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The Making of Incarnation

By Tom McCarthy

Knopf. 336 pp. $28

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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 zero-gravity 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." Events or character, he might have said 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. McCarthy doesn't see panes of glass so much as "soda-lime-silica-constituted, batch-mixed, tin-bath-poured, roller-lifted, lehr-cooled and strainlessly annealed, machine-cut rectangles displaying a regularity, indeed a sharpness, of light propagation with refraction kept right down at

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, from etymology and the philosophical implications of repetition to the significance of Queequeg's coffin in "Moby-Dick" and the idea from "Remainder," his first novel that everything leaves its mark. Like all his fiction to date, "The Making of Incarnation" is a novel of motion rather than emotion; imagine an even chillier J.G. Ballard. But that's not a criticism this excursion into what McCarthy might call the "source-code" of behavior is a rich and fascinating exercise in observation.

What does it add up to? As one of McCarthy's characters avers during a disquisition on the three-point turn that killed Franz Ferdinand: "I'm not saying anything. Just tracing out a set of lines; a fracture network. That's all I do."

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Tom McCarthy's 'The Making of Incarnation' is a mind-bending international caper - theday.com