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WORK TITLE: Infinite Ground
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://martinmacinnes.com/
CITY: Edinburgh
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: Scottish
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Inverness, Scotland.
EDUCATION:Stirling University; University of York, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Novelist.
AWARDS:Edward and Thomas Lunt Prize; Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award; Manchester Fiction Prize, 2014.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Martin MacInnes is a Scottish writer of psychological thrillers and mysteries. He has published fiction and nonfiction for numerous journals and anthologies, including a series on biography and ecology for Edinburgh Review. Educated at Stirling University and York University, he attends literary festivals in Edinburgh and was enrolled as an “emerging Scottish writer” at Cove Park literature residency. In 2014, he received the Manchester Fiction Prize.
In 2017, MacInnes published the metaphysical detective mystery, Infinite Ground. A satire of ferreting out the nature of reality, a surreal story featuring an unnamed inspector in an unnamed Latin American country. He is investigating the sudden disappearance of Carlos, a family man who vanished from a restaurant without anyone knowing where he went. The inspector follows clues that lead him to Carlos’ unnamed workplace, a shadowy corporation that deals with unusual biological elements, has illegally displaced indigenous villagers, has ecotourists mad at it, and hires actors to portray hardworking employees.
“The strong experimental bent can sap the narrative of some of its vitality, though Maclnnes’s vision is consistently involving and mesmerizing,” according to a writer in Publishers Weekly. The writer added that despite bizarre anthropologies and lack of motive, the story nevertheless has the experimental energy of writers like Ben Marcus and Tom McCarthy. A Kirkus Reviews contributor said that MacInnes creates an atmosphere of lowering menace and enigmatic anthropological text, adding: “The inspector is the only person drawn with any depth, but characterization isn’t the point in a narrative that aims to unsettle and provoke. Vividly suggestive and filled with haunting images.”
In an interview with Stephen Sparks online at Bomb, MacInnes explained how the book addresses existential concepts of humanity as a species on earth and our possible demise: “The book tries to dissolve the idea that humans are discrete things—shapes entirely made of this ‘human’ quality… Safe, secure, permanent. That kind of human has never existed. We are inherently unstable, fluid, various.” Writing at the Herald Online, Nick Major gave a mixed review, saying: “It is ambitious in scope, contains paragraphs of beautiful writing and defies convention. But, as a whole, the work is too obscure. The unsolved mysteries accumulate until what starts out as intriguing and disquieting becomes directionless and repetitive.” Nevertheless, Malcolm Forbes commented on the National website: “MacInnes makes us scratch our heads and lose our purchase, but being baffled is half the fun. … Complex but rewarding, Infinite Ground owns up to being a book of multiple fates, boundless interpretations, numerous planes of reality.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2017, review of Infinite Ground.
Publishers Weekly, August 28, 2017, review of Infinite Ground, p. 100.
ONLINE
Bomb, https://bombmagazine.org/ (April 1, 2018), Stephen Sparks, author interview.
Herald Online, http://www.heraldscotland.com/ (August 6, 2016), Nick Major, review of Infinite Ground.
Martin MacInnes Website, https://martinmacinnes.com (April 1, 2018), author profile.
National, https://www.thenational.ae/ (August 18, 2016), Malcolm Forbes, review of Infinite Ground.
I was born in Inverness and live in Edinburgh. I have degrees from Stirling and York Universities and won the Edward and Thomas Lunt Prize for my thesis on Virginia Woolf. I have read from my work at literary festivals in Edinburgh, Pitlochry, and Mangochi in Malawi, and at the 2015 Edinburgh International Science Festival.
In 2014 I won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the £10,000 Manchester Fiction Prize – you can read the winning story from the latter prize here. I have written fiction and non-fiction for more than a dozen journals and anthologies, including a series of linked articles on biography and ecology for Edinburgh Review.
I spent six week in residence as ’emerging Scottish writer’ at Cove Park in summer 2015. My debut novel, Infinite Ground, will be published by Atlantic Books in August 2016.
