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Summary
Summary
From the author of Remainder, and two novels short-listed for the Booker Prize, C, and Satin Island, a widescreen odyssey through the medical labs, computer graphics studios, military research centers, and other dark zones where the frontiers of potential--to cure, kill, understand or entertain--are constantly tested and refined.
Bodies in motion. Birds, bees and bobsleighs. What is the force that moves the sun and other stars? Where's our fucking airplane? What's inside Box 808, and why does everybody want it?
Deep within the archives of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret. Famous for producing solid light-tracks that captured the path of workers' movements, Gilbreth helped birth the era of mass observation and big data. But did she also, as her broken correspondence with a young Soviet physicist suggests, discover in her final days a "perfect" movement, one that would "change everything"?
An international hunt begins for the one box missing from her records, and we follow contemporary motion-capture consultant Mark Phocan, as well as his collaborators and shadowy antagonists, across geopolitical fault lines and through strata of personal and collective history. Meanwhile, work is under way on the blockbuster movie Incarnation, an epic space tragedy.
As McCarthy peers through the screen, or veil, of technological modernity to reveal the underlying symbolic structures of human experience, The Making of Incarnation weaves a set of stories one inside the other, rings within rings, a perpetual motion machine.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McCarthy's acclaimed previous novels all revealed a fascination with spatial diametrics and information theory, and the intricately calibrated latest (after Satin Island) soars even further from plot and character conventions with a study of motion, data, and trajectory. At the center of many looping narratives is Pantarey Motion Systems, whose chief engineer, Mark Phocan--who had a boyhood epiphany during a mishap at an exhibition of Joan Miró paintings where he first encountered camera playback technology--oversees the company's various models comprising vectors and the measurement of bodies through all matter of space. Its interests include motion capture studios, various experiments with wind tunnels and water tanks, the course of an affair between Norwegian dignitaries, a mysterious client looking into the copyright of dance moves and, most prominently, the special effects department working on a science fiction movie called Incarnation. Crucial to Pantarey's work are the boxes created by form-and-motion innovator Lillian Gilbreth to measure the pathway of workers through factories, one of which--Box 808--has gone missing. The search for the missing motion-map provides one more course through a series of set pieces that meditate on topics as diverse as the physics of space travel and the pathway of the bullet that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. (There are also airplanes, astronauts, and Russian spies.) McCarthy arcs and zigzags through the parameters of contemporary fiction and achieves a brilliant new form. The whooshing, trawling result is the epitome of sui generis. (Nov.)
Guardian Review
The TR-808 Rhythm Composer was a 1980s analogue drum machine, manufactured by the Roland Corporation of Japan, which has featured on everything from Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing to Kanye West's 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak. Manchester acid-house pioneers 808 State even named their band after it. Samples of it are still a mainstay of electronic music production 35 years after the original ceased to be manufactured. Why am I telling you all this? Because the number 808 features heavily as a numerological MacGuffin in the new novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted Tom McCarthy. It variously appears as a missing item on a menu, the designation of a lost archive box, and a zero between two side-on infinity signs, but it would be surprising if McCarthy, who after all lives in Berlin, long home of a strong techno scene, did not also intend an unspoken homage to the machine that made techno possible. Especially because he is known for high-modernist experimentalism and an interest in systems - 2010's C was about radio communication, and 2015's Satin Island about anthropology, consultancy, and much else - and this is a novel about machines and their interactions with humans, and about how human plus machine might make a super-machine. A lawyer, Monica Dean, is assigned to investigate the private archives of Lillian Gilbreth, an American psychologist who with her husband Frank was influential in the field of time-and-motion studies, developing the "scientific management" theory otherwise known as Taylorism. She made "cyclegraphs", time-lapse photos in which a light trail reveals the pattern of repetitive movements in men operating drills, women operating cash registers, and so forth. This much is historically true, but in the novel Gilbreth also made sculptures of those cyclegraphs in boxes, and one of them - number 808 - has gone missing. Meanwhile, Mark Phocan works for a tech company called Pantarey Motion Systems, which uses motion-capture tech to provide modelling data for everything from football teams to the movie industry. The company is hired to model the physically accurate implosion of a spaceship for an SF film called Incarnation (hence the novel's title), which seems to be even more childishly boring than George Lucas's first Star Wars prequel. There is also a shadowy company, known only as "Client A", which might be seeking somehow to copyright or own human gestures; and there is an MI6 