“I'm not a scientist at all. I only read scientific books because I don't understand them. So science for me is like a kind of embroidery or tapestry. In it I can do with my imagination exactly what I really want,” Salvador Dalí proclaimed on one occasion, and in a similar way – saving all distances from the Master – I have felt after reading Ascension, by Martin MacInnes.
A novel that I found really fascinating despite the fact that I have been left in the dark about some of its content, not only because of the open ending, but also because it uses with great self-confidence a battery of concepts from biology, physics and even science. high-tech construction techniques to which one, very literate, can only react in a Dalinian key: they are suggestive to me largely because I have not understood them.
Martin MacInnes (Inverness, 1983) is one of the figures of the new British narrative. He has published two untranslated novels here, Infinite ground and Gathering evidence, and was selected by the British Council and The Guardian newspaper among the ten authors with the greatest potential in the country.
Ascensión was among the nominees for the 2023 Booker Prize, although no place has been made in the shortlist of six among which the winner will be decided on the 26th. In Spain it is published by ADN, one of the literary imprints of the Anaya group, with translation by Javier Calvo, a real guarantee.
The novel begins with the protagonist, Leigh Hasenboch, sailing on the ship Endeavor – the same name as that of Captain Cook and the space shuttle that replaced the Challenger – with a scientific expedition that discovers in the Atlantic a trench much deeper than that of the Marianas, which is the best known.
Although in principle he has been assigned to minor tasks, Leigh manages to be allowed to dive, and on one of the dives he experiences a strange sensation that lasts several days and with which he becomes peculiarly aware of his body, as if his skin "was alive,” while noticing “how each cell hummed and spun.”
The Endeavor returns to land without many explanations being given for what was found there, and some time later Leigh, already a microbiologist expert in genetic programming, who often dreams of her underwater experience, is recruited for a space research program. He is asked to develop algae crops that will feed the crew on a thirteen-month trip with the Nereus ship to the edge of the solar system, where a strange oval object of interstellar origin has been detected, a trip, of course, in which will be more involved than imagined.
Leigh, on the other hand, carries a backpack of family complications with her mother, her sister and the memory of an abusive father – the most topical part –, which generate recurring tension.
In MacInnes' prose, allusions to microgravity, radiation or asteroid classification software; prokaryotes, bacteria and archaea in symbiosis; Slime molds and other organic references achieve a remarkable plausibility – at least for me – with poetic resonances. The author points out that they are the result of fifteen years of scientific reading.
Halfway between science fiction, psychological novel and novel of ideas, Ascensión's proposal leaves unknowns: MacInness confesses to seeking the balance between "mystery and revelation", and the desire to give his creations "an irresolvable quality, a strangeness." lasting.”
Like certain films of recent times such as Interstellar by Cristopher Nolan or The Arrival by Denis Villeneuve, it induces us to meditate on the genuineness of our existence and our family ties based on original, and beautifully developed, hypotheses about the future. of the planet and the human species.
