In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the animated film The Lion King, Elton John sang the sublime words

From the day we arrive on the planet
And blinking, step into the sun
There's more to see than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done
There's far too much to take in here
More to find than can ever be found
But the sun rolling high
Through the sapphire sky
Keeps great and small on the endless round

It's the Circle of Life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
Till we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the Circle
The Circle of Life

Towards the end the MacInnes writes in this book

In order to create itself, life already has to exist. Cell theory is circular. Marine chemicals build a membrane that’s a prerequisite for synthesizing the chemicals needed to build a membrane. The end instigates a beginning. Cells produce the conditions essential for their own creation. Life is circular, atemporal. Every cell an instance of time travel.

The story starts off slow, promising a lot more later. The pace accelerates and the narrative gallops along breathlessly. But then it starts to meander and muddles along to a mystical end – proving the The Circle of Life – albeit on a cosmic scale – a symbiosis, a syzygy.

My favourite species were those that lay dormant in husk form before reanimating, such as the rotifers discovered in Arctic ice-sheets after 24,000 lifeless years. Able to withstand almost any force, they seemed to challenge the distinction between life and death, annihilating the concept of straight and linear time to suggest something more circular and repetitious instead.

‘The cell is basically an ocean capsule. A preserved primordial capsule, holding the original marine environment inside. This is … this is beyond incredible, isn’t it? I mean, you could describe us both as people, and as mobile assemblages of ocean. I am not ready to get over this.’

There were a lot of new terms I learnt about in the book - one of them being the Cassini Oval

Human propensity of fiddling with natural processes leads to climate change and pollution

they weren’t just exhausted, they weren’t just emaciated to the expected degree. They were actually in the process of consuming and evacuating their own organs – they were eating themselves, attempted self-digestion, ouroboros syndrome.

Chest and throat issues are treatable, neurological ones less so. The problem is general, possibly intractable. Globally, articulation is delayed, in speech and in writing, infancy – defined as an enduring state of helplessness – prolonged.
Senility rises exponentially. In many ways it’s a crisis of language, words taking longer to emerge and disappearing quicker…this was a pathology developed by the species to protect itself, turning away form an increasingly insupportable reality into denial and hallucination. Vision is failing too – everything is, depending how you track it. Depth fields atrophy from lack of stimulation as life is lived increasingly indoors. Sometimes, from her twenty-third-storey apartment, visibility barely reaches 15 feet.

Boundaries of a nation’s territory are determined on a two-dimensional scale, but what determines the vertical limit of a country? It’s the arbitrarily defined Kármán Line

‘…Bush signs an executive order lowering the height of the country.’
‘The president can do that?’
‘Well he did…’

The power, as we attempt and fail to observe it, resists us like it is itself alive. Life is not necessarily carried in a body. And what is a body, in the loosest terms, but a set of agreements among matter and energy that endures foe a period and exhibits a metabolic response? The alien may be a particular way of calibrating energy, not constituted in any one of the properties that delivers the power, but in the act of delivery itself. A state and not a body, a pattern not a form.

Engrossing but, at times, loses steam.

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