In ascension

I had high hopes for this novel primarily because it was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Yet, I found it to be a disappointingly complex sci-fi story that just didn’t seem to fit smoothly with a family drama or a story about a woman’s scientific ambitions. Notwithstanding his efforts to tackle

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big questions about the interconnectedness of humans the natural world and the universe, MacInnes’ ideas remained obscure. His settings in oceans, deserts, space, and the industrial city of Rotterdam were indeed evocative. His protagonist, however, was more nebulous. Clearly, Leigh was highly motivated by her science, yet her familial relationships, especially with her abusive father, don’t seem to be well explored or fit well with the overarching theme of the novel.

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an interesting and well written novel that to me does not really work, because it is caught between its imaginative near-future set-up about a space flight and bioengineering immortality and the very different inward-looking focus of a contemporary family psychological novel. so it moves awkwardly

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between the momentum of an sf story and the more static inner issues of a psychological novel, and that complicates and ultimately compromises both impulses. at the same time both the author's attention to detail and the rhythms of his prose herald a gifted writer, but i'm not certain that this approach could ever work; perhaps he tried it as an experiment.

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This is a good book. The story, mostly told in the first person, seemed at first to be mostly plot-driven the way sci-fi often is. Even though Leigh does describe growing up in her, close, caring, but not at all warm sort of family in Rotterdam, she speaks more about her early interest in biology

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and her path toward a pHd, and eventually a job heading a lab that is an important part of a new space project.

But I gradually became aware that, in this complex novel, each step on her way was related both to her traumatic childhood, to her parents and sister, and to her adventures to come. The book is about people and emotions as well as scientific and engineering details There are also questions about how life on Earth, including we humans, came to be the way we are now and, what might happen in the future.

Only when she finds herself one of a crew of three on a spacecraft moving rapidly through the solar system, toward interstellar space, did I think the pace slowed and wander into maybe too much detail. But that doesn’t last for long, and in the rest of the book Macinnes skillfully describes what could be only day-to-day routine in ways that kept me entranced to the end.

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