I am a writer living in Edinburgh. My work has been published in over a dozen journals and anthologies and I’ve won several prizes, including a major international short-story competition. My debut novel, Infinite Ground, was published by Atlantic Books in August 2016, and has recently been shortlisted for the Saltire First Book Award.
You can read from my writing via links to magazines.
Martin MacInnes
Martin MacInnes
A strange and terrifying debut from an emerging Scottish writer.
Martin MacInnes was born in Inverness. His thesis on Virginia Woolf was awarded the Edward and Thomas Lunt Prize. He is also the winner of a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the 2014 Manchester Fiction Prize. He spent six weeks in residence as 'emerging Scottish writer’ at Cove Park in 2015. Infinite Ground is his debut novel.
During a family dinner at a restaurant, Carlos excuses himself from the table; the successful 29 year old is never seen again. A routine investigation turns into a succession of strange dead ends; his workplace seemed to serve no purpose, his colleagues’ talk is alarming and the forensic team has found traces of abnormal shifting microorganisms in his office. The trace leads a semi-retired investigator deep into the rainforest, where horror and wonder await him.
MacInnes’ style blurs the line between psychological thriller, surreal mystery and typical police story. He successfully toys with the idea that everything is both true and untrue at the same time, leaving the reader in a paranoid state throughout the novel. An evocative and compelling read.
Unusual Play: A Conversation with Martin MacInnes by Stephen Sparks
The Infinite Ground novelist on detective fiction, Borges, end times, and the impermanence of bodies.
Martin MacInnes’s Infinite Ground (Melville House) revolves around an absence: while eating dinner with family at a restaurant in a nameless South American country, a man named Carlos excuses himself from the table and is never seen again. From this opening act, the plot spills out centrifugally, bursting the boundaries of a typical thriller while pulling the nameless inspector attached to the case into a whirlpool of conjecture, microbiology, and the dissolution of identity. It is a frequently uncanny work, with passages that linger long in the imagination: during a disorienting search for a medical office, the inspector finds himself drawn toward a crowd of jostling people. He assumes by their arrangement that they are gathered around some sort of altercation and wends his way into the crowd, only to find that, after a laborious struggle, he has come out the other side of the mass.
The novel also has moments of exquisite and estranging beauty, and has earned comparisons to a number of writers we now almost quaintly refer to as “postmodern.” There are echoes of J.G. Ballard, Clarice Lispector, César Aira, and Borges resonating through these pages, but MacInnes manages to keep these echoes muffled so that his voice, one of the most promising in contemporary fiction, rings clear and true above his influences.
Stephen Sparks Infinite Ground seems to be as much about the disappearance of a particular view of humanity as it is about the disappearance of a single human. It feels like a book for this moment, when we—as a species—are forced to reconsider the values and beliefs that have led us to the brink. Was apocalypse on your mind when you were writing the novel?
Martin MacInnes The book tries to dissolve the idea that humans are discrete things—shapes entirely made of this “human” quality, entirely ourselves, with a solid skin border separating us from everything else, bound as a species with a clear origin point, sufficiently removed from all other life. Safe, secure, permanent. That kind of human has never existed. We are inherently unstable, fluid, various (it’s interesting how this language emerges in psychology, as if the body were pushing out structural metaphors), able to exist only through co-operation, both inside and outside the body, with an enormous range of other organisms.
Our species is a recent branch of hominin group, whose beginnings are still contested. One million years ago, or two hundred thousand years? Is “human” the same as “modern human”? What meaning does “non-anatomically modern human” have? The central character doesn’t appear in Infinite Ground and what I was trying to do is challenge the idea that this loss of identity is necessarily a bad thing; to suggest that a humbler perspective and a more inclusive attitude to the life around us can be enriching.
SS In what ways might a more humble and inclusive perspective alter our view of the world and our place in it?
