Note: Please enjoy my review of Hisham Matar’s My Friends for RealClearBooks.
In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes. New York: Grove Atlantic, 2024. 496 pp. $18.00.
There is a much visited Facebook page that used to be called “I Fucking Love Science”, which for business reasons was renamed “IFLScience”, becoming one of these curious cases, like KFC, of an initialism that doesn’t officially stand for anything. It does coverage of popular science, discoveries like a new species of anaconda or a neutron star. That profane profession of love is cringe in a few ways, and I wonder how effective such promotion of the subject can be. The pushy demoticism puts some people off; it’s what the would-be cool high school teacher says on the first day of class, and if showing is anywhere better than telling, it’s probably there, where unremarked enthusiasm is the best example to set. Reading this new piece of science fiction, In Ascension, one doesn’t quite want to make that profession, but rather pass the book along with a firm recommendation. One is wary of crediting novels with salutary effects, but here goes: this one might well encourage a youthful scientific curiosity in someone who doesn’t like all the pandering.
Scotsman Martin MacInnes had previously published Infinite Ground (2016), which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and Gathering Evidence (2020). In Ascension, first published in the UK in 2023, was on the long list for that years’ Booker Prize. We begin with the narrator Leigh Hasenboch’s early years in Rotterdam’s northern district, where the land is “newly excavated, freshly claimed from the seafloor.” Her mother, Fenna is a perhaps too diligent mathematician, her father, Geert, an architect manqué who works for the regional water board, up against the tides of climate change. Geert beats Leigh, and is rough with Leigh’s younger sister Helena. He dies shortly after much of his work is automated, and the children leave home, Helena for mathematics followed by financial law, and Leigh, inspired by an epiphanic dip in the Nieuwe Maas, for marine biology. Near the end of her doctorate she gets a place as a factotum on the expedition of the Endeavour to explore a newly discovered hydrothermal vent. Down in the deep waters, there are archaea, early organisms which later “grouped with bacteria to form a new kind of cell, containing a nucleus”, from which are built you, me, the postman, the postman’s dog, the postman’s dog’s fleas, and all the rest. Meanwhile, a mysterious innovation in propulsion technology makes travel beyond the solar system possible. Still disturbed and intrigued by her experiences diving from the Endeavour, Leigh is next in California working for the Institute for Coordinated Research in Space, figuring out how to grow algae indoors, so that it might be used as a food source on long range space missions.
Leigh will of course be on one such mission. We know this from the blurb, but for our narrator there is a slow, many-staged awakening to purpose, and even fate. This will take her from her ailing mother, leaving Helena all the filial responsibility, but the scientific progress is actually leading Leigh, and her whole race with her, back to origins: the depths of the sea are much like the reaches of space. The dilation between the personal and the cosmic along a looping storyline recall the films Solaris and Interstellar, and MacInnes adds a fascination with non-human life, while taking advantage of the long novel’s greater latitude for explaining the science. He does all the tasks he had set himself pretty well. The family saga had looked to be a little too neatly schematic in Part One, but it eventually works, informed by Helena’s perspective in the penultimate Part Four. Life on both ships, the Endeavour and the interstellar Nereus, is detailed and cramped, while the wonders beyond the hull are given their rapturous due. We’re fed all the biology and physics we need to get us through the mission, and a little more for curiosity’s sake, but not surfeited with it. The suspense worked up by the plot is from wanting to know not just what happens next, but also what happened before. So as not to get ahead of the author’s designs, one can leave it at saying that those two concerns are very much connected (Leigh could adapt T.S. Eliot and declare that “In my end is our beginning.”)
As for faults, MacInnes resorts in places to the sort of dramatic trickery that is probably more proper to the multiplex than to the page. He needs to make the fathoming of the sea vent exciting, but all he has to work with is numbers, so he has a shipmate call out “thirty-six” so Leigh can stun us with the stat in context: “36 kilometres. Three times the depth of the Mariana Trench.” A little later a higher-up says there’s another “200” to go. “200 meters?” Leigh asks. “Stefan shook his head. ‘Not metres. Kilometres.’” On his way to launching Leigh to the stars, MacInnes stages some exposition at a remote observatory, whose giant antennae, “soft, curved white parabolas”, have picked up some interesting signals, and Leigh’s astonishment makes for an uncomfortable déjà entendu (“Who else knows about this?” “So we’re saying these are connected?”). These scenes seem a little too ready to be taken and trimmed down for a film script, like they’re getting ahead of themselves. And In Ascension does have some grand sequences that could be nicely done up with camera and computer wizardry (perhaps overseen by James Cameron if he ever gets himself disentangled from those lithe blue aliens). For now, we have a fine novel whose five hundred pages fly past us pretty near light speed, and we’ll feel pleasantly dazed, and curious to see more, in its wake.