man, Pilkington, taking an oddly close interest in all this, who gets very upset when his chocolate tart comes with ice-cream and a wafer. Do not, however, mistake this for a spy thriller. It proceeds not primarily by events, but by the accretion and rhyming of concepts. "Things are connected to other things, which are connected to other things," notices the operator of a wave machine in the bravura opening scene, the first of the novel's many visions of a tech-industrial sublime. There is a theme of signalling rather than being: a gallery guide speaks to a crowd of schoolchildren with "not enthusiasm itself but rather an intent to enthuse"; while the movie's script has "various subplots put in solely for the sake of complicating things - ie of signalling complexity". There is an overarching obsession with imprints, negatives, traces left by human movement, both in the motion-capture computer and in the mythical Gilbreth boxes. And most of all there are constant visions of machines within machines, and the whole universe as a machine. We hear from an ex-Soviet physicist who speaks of the USSR's dream that the world might be a perfectible "apparatus"; while Phocan envisions "a general state in which things, all things, find themselves caught up in the same general, if unnameable, contraption, and the world, its stakes, its struggles, all hang in the balance". Of course a novel is a contraption too, which is why we have no reason to expect minor characters to do any more than function, like this one, as Professor Exposition: "Riga's always looked both ways, ever since its Hanseatic League days, when it served Peter the Great as gateway to an open, ie unfrozen, seaboard." Observing people caught on CCTV, one character thinks they "move strangely: at normal speed, but with a motion that's somehow imprecise and fluid at the same time, as though they were immersed in water" - a beautiful observation, and one that also applies to the people in the novel. But that is thematic, this being also a novel of cybernetics, which considers its humans as parts of a larger feedback machine. It's more as a mechanical matryoshka or ouroboros of interconnecting yarns past and present, then, that the novel exerts its strong and peculiar effects. Of which there are many, including a very dry humour, as in the echo of Don DeLillo when a crashed aeroplane is said to have undergone a marvellously named "integrity event". There are nods to William Blake and CP Snow, and an intense observation of quotidian technicalities (including a weirdly mesmerising description of an airport baggage cart's dance across the runway, before it "draws to a halt across (but not within) the red and white rectangle of the loading box"). Some chapters trace a single spiralling thought to a satisfying image of negative epiphany: "a white bird gliding in a parallel and empty sky, above a darkening flood". It's only when the writing attempts to stretch beyond its enjoyably ironic style of deadpan cataloguing that it falters, with italics straining to signal importance, or words piled up to grasp at an idea that doesn't materialise. The overall effect of The Making of Incarnation, then, is like that of an extremely dense art installation - or indeed a machine, within which the reader, too, can play only the designed function. It is implacable and intermittently tedious, but then isn't the world, too? At one point, which might be the book's true centre of gravity, a drone pilot who remote-controlled Predators in Afghanistan from his base in Hampshire mentions that he was diagnosed with PTSD. But you weren't actually in a war zone, objects his naive interlocutor. "'Wasn't I?' He smiled, then added: 'Aren't we?'"
Booklist Review
McCarthy's (Satin Island, 2015) brilliant, multilayered latest is inspired by Lillian Gilbreth, the time-and-motion studies pioneer whose work sought to make movement more efficient, labor less laborious. That same absorption in minutiae is the specialty of Pantarey Motion Systems and chief engineer Mark Phocan, hired to help makers of the sf film Incarnation depict a level of accuracy and authenticity rarely achieved in even the most high-budget blockbusters. Each scene, each frame, is evaluated with an exactitude both fascinating and ludicrous to satisfy overzealous geekdom. This serves as scaffolding for McCarthy's larger philosophical arguments about how we go about "mapping particulars on to great universals." The sf epic, the making of which becomes even more science-fictional, even metafictional, affords McCarthy the range to explore myriad and disparate concepts, ranging from space travel, plane crashes, soccer, and Franz Ferdinand to Queequeg's tattoos and archaeoacoustics. These Pynchonian asides are filtered through a Joycean love of language, etymologically rich ("Archives were held in chests or arks, made of acacia wood . . . Arca can mean coffin, too") yet imbued with wry humor and devastating satire approaching profundity: "Everything is information. The entire world is an arc." McCarthy's is a prodigious intellect, keenly tuned to the "aestheticization of technology," frenetically Feynmanian, joyously Kafkaesque, yet distinctly a category of one.
Library Journal Review
Informed by the motion studies of Lillian Gilbreth (famously the mother in the memoir Cheaper by the Dozen), this novel from two-time Booker Prize short-listed, inaugural Windham-Campbell award winner McCarthy stars insomniac Anthony Garnett. His frustrated sheep-counting leads to a schematic about tracking sheep's movements as individuals within a herd, creating branching vectors of need, fear, and closeness. Soon he is inspired to form a company called Pantaray, PLC, referencing a fragment from Heraclitus, who proclaimed that we could never step into the same river twice.