MM Human exceptionalism is complacent; it’s not interested in the world. In old English, the word “weorld” means “the age of man.” Originally being conceived to imply a temporary human residence, it’s come to mean everything, as if the planet only became active with humans. “Weorld” also implies an ending. Obviously, this is a time of ecological collapse, almost entirely based on hubris. A new species goes extinct every six minutes, while we’re fawning on social media or on public transport over dogs that have had their intelligence and noses bred out of them, gasping for air. Those things are directly related. Insect populations are more than decimated—how soon until that results in widespread crop failure and further, geopolitical conflict?
One of the scenarios in the “What Happened to Carlos” chapter is that the novel is a hallucination taking place in the moments following a nuclear detonation. There’s a very cynical argument to be made—not completely serious—that one possible reason for the apparent emptiness of space is that every life-supporting planet necessarily self-annihilates. “Great filter” theory posits that there is a single step that makes this inevitable, and that it either comes early in life, a problem, say, in cell-binding—Earth, having passed this, is the outlier, the single example of post-filter activity—or it comes later, Earth having not reached it yet, still bound to it. Could the filter be technological, cultural? The development of language creating a direct, necessary line ending in nuclear annihilation? More seriously, I was thinking every day about apocalypse. Matter is illogical and so is the removal of matter. Trying to imagine that kind of silence, afterward, provokes a retaliation. All traces of the history of the planet get removed, leaving a smooth, neutral space.
SS Throughout the novel the borders between the so-called natural and man-made regions are dissolved. Is it fair to say that Infinite Ground radically recognizes the role of nature in human affairs?
MM I’m not sure if it’s fair but it’s generous. Obviously, everything is natural, man-made is just nature at one false remove. I like failed containers, failed borders, the maddening intrusion of dirt, somehow, into a “sealed” environment. I particularly like writing about symbolic, psychological, internal events—speech, thought, imagination—in a way that recognizes them as part of an ecological landscape. The drift of dampness around the conversation in a cold room; insect behaviors affected by human breathing rhythms and blinking speed during REM sleep—all happening in one place.
Infinite Ground Final
SS
The novel is steeped in unreality: there are actors, duplications, proliferating theories of truth. These elaborations lead the reader into murky ontological depths, from which it seems there is no escape. I found this technique fascinating, perhaps especially following the 2016 U.S. election and its attendant and ongoing debates over reality. Was there a particular impetus that led you to layer the work in this manner?
MM
This is difficult, murky territory. The easy answer is that epistemological uncertainty as a philosophical concept is one thing, while the Trump administration’s lack of regard for things that have clearly happened—”alternative facts,” etc.—is another. You wonder how much of what they’re doing is strategy and how much is just disdain for other people, and the feeling that will hopefully be proven wrong, that the president is untouchable, can do and say whatever he wants, can claim any reality, irrespective of evidence. I listened to a Radiolab episode recently about voice and facial manipulation software which aims to convincingly edit any footage and have any person appear and sound as if they are saying anything. Do these programmers just mine Philip K. Dick novels? I don’t really know where to go after that.
I was also writing about shock, the inability, in certain emergency situations, to believe what is happening around you. I’ve always been interested in this; it’s so irrational. I discovered a fire once, in the flat beneath mine; their dog was distressed in the stairwell and I knocked, tried the door, and opened it onto a large fire. My first thought: “This is a good version of a fire, a good production, quite fire-like.” So the initial prompt was in pursuing some of this, extending it absurdly, even to the idea that all of life is an emergency, something that is only contacted in a kind of shock hallucination. How are we alive? What do 4.58 billion years feel like? What is it like, at the very end of a life?
Thomas Metzinger said we are “vigorously dreaming at the world.” Not even dreaming of the world, but dreaming at it, like in retaliation, or in denial. The world, and its opportunity, is too big. So I was playing with some of this, and putting it up next to forensic analysis, hard, evidence-based science, looking for tone clashes, ideas.
SS
You’ve spoken elsewhere against traditional novelistic teleology: the belief that the novel exists to develop plot and character. Does avoiding that kind of development necessarily make a writer “experimental”?
