Tom McCarthy’s ‘The Making of Incarnation’ is a mind-bending international caper
If you’ve ever tried counting sheep and found yourself, rather than dropping off, wondering if there might be some kind of design underpinning the leaps and bleats of your woolly friends, Tom McCarthy’s new book might be for you. “The Making of Incarnation,” the British writer’s fifth novel, is an investigation of pattern and connection set in the world of motion studies. And lest that sound dry, rest assured it also asks such big questions as how can you fake zerogravity love-making onscreen? and what happens if you put a bobsled in a wind tunnel?
“Incarnation,” for those stumbling over the title, is the name of a movie — “a grand space opera in the Star Wars mould, with princesses, kidnappers, pirates, smugglers.” The design of its special effects is the ostensible subject of many of the book’s chapters, vignettes in which bodies both human and machine provide the blueprints for mega-budget illusion. The company consulting on this work is Pantarey Motion Systems, a high-tech outfit whose motion studies have had applications not only in medical, military and sporting simulations but also in CGI. (The name presumably derives from “panta rhei,” a phrase usually attributed to Heraclitus that means something like “everything flows.”)
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. Somewhere — putatively — buried deep in a research institution in a former Soviet country, is an archival carton containing a cyclegraph, a wire frame model of a movement that, we’re told, “changes everything.”
The box in question, Box 808, appears to be missing from the papers of Lillian Gilbreth, a brilliant American psychologist whose experiments in time-and-motion studies ushered in the ergonomic efficiencies of modern industry. (She’s real — USPS put her on a stamp in 1984 — and McCarthy does a great service to readers in resurfacing her story, notwithstanding his embellishments to it.) Gilbreth, in the course of her career, “attempted to amass a general taxonomy of act and gesture” in an effort to find “the one best
way” of performing basic actions. In McCarthy’s telling, it seems she may have found it — but her archive at Purdue lacks the crucial jigsaw piece (it is “perdu,” or “lost,” as McCarthy punningly observes). Cue much intellectual globetrotting and arcane pontificating as the novel transforms into a road trip of ideas.
Though twice a nominee for Britain’s Booker Prize, McCarthy isn’t a mainstream novelist. In his public pronouncements, sometimes under the auspices of the International Necronautical Society — a “semifictitious avant-garde network” he founded in 1999 — he’s disdained the notion of writing as self-expression and the tendencies of middlebrow fiction toward what he sees as uninteresting humanism. As the narrator of his 2015 novel, “Satin Island,” exclaims: “events! If you want those, you’d best stop reading now.”