In Ascension

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ISBN 9781838956257|Paperback|496 pages|2023|Atlantic Books

Travelling from the ocean's depths to the edge of the solar system, In Ascension uses the tropes of sci-fi to remind us that there's no place like our home planet.

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In Ascension starts with two sisters growing up in the Dutch city of Rotterdam. There’s Leigh: tall, clever, slightly chaotic, fascinated by the sea and its biology. Her father Geert, who works for a water board, maintaining the dykes and engineering the supply to keep the sea at bay, mistreats her, and she can’t wait to get away and begin a career as a marine biologist. Her sister, Helena – a quieter, smaller person, who avoids being on the receiving end of their father’s violence – ends up as a financial lawyer. Leigh travels all around the world, while Helen feels more closely bound to their ageing, widowed mother.

Leigh takes a position on a survey ship called the Endeavour exploring the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean. This voyage uncovers an anomaly: a huge cavity in the mid-ocean floor, a crater so deep that the scientists assume their measuring equipment must be malfunctioning. Exploratory dives in the area result in strange, inexplicable consequences: there’s an odd light; divers fall ill; Leigh experiences unexpected bliss. When a crew member is lost, the voyage is abandoned, to Leigh’s disappointment.

Then, a second mystery. Astronomers detect a strange object on a path through the solar system: a kilometres-long ovoid decorated with a gigantic grid of intersecting spiral lines. Initially it is believed to be on a collision course with Earth, but instead the object swings out into the Oort cloud and vanishes. A spaceship is fitted out to follow, explore and hopefully re-encounter this object, with Leigh training to join the crew. All this alongside the mental decline of her mother, on the other side of the Atlantic.

MacInnes brings the novel home with a haunting sequence of episodes that capture its main themes: belonging; reverence; the instabilities that are woven into reality; and above all, our place in nature. “It’s my strong opinion,” MacInnes says in an author’s note, “that climate disaster has been and continues to be enabled primarily through our refusal to accept human integration in the natural world.”

The whole novel is beautifully written: richly atmospheric, full of brilliantly evoked detail. Nobody else writes like MacInnes, and this magnificent book is his best yet.

Excerpted from the review in The Guardian.

Author:

Martin MacInnes

ISBN:

9781838956257

Publisher:

Atlantic Books

Binding:

Paperback

Pages:

496

Year of Publication:

2023

Edition:

First

Condition:

New

Country of Origin:

India

About the Contributors

Martin MacInnes lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. His debut novel, Infinite Ground (2016), won the Somerset Maugham Award. His second novel, Gathering Evidence (2020), led to his inclusion in The National Centre for Writing/British Council's list of ten writers shaping the UK's future. In Ascension is his third novel.

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