MM
I think what I mentioned earlier about the non-human world being considered a stage or a set, a place in which the primary human drama takes place, also applies here. It’s a frustratingly conservative perspective and it dominates fiction. Landscapes as emotion-houses, whose colors and shades literally change according to the feelings of a protagonist are the standard in fiction. It’s entrenched, applauded, parochial. You couldn’t pay me to read another, say, Julian Barnes novel.
I suppose you have to trust that enough people might want something different. As a reader, I want to be entertained, but entertainment is various and doesn’t have to mean formulaic. An idea from Lispector, a rhythm from Bernhard, a fragment of memory from Jorie Graham—these things can entertain me for years. I don’t think that taking any one of the infinite options beyond “plot and character” deserves to be called experimental, as it implies some similarity between all those different ways of doing things, and also seems to accept the idea that that one way of doing things—”plot and character”—is natural, and the default option, when there’s no reason for that to be so.
SS
What led you to set the novel in a nameless South American country?
MM
I had to set it in the tropics because of the forest plot, and primarily because I wanted to feature ambient biology, and in the temperate world, it’s more common to see the air as a vacuum. We don’t sweat as much, we have fewer insects, maybe we observe what’s on the ground less often too. It’s a reference to Lispector, though I used occasional Portuguese and Spanish names to make it clear the territory isn’t a coded single country. Broadly, I was aware that some of what I was doing—unusual events presented in a matter of fact manner—borrows from magical realism, and though that wasn’t intentional I thought I should gesture to that with the location. I don’t like putting in names—characters, places, supermarkets or whatever; I instinctively reel from it, I realized I would find it inhibiting.
SS
The epigraph to the novel comes from Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. What influence has Lispector had on your writing?
MM
I started reading Lispector about ten years ago, beginning with The Apple in the Dark. I was tired and frustrated with fiction and Lispector was completely new. The Apple in the Dark is so strange, direct and allusive at the same time. The translation was full of copy errors, like mutations on the page, which seemed apt. Lispector writes with a really unusual play on objects and subjects; she goes from these deeply expressive monologues to abrupt aphorisms on place and time. A passage from midway through that novel, about houses built with no sense of their own impermanence, then evoking this brief image of civilizations passing like circus tents, seared onto my brain. The point, I thought, was that this was urgent, purposeful; Lispector’s characters and narrators are always trying to fully wake up to where and what they are, and this might have promising creative and even moral possibilities.
I only thought of this recently, but The Apple in the Dark begins with a typical crime set-up, which is then all but discarded—that might have influenced Infinite Ground.
SS
Your writing has earned comparisons to Borges, Angela Carter, Tom McCarthy, J.G. Ballard. If there’s a unifying element to the work of all these writers, I would argue that it’s curiosity and a willingness to follow a thought to its logical conclusion. How important is curiosity to a novelist? To a reader?
MM
I suppose it can result in a kind of exaggeration or amplification. It’s a genre staple that the detective tries to take on the perspective of the person they are looking for, hoping that understanding them leads to an insight into what they have done, where they might be. In Infinite Ground, the inspector attempts this with Carlos, but not just as a thought experiment. He goes to absurd lengths, working literally, building a replica office in a rented garage, reproducing the chair and desk Carlos worked at, accurate down to replica coffee rings. Following these thoughts through—in this case about empathy and mimicry—is useful for generating unanticipated material, the above example, for instance, ending in the idea that you might clone someone through rebuilding their environment.
Curiosity is the most important thing. Without curiosity there’s no empathy, the world becomes smaller, harsher. You’ve got to imagine that the reader is curious; they’ve opened the book.
Stephen Sparks is a bookseller and writer in San Francisco. His essays and interviews have appeared in Tin House, The Paris Review, Music & Literature, and elsewhere.
Dec 19, 2017
Interview
Infinite Ground
Publishers Weekly. 264.35 (Aug. 28, 2017): p100+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Infinite Ground
Martin MacInnes. Melville House (PRH, dist.), $25.99 (272p) ISBN 978-1-61219-685-5
"If it were up to me I would spend my whole life digging up the lost civilization of a single vanished person," one character says in MacInnes's invigorating metafictional debut. "There would be no end to the project." The novel explores the bewildering, perilous progress of one such project: an unnamed detective's attempt to track down a missing young man, Carlos, who works for a shadowy corporation. Complicating the search, some of Carlos's family members and coworkers are actually actors, who can be hired by relatives looking to discharge tiresome familial duties or by companies looking to create "an appearance of optimal efficiency and hard work" in their offices.
