of his depth in a case he couldn’t understand and would never resolve.” This was never about finding out what really happened to Carlos, but accounting for the totality of life when we’re caught in the unstoppable flow of time.

This is an experimental novel whose imagery and ideas challenge our modern sensibilities. In an age when our understanding of other people’s lives are mediated through how they are represented on social media it seems more pertinent than ever to question how we can really understand or know about another’s experience. At the same time there is something pleasingly retro about the novel’s style and earnest manner (perhaps because its action isn’t located in any specific time or place). It harkens back to post-modern literature like Joyce Carol Oates’ phenomenal novel “Mysteries of Winterthurn” which is more about the process of investigation than the crime itself. No matter how objective we try to be in understanding the world it is always refracted through a personal perspective leading the investigator of MacInnes’ novel to see he was “so naïve as to believe in the authenticity of the investigation and the autonomy of his own role.” The totality of the investigator’s being is caught up in searching for answers (which might be why he has no name), but he can only start to see what’s true when he looks hard at himself.