IN ASCENSION, by Martin MacInnes
How to comprehend the vastness of the cosmos; how to comprehend not just the mystery of our place and purpose within it, but also our own lives as we live them on earth? Martin MacInnes’s Booker-longlisted third novel, “In Ascension,” is an elegiac voyage through these questions, a vaulting exploration of the interplay between the micro and the macro, the human and the otherworldly.
The novel follows Leigh, a driven but reserved marine biologist, on a journey from deep sea to deep space. Investigations of a newly revealed marine trench far deeper than anything discovered before — measurements suggesting it may reach an impossible 200 kilometers, compared with the Mariana Trench’s 11 kilometers, for context — lead to revelations groundbreaking and eerie. The strange experiences of the explorers of the trench are echoed by a spate of unconnected yet simultaneous breakthroughs in space travel globally.
Leigh is one of these first deep-sea divers, moving into unknown depths with little trepidation. It is in the natural world that her attachments lie, most notably an affinity with water and its organisms — awe in “every cubic millimeter of water densely filled with living stuff,” as she puts it during a formative, perilous swim.
The living of life itself puzzles Leigh more, however. A difficult childhood in the Netherlands, a distant mother with deteriorating health and a sister on the other side of the world: There’s a more fraught kind of symbiosis at play here, the bonds of family that the deep-sea mission allows her to retreat from.
But Leigh is not as self-contained as she believes she is, or as she wants to be. Throughout the novel these relationships contextualize, and humanize, the remote glories of scientific endeavor.
Leigh’s connection to, and reverence for, the natural world is profoundly moving. MacInnes’s descriptions are lush, almost devotional at times — “outlines of animals burst in rapturous communication”; “fractal sponges and long, leaflike creatures built completely from repetition, self-similar organisms stating themselves again and again.”
Finding a way to create algae crops for space missions, Leigh’s focus is not simply on nourishment; she believes intuitively that the presence and maintenance of living things offers the best protection against space’s dehumanizing expanse. To look to the stars here also requires looking through a microscope at the humblest of organisms.
And so the novel suggests that, in order to leave the world, there must be an understanding of where we begin. Leigh was born in Rotterdam, a city below sea level, on land reclaimed from the ocean. Her choice of career echoes the marine heritage of her violent father, a fisherman turned hydraulic engineer. We return to our formative matter, the things that make us, even if we seek to transcend.
Occasionally, during sections detailing Leigh’s research and training, I wanted to return to the tense, shivering fascination of deep-sea discovery. Yet amid the recounting of preparation exercises and laboratory experiments, I came to appreciate this pacing as an exercise in readerly patience, a necessary preparation mirroring Leigh’s own.
The payoff is worth it. When the mission takes Leigh into the unknowable reaches of interstellar space, we are enveloped in an ever deeper sense of interconnectedness, of patterns bigger and more beautiful than us.
Human beings hurt each other, but remain drawn to each other. A clouded lake shore is as alien, and as astonishing, as anything found outside our planet. The smallest of things and the vastest of things prickle with wonder: “Above us and below us this brilliant radiance.”
IN ASCENSION | By Martin MacInnes | Black Cat Grove Atlantic | 512 pp. | Paperback, $18