Operating on the assumption that no one disappears without a trace, the meticulous inspector (who is not named) examines every aspect of Carlos s life, down to the state of his office equipment: "Out of invisible microbiota decaying on keyboard he was presented with an identity in crisis." The evidence leads the detective to a secluded region of the unnamed countryside, a place of "great wilderness and biological eruptions" where reclusive tribes with strange rites are said to reside. Committed to his investigation despite his growing suspicion that it might be a ruse, an "adventure artificially framed" by unknown forces and for unknown reasons, the inspector risks losing his own sense of direction in searching for the missing Carlos. The strong experimental bent can sap the narrative of some of its vitality, though Maclnnes's vision is consistently involving and mesmerizing. With its bizarre anthropologies and dystopian portrait of a vast corporation whose malignancy is as murky as is it motiveless, the novel successfully infuses the detective story with the experimental energy of writers like Ben Marcus and Tom McCarthy. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Infinite Ground." Publishers Weekly, 28 Aug. 2017, p. 100+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502652587/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9880e9be. Accessed 16 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502652587
MacInnes, Martin: INFINITE GROUND
Kirkus Reviews. (Aug. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
MacInnes, Martin INFINITE GROUND Melville House (Adult Fiction) $25.99 10, 17 ISBN: 978-1-61219-685-5
A missing persons case is merely the starting point for Scottish writer MacInnes' mind-bending debut, which takes impersonation, infection, and simulation as its metaphors for the unstable nature of reality.An unnamed police inspector is called out of retirement to investigate the disappearance of a man named Carlos from a family dinner at a restaurant in an unspecified city somewhere in Latin America. A series of early discoveries rapidly signals that things are not what they appear. The grieving mother the inspector thought he was interviewing turns out to be "employed by the mother to speak on her behalf." The financial institution where Carlos worked--"in the process of a large and complex merger, leaving it for the moment without a name"--populates its office with pretend workers from a "performance agency" to make a good impression on prospective clients. "Trust me," the agency's director tells the inspector, "they appear much more convincing in the role of hard-working employees than such employees do themselves." At first, it seems that all this play-acting screens a sinister mystery that could actually be solved: the corporation has been sued by activists claiming it has illegally occupied land belonging to indigenous peoples illegally resettled, and the inspector follows this trail into the country's rain-forest interior. There, however, reality and the inspector come completely unglued--a development forecast by a chapter bluntly subtitled "Suspicions, Rumours, Links," which offers multiple explanations for Carlos' disappearance and many other puzzles while making it obvious that all explanations are provisional and suspect. MacInnes skillfully creates an atmosphere of lowering menace, aided by excerpts from an enigmatic anthropological text, Tribes of the Southern Interior, while deft satires of forensic analysis and ecotourism keep the tone from getting too misty. The inspector is the only person drawn with any depth, but characterization isn't the point in a narrative that aims to unsettle and provoke. Vividly suggestive and filled with haunting images, though probably best appreciated by readers with a strong taste for the avant-garde.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"MacInnes, Martin: INFINITE GROUND." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500365007/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=86ea2b53. Accessed 16 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500365007
Book review: a sinister thriller, Infinite Ground warps the planes of reality
A man disappears in a restaurant, but does he still exist? Martin MacInnes's self-assured debut twists detective fiction into a metaphysical mystery.
Malcolm Forbes
Malcolm Forbes
August 18, 2016
Updated: August 18, 2016 04:00 AM
Infinite Ground, Martin MacInnes’s strange, cerebral and incredibly assured debut novel, begins like a standard police procedural, a routine mystery. At the height of an intense heatwave a man meets his family for a reunion in a restaurant. Halfway through the meal he vanishes. A former inspector is roused from retirement and tasked with tracking him down. So far, so straightforward.
