Infinite Ground

August 28, 2017
“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 MacInnes’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.

August 15, 2017
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.

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