... like a ghost-written hybrid of a John le Carré thriller, the postmodern philosophy of Jacques Derrida and a sci-fi romp all at the same time ... At one level this is about the choreography of the human body; at another it is—since the studies involve production lines—a horrific vision of how to make humans more efficient, or rather, more like robots...with some wonderful comedy about getting the physics right about a sex scene in zero gravity ... It reads like a parody of Star Wars or Flash Gordon, with a loveable rogue and a haughty princess, and sending these tropes up, McCarthy shows how all these stories contain their own precedents ... McCarthy has, in the old sense of the word, wit ... There is something uplifting about McCarthy’s work. He makes you think and he makes you think things you hadn’t thought before, in stark opposition to the bourgeois novel of manners ... That seems to encapsulate both the cleverness and the prankishness of this most intriguing of contemporary writers.
... remarkable, at times exasperating ... As stuffed with characters and subplots as War and Peace, it’s about the making of nothing less than contemporary reality itself ... the new book’s endless motion-capture sessions produce a sort of counterfeit, denatured mimesis ... McCarthy, a formidably gifted stylist, can tease an uncanny poetry from his findings, but he can also smother us in superfluous technical jargon ... self-enamored pedantry is funny in moderation, but moderation isn’t something McCarthy has ever practiced. As I read, I found myself wondering how important it was to the book’s overall effect that we understand the science behind motion capture at the level of detail he throws at us. It often seems that all McCarthy really wants is for us to understand that he understands it ... the real question might be why McCarthy decided to write a novel at all, and not, say, a magazine article ... McCarthy’s work has begun to harden into a conventionality of its own. He’s repeating himself, in a way that’s often unproductive ... This may be a part of his design, but in a book that addresses the creeping usurpation of the individual by technology it feels like an imaginative deficit. At this point, the most radical and surprising path forward for McCarthy would be to write a novel in which human beings are treated with the same dazzling complexity as ideas.
The unfolding of the plot...is interspersed with complex descriptions of the wind tunnels and motion-capture techniques deployed behind the scenes. These are so meticulously detailed that they take on a hypnotic, almost hallucinatory quality ... The novel, however, does not end with the blinding light of revelation, but a 'blackness neither rays nor traces penetrate' ... The truth is out there: Tom McCarthy has worked his magic once again.
... the novel’s approach to character: interiority will be brusquely avoided, we understand, and motivation will be treated as purely mechanical. McCarthy doesn’t have much time for plot either. In spite of its thrillerish premiss, The Making of Incarnation is very far from being a page-turner. We are more than a third of the way in before the MacGuffin—the mysterious Box 808—is introduced, and its late arrival is followed not by a sprightly gathering of narrative threads but by a twenty-three-page description of a simulated bobsleigh race ... This sort of thing is typical of this novel’s sentence-by-sentence texture. Its interest is ostensibly in the relations between objects—that is, in material systems—and yet physical detail is often neglected in favour of arid technobabble ... his customary glazed tone often gives way to nerdy info-dumps and animated mini-lectures. These don’t just kill the deadpan mood, they replace it with the precocious pitch and conceptual clatter of an undergraduate philosophical debate.
McCarthy...has composed with impressive ingenuity a Futuristic and partly futuristic work that should add to his reputation as one of England’s most inventive authors ... readers who expected to be moviegoer passive could lose patience with the effort needed to see how McCarthy’s disparate disciplines and data patterns do connect. If you wanted action, to process this novel your mind will need to be active—except when reading a précis of Incarnation about which everything is explained in both a send-up of sci-fi and the easy-reading realistic novel ... the single master-pattern of motion eludes characters, but McCarthy does no less than redefine what a human is, not a sidereal Cartesian cogito but—like the many athletes observed in the novel—a flowing participant in multiple systems of movement ... For readers who desire action presented in the seemingly transparent language of traditional realism (think Franzen), McCarthy’s numerous lingos will be an impediment . . . unless you realize they are the realism of the now and future. You don’t need to understand all the discourses if you’re willing to believe McCarthy does and if you also believe that linguistic special effects are necessary for scientists—and novelists--to describe and communicate processes far beyond the capacities of what Wittgenstein called 'ordinary language' ... With this novel, McCarthy scales up and out and around and back this wisdom in an intricate work of collaborating and conflicting information, action of a cognitive kind on every page. As my inclusion of other novelists suggests, The Making of Incarnation is a grand—yet compact, like the body—open and active system of systems, literary and scientific.