However, instead of captivating the reader by upping the pace and deploying the usual thrillerish twists and turns, MacInnes confounds by gradually turning a disappearance into a reality-warping puzzle and a police investigation into a metaphysical inquiry.
“Carlos had gone to the bathroom,” he writes, “and then to all intents and purposes he had stopped existing.”
As the unnamed inspector gets to work in an unnamed South American country, the oddities mount up. The company Carlos worked for – also nameless – employs “outside performers” to stand in for real staff members, and has “contingency sites” outside the city to which workers can relocate in an emergency or “post-disaster”. The woman claiming to be Carlos’s mother admits to being an imposter.
After weighing up two plausible theories – Carlos was kidnapped; Carlos was involved in fraud and fled – the inspector learns from forensic expert Isabella that Carlos was ill and wasting away. Suddenly fearing that he too has become infected by something in the victim’s office, and believing that locating Carlos means finding an antidote, the inspector doubles his efforts and swaps his search of the city for a sweep of the country’s vast forest.
We arrive at MacInnes’s last section wondering if the inspector has reached his journey’s end by checking into the Hotel Terminación, or if he can still pick up the trail by veering off the beaten track into an alien and hostile environment.
MacInnes is Scottish but his setting and bouts of weirdness put us in mind of South American authors. We get the dark tones and psychological struggle of Ernesto Sábato, the vertigo-inducing flights of fancy of Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and the queasy atmosphere and maddening open-endedness of Roberto Bolaño.
Despite its surreal content, the novel unfolds by way of conventional storytelling – chapters, dialogue, streamlined prose, even-length sentences – and this blend of eccentricity, familiarity and clarity recalls the Argentine writer César Aira.
MacInnes’s original voice can still be heard, both in the main narrative and the sections that interlard it – case notes on the forest, forensic reports, hallucinatory dreams, excerpts from a book on tribes – and it always speaks with confidence.
All that is lacking, for this reader at least, is a smattering of humour. Missing men, virulent infections and sinister landscapes needn’t be all doom and gloom.
MacInnes makes us scratch our heads and lose our purchase, but being baffled is half the fun. The inspector doesn’t just retrace Carlos’s footsteps, he attempts to reconstruct him in a duplicate office. A killer he locked up for scalping his victims disappears in prison.
In time, MacInnes’s novel starts to resemble Carlos’s shape-shifting corporation – “priding itself on innovation and experimentation, alert to the power of appearances”.
As we near the end and the inspector is drawn deeper into the heart of darkness of the rainforest interior, we come upon a section called Suspicions, Rumours, Links which offers up 29 explanations as to what happened to Carlos. They range from the possible to the absurd. The last one reads: “Carlos isn’t here. Carlos isn’t gone. This isn’t everything. This is a brief light.”
Complex but rewarding, Infinite Ground owns up to being a book of multiple fates, boundless interpretations, numerous planes of reality.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance reviewer based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
6th August 2016
Review: Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes
Nick Major
0 comments
Infinite Ground
Martin MacInnes
Atlantic Books, £12.99
Review by Nick Major
THE case of the missing person is a tried and tested template for crime fiction. So is the inclusion of a semi-retired detective under psychological duress. Martin MacInnes takes this formula as the starting point for his debut novel, Infinite Ground, then strikes out into bewildering and unfamiliar territory. For a first published work, there is much to be applauded. It is ambitious in scope, contains paragraphs of beautiful writing and defies convention. But, as a whole, the work is too obscure. The unsolved mysteries accumulate until what starts out as intriguing and disquieting becomes directionless and repetitive.
The novel is set during a hot summer in South America. The missing man, Carlos, goes for dinner with his family at a restaurant called La Cueva. Half way through the meal, he stands up, goes to the toilet, and doesn’t return. The nameless inspector assigned to the job of finding Carlos is as enigmatic as the faceless and nameless corporation who employ the missing man. We know the inspector’s wife has died. He is impatient and prone to trusting gut instincts. His personal life might as well consist of an empty room he sleeps in. But his elusive nature chimes well with the impersonal tone of the novel.
