In Ascension - Martin MacInnes
- Publisher – Atlantic Books
- Published – Out Now
- Price – £9.99 paperback | £4.31 Kindle
My brain does this very weird thing where the more people tell me to do something, the less I want to do it. That extends to all parts of my life, and it also includes book and film recommendations. The more I hear about how good something is, no matter how laser-targeted at my tastes it may be, the less I want to know about it. In Ascension has been on my reading list since the beginning of the year, as I was aiming to read all of last year's Booker Prize Longlist, and I've been hearing nothing but good things about it for months. And the more I heard about it, the more it slipped down the list.
But the new Booker longlist is going to be announced in the next few days, and In Ascension just won the Arthur C Clarke Prize, so I figured I should probably get around to finally reading it. And I'm very glad I did.
Here's the blurb:
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms - what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.
Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency's work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.
If you reduce it purely to elements of plot, In Ascension isn't particularly original. As I was reading it I was drawing comparisons with Annihilation and Pushing Ice, and at the end I was struck by some similarities with Interstellar. But what makes this work where Interstellar failed, and what makes me love it rather than thinking that it's just derivative, is how beautifully MacInnes captures his people and how willing he is to take his time to immerse us in his world and to build to the ending.
The story of In Ascension takes place over years, and MacInnes is in absolutely no rush to get to where he's going. It definitely falls on the litfic end of the literary SF spectrum and that's especially apparent in the opening section. I know a few people who have bounced off this book in the first few chapters because they wanted SF and the first 20% of the novel is absolutely not SF. But I loved it, and it's critical to lend weight to the rest of the book.
All the way through the novel we're shown echoes of things that have come before. Leigh thinks at great length about the records of humanity sent out into space aboard Voyager and how we eventually lost contact with it; later, she sends her own records back and forth to her mother before losing contact. Early on we see Leigh join the crew of a deep ocean research vessel using unmanned craft to explore a newly discovered trench in the sea floor. We're told that unmanned craft are better suited for this purpose because people are soft and protecting them is too difficult, too expensive. Later, as Leigh and her new crew prepare to leave Earth, we learn that they chose a manned mission over unmanned ships because "Sentient flesh hitting the coordinates - that's why we were here, and why this wasn't a more elegant and streamlined uncrewed craft". And the second we're told this we remember the dread of the crushing ocean, the way the unmanned craft crumbled under the weight of the depths, and suddenly the whole mission seems that little bit more dangerous.
Speaking of that early section out in the depths of the Atlantic, I was particularly impressed with how real the whole expedition felt. One of my favourite books this year was Mensun Bound's The Ship Beneath The Ice, which details the two expeditions to recover the wreck of Shackleton's Endurance from beneath the ice of Antarctica. Parts of that book are more viscerally terrifying than any horror novel I've ever read, and I learned much more about the challenges of deep sea salvage than I'd ever thought to consider. I have no idea if MacInnes has experience in this field or not, but the early sections dealing with the expedition into the depths of the Atlantic filled me with that same sense of claustrophobic dread as Bound's book. I'm not in any way a scientist and when I read SF I generally have no idea if the technology I'm reading about is even remotely accurate or possible, but knowing that the oceanic section was grounded in reality really sold me on the accuracy of everything else that follows in the book.
Frankly, I'm annoyed that I waited so long to read this. I fully understand how it ended up on the Booker longlist and though I've only read one of the other novels on the Clarke shortlist, I think this is very much deserving of all the accolades it's received. Definitely one of my favourites this year.
This blog doesn't have a comments section, by design. If you want to chat about any of the posts here, drop me an email at chris @ loottheroom dot uk.