The Making of Incarnation is unlikely to convert any new readers to his cause. It intercuts between several storylines about movement, data and pattern analysis. At its centre is a motion capture company called Pantarey, whose engineer, Mark Phocan, has persuaded a couple to cover themselves in digital markers and perform vigorous sex (this is the best scene in the book) ... This makes it sound far more exciting than it really is, because the story is lost in a dense fog of detail. Much of the time you can barely make out what’s going on. The mainframe of McCarthy’s novel is still realism, a traditional play-by-play narrative structure, but it’s realism stripped of characterisation, suspense, atmosphere or emotional insights ... writing that fetishises water tanks and wind tunnels and makes heavy weather of avoiding human life. It’s entirely possible to be intrigued by the Tom McCarthy Project while wondering why it has to be so dull.
While these long motion-capture sequences crackle with thrilling technical argot and are pretty interesting in themselves, the real plot lies elsewhere. Stripped back, The Making of Incarnation is a thriller, an international caper about the search for a missing box ... McCarthy is simply not interested in emotional development, besotted though he may be with other arcs ... His rejection of the standard props of realist fiction will alienate some. The prose here is complex and largely free of lyricism; instead, McCarthy opts for the precision of scientific or instructional language. Many sentences read like verbal description or the alt text used by screen readers to help blind computer users, as if there might in fact be one best way of transcribing the world ... As you may surmise, the book can be fascinating but at times a hair tedious. McCarthy’s voluminous research is everywhere on the page — and, yes, very impressive — but you may find yourself stopping to look up supercavitation, acetabulum or festination only to turn back having forgotten what’s happening ... But difficulty is also part of the pleasure of reading McCarthy. In both his fiction and nonfiction, he seeds patterns and ideas that, taken together, gesture grandly (if disingenuously) towards a Big Theory. Devotees will be delighted to spot old preoccupations resurfacing ... a rich and fascinating exercise in observation.
McCarthy tells us nothing about the rest of Dean’s life, creates no narrative that might show us how this episode enlarges or diminishes her. The modern novel thrives on moments when an individual behaves out of character but Dean, like everyone else in the book, is only shown doing what she’s employed to do. So what, novelistically speaking, is in it for the reader? Meanwhile, Phocan spends 23 pages watching a bobsleigh team make use of a digitised wind tunnel ... a novel must surely enable us to invest in the central characters’ aspirations or failings or loves and losses ... having lured us with work lives packed with IP, IT and CGI, he offers no enigma, no insight. We are left with what the characters are employed to do, nine to five, and little more. It’s minutely described and probably realistic, but is that a novel?
Do not...mistake this for a spy thriller. It proceeds not primarily by events, but by the accretion and rhyming of concepts ... 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 ... 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 ... Some chapters trace a single spiralling thought to a satisfying image of negative epiphany ... 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?
Only an author so zealously devoted to a particular theory of literature could produce a novel as boring as this one, which promotes the theory at the expense of everything else. The characters are nothing more than proper names. The scenes exclusively focus on in-depth workplace conversation, briefly interrupted only when people order food. The language is an immense composite of colorless technical jargon ... Since Mr. McCarthy thinks that writing is about retransmitting pre-existing ideas, he likely does not care that his novel cribs so heavily from Don DeLillo ... But The Making of Incarnation, being evangelical, lacks Mr. DeLillo’s humor, his pleasure in absurdity. If the novelist ne plus ultra is a computer then so is its ideal reader, and reading itself becomes a matter of scanning texts for codes and patterns. Enjoyment doesn’t enter into it.
... brilliant, multilayered ... Each scene, each frame, is evaluated with an exactitude both fascinating and ludicrous to satisfy overzealous geekdom ... Pynchonian asides are filtered through a Joycean love of language, etymologically rich...yet imbued with wry humor and devastating satire approaching profundity ... McCarthy’s is a prodigious intellect, keenly tuned to the 'aestheticization of technology,' frenetically Feynmanian, joyously Kafkaesque, yet distinctly a category of one.
McCarthy’s acclaimed previous novels all revealed a fascination with spatial diametrics and information theory, and the intricately calibrated latest...soars even further from plot and character conventions ... 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.