The inspector employs Isabella, a forensics expert, to analyse the microbiological detritus in Carlos’s office. She finds some strange anomalies. There are certain microbes in Carlos’s body that would have lived in his gut, fermenting anxiety and paranoia in his brain, like a ‘factory producing the elements of feeling – chemistry’. It is soon apparent that the office worker’s disappearance is as much a scientific mystery as a human one. The inspector starts to believe an infection has caused Carlos to become either deranged or, oddly, to have experienced a physical erasure of his identity and to have become at one with his environment. Worse, the inspector starts to display worrying signs that he is subject to the same illness.
He has an intuitive grasp of ecology, and how the presence or absence of people effect an environment: ‘when his wife had died, it wasn’t just her body that had gone…there was a frame around her, a hive, a community created by the kind of thoughts she had and the way she spun her hands and moved her feet. It wasn’t just that she had gone; more than her had been devastated. Biodiversity was weaker.’ MacInnes is excellent at combining scientific writing with psychological acuity. Although we know little about the personalities of characters, we are given plenty of information about the routine nature of the masses.
The scientific aspects of the novel are given an anthropological twist. In the first part of the novel, ‘Corporation’, extracts from a study called ‘Tribes of the Southern Interior’ form epigraphs to each chapter. They describe the transmigration of souls familiar to the tribespeople of the title: ‘Following signs of a vanishing, loved ones examine light for imperfections. It is far more likely that light has only subtly changed, concealing the missing person, than that this person has been voided…the afflicted individual, the one whom no one, for the moment, is able to locate, will be amused and unable to affect people, other than through atmospheric impressions.’ In the second part of the novel, called ‘Forest’, we learn that the inspector has been consulting this study regularly.
This final section of Infinite Ground is disorienting and hallucinogenic. The corporation have land holdings in Santa Lucia, a rainforest that contains false corporate communities. The inspector is convinced Carlos travelled to this interior and follows him into the wilderness. From this point on, Carlos is no longer a missing man because all of humanity is missing, and the reader knows that every strange occurrence will pass by without consequence. The last fifty pages read like an account of a primitive regression. An animal, possibly human, runs, alone and unrecognisable to themselves, through an ‘infinite ground’ covered in ‘vast trees, looped and tangled, bent into strange and impossible shapes,’ all competing for the light. As for the reader, they are left behind, for good or ill, waiting for some light to be shed on what exactly is going on.
The Scottish writer’s award-winning debut spins the premise of a classic noir into the realm of the supernatural.
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Infinite Ground mech HC.indd
Cover of US hardcover edition, courtesy of Melville House
One day in March of 2012, a Canadian humanitarian worker named Anton Pilipa failed to report to work. His family reported his disappearance noting that Pilipa had earlier begun taking medication for schizophrenia. Leads went nowhere, and everyone save his brother gave up their searches. Due to his efforts, it wasn’t until this past February that Pilipa wasn’t just found alive, but over 10,000 miles from Vancouver, barefoot and emaciated, in the middle of the Amazon. He had apparently walked the entire way and gave no reason for his initial departure.
In Infinite Ground, the award-winning, brain-vaporizing debut novel of Scottish writer Martin MacInnes, an analogous occurrence is put through a metaphysical wringer. Set in an unnamed Latin American city, where Spanish and Portuguese are apparently in use (São Vincente, Santa Lucía), the premise, in this three-part novel, appears at first to be classic noir: during a dinner with his family, an office worker named Pablo apparently leaves the table for the bathroom and never returns. A semi-retired inspector is brought in to take the case. But even within the first chapter, when the inspector is interviewing the Pablo’s mother only to find out that she’s just an actor making things up:
The mother, in relating the incident, had gone on for some time for what he would consider insignificant details…it turned out, now, that this woman was not who she claimed to be. She was not related to the disappeared, had in fact never met him, was merely employed by the mother to speak on her behalf, she being—the real mother, that is—still too upset to return to the restaurant.
