Mind Picker: In Ascension

A twitching of fingers, an arc of the neck. The first stirring of a cell. Ascension: bodies rising and lifting off the ground, all of us airborne, all of us unlimited. We only look like we are rising when really we are falling. I barely recognise the faces around me: I have never seen them as expressive, as exquisite, as this. So much of the face is ordinarily buried, only two or three times in a life falling into expression, into joy, like this.

At over five hundred pages, In Ascension is a long read, comprised of five (or is it seven?) sections set around (and below and above) the world as we’re about to know it. Part sci-fi, part cli-fi, part domestic drama, author Martin MacInnes imagines a near future with a hotter planet, corporations ever more in control of the scientific process, and mysteries that trigger responses in humans at the cellular level. Told from the POV of a Dutch marine biologist, I have to admit that I was pretty bored with all of the digressions to her challenging childhood — even if the point seems to be about what is passed down through the cells — but as unengaged as I was with some sections, there were others that were thrilling and meaning-filled. I liked the science and the sense of awe at the natural world and the plot when things were happening — MacInnes captivated me with the uncanny bits — but too many parts made me sigh with impatience, and overall, this just felt unpleasantly long. Not a complete win for me, but I’d read the author again. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I dwelled on this as I waited out on deck, watching the activity. I questioned what else I had already missed so far, in my own life, simply through the limits of my character. If we were blind to anything representing a new category, then our individual histories might have amounted to a series of glancing encounters with unspeakable wonders – as a general summation, it felt about right. Life as a repeated failure to apprehend something. Coming close then veering away again, sensing this unnameable category, music heard distantly through a series of doors, a dull, echoing bass, a sound hitting your body.

I didn’t know anything about the plot going in, so I don’t want to spoil any surprises, and will just say: When we first meet Leigh Hasenbosch, she’s a young Dutch girl dealing with a violent father and a disengaged mother; her father is mostly under pressure because he’s a hydraulic engineer coping with rising sea levels and their effects on the Dutch dyke system, and as her mother is a maths genius working at the local university, Leigh understands and forgives her detachment. While swimming in a pond one day, Leigh has an epiphany about the microorganisms around her and within her and her place in the universe; and when she grows up to become a leading researcher into the earliest forms of life on Earth and their implications for our survival into the future, Leigh will have to choose between her career and a mother who is increasingly in need of her; fortunately, Leigh has a younger sister to pick up the slack.

As this domestic drama plays out over the course of her life, Leigh’s research takes her to some exotic and compelling locales — ie, the interesting bits — and while the overall point seems to be that life is such a rare and valuable phenomenon that we ought to honour the living from the single-celled, to one another, up to the level of the planet itself, for me, the bits were more interesting than the whole. This is sci-fi (not my usual genre), and while I thought that MacInnes wrote engagingly about biology and ecology and the genesis of life, when the story focussed on the mechanics and engineering of new technologies, I’m not sure even he understood how they were supposed to work. (Grids and Cassini ovals and autonomous slime mold?)

A family is a group of strangers with a destructive desire for common nostalgia. We had privileged access to so much of each other’s life, our early life in particular, but I’m not sure we ever really knew what to do with that. I’m not sure we ever really knew each other, in the end.

There was something interesting, if mostly unexplored, in the relationship between the sisters — why doesn’t Helena remember their father as abusive? — but I didn’t understand why the author needed his main character to be female (her gender doesn’t play into the plot at all), or why she needed to be Dutch (other than her father battling the dykes? The legacy of the Dutch East India Company living on in modern day corporatocracy?), or why so much of the story centred on Leigh’s parents (ie, the boring parts). It’s a subtle work of climate fiction — mosquitoes in Amsterdam, smog in Jakarta, everyone getting sunburned everywhere — but the best parts were about mystery and awe and connection; and the best parts were very good. Hopefully I haven’t said too much; the surprises are surprising.