Nor is the Mother the only actor the inspector encounters. Pablo’s work, he discovers, also employs actors to work at the office to exemplify the ideal worker and that the corporation kept remote work sites in forests where, given an emergency, it could “reestablish itself.” MacInnes is a pro at being one step ahead of his own protagonist, and throwing readers for loops that even the inspector can’t account for. When a forensic specialist sweeps Carlos’s office, she appears to have discovered parasites living in his hair and skin cells that are not normally present in humans that causes its hosts to wander away from normal habitats.
Problem solved, right? Not quite. The forensic officer later denies these claims, even scolding the inspector for believing her. The inspector himself begins to have surreal experiences—in seeing a crowd gathering around something, he investigates, pushing in and finally through to the other side without having stepped into or even seen what everyone is gathered to see. Later, on a different lead, the inspector agrees to meet a killer he had once apprehended at a hotel, only to be taken for a literal loop by clients representing the convict. On a whim, he ends up back at the restaurant and takes a seat in front of a large window and immediately spots a clue.
“Quite clearly, framed almost geometrically by the light, was a forest patch…it was an image beyond the city normally to distant to see. But post-storm, and presumably momentarily, the forest was clear and sublime. Carlos had sat here…was there any reason, any reason at all, why a man, washing his hands in the bathroom, would not walk directly out of the building, past his family, and aim straight for that image, beyond the glass and artificial frame—into the forest itself?”
End part one.
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Martin MacInnes © Atlantic Books
MacInnes puts his inspector through such a Chutes and Ladders course that “the case” begins to take on ectopic dimensions. What makes this possible is the very premise itself. It is unnatural for people to simply vanish, and it is one of the few instances in human logic where anything could put forth as its cause—A psychotic break (Pilipa), the mafia (Jimmy Hoffa) or the paranormal (the Bennington Triangle). “Missing persons cases were like fissures,” the inspector notes to himself, “breaks in the earth, and there was no greater feeling than a resolution, correcting the error, restoring the identity back to its place.”
For MacInnes, the leads to a novel that isn’t able to resolve. The characters of the book are absent in its second part, which MacInnes uses to do a bit of world building, giving bizarre historical attributes to the forest and, in doing so, bellows it into an uncanny environment for the people who reside there. This is where the the inspector lead takes him in the third part of the book, in the basecamp village of Santa Lucía, the furthest basecamp village for the tourists drawn to explore the forest’s interior, “thousands of miles” from the city. Not too far when considering the vastness of the forest’s real-life counterpart, the Amazon, which measures to just over 2 million square miles.
The inspector will appear to find Carlos, but not in any way the he or the reader will expects. The discovery is so strange, that MacInnes devotes one chapter to putting forth 30 extraordinary reasons as to what actually happened to him. On the verge of closing the case, the inspector will experience a final macabre event that will force him out of the Santa Lucia and into the forest itself, where he’ll for the most part remain, himself now disappeared entirely from society. But that’s still not where the book ultimately concludes.
Borgesian or Kafkaesque are attributes that have previously appeared as descriptors for Infinite Ground, but MacInnes rather than demonstrating or fearing how the logical anomalies can impact our psyche, he instead constructs a puzzling terrain for his fertile imagination to explore. While at times it threatens to escape his sheparding, it also leads MacInnes to graze from the topographies of other surreal visionaries to create an original literary work not seen enough in contemporary fiction. The disappearance of Carlos brings to mind an equally baffling missing persons scene from Olga Togarczuk‘s Flights. The inspector’s surreal encounters resembled similar bureaucratic nightmares of Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. Terry Gilliam, J.G. Ballard, Rod Sterling, Clarice Lispector (who MacInnes draws on for an epigraph) also come to mind. It’s all enough to leave one with a massive head spin. If that’s the feeling you have at the end of this brilliant novel, the best cure might be to go on a long walk.
***
INFINITE GROUND
by Martin MacInnes
Melville House (US) | Atlantic Books UK
Available Now