The Making of Incarnation

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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. 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 geo-political fault lines and experimental zones: medical labs, CGI studios, military research centres . . . Places where the frontiers of potential - to cure, kill, understand or entertain - are constantly tested and refined.

And all the while, work is underway on the blockbuster film Incarnation, an epic space tragedy. Commercial box-office fodder? Or a sublimely mythical exploration of the animation, contemplation and possession of flesh - ours and others' - traumatised, erotic, beautiful, obscene...

Audacious and mesmeric, The Making of Incarnation weaves a set of stories one inside the other, rings within rings, a perpetual-motion machine. Tom McCarthy peers through the screen, or veil, of technological modernity to reveal the underlying historical and symbolic structures of human experience.

© Tom McCarthy 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critics Review

  • In its conceptual magnitude, its sustainedly dazzling prose… The Making of Incarnation feels utterly original, utterly new, utterly magical… Tom McCarthy, the most visionary of contemporary writers, is light years ahead of anyone writing anywhere currently.

    Neel Mukherjee

  • A typically ambitious mille-feuille of modernity, symbolism and myth.

    Guardian

  • One of the most brilliantly intellectual novelists of the moment… The Making of Incarnation is like a ghostwritten hybrid of a John le Carré thriller, the post-modern philosophy of Jacques Derrida and a sci-fi romp all at the same time… There is something uplifting about McCarthy’s work. He makes you think, and he makes you think things you hadn’t thought before.

    Scotland on Sunday

  • Hugely interesting, energetic, wise and well written.

    GQ

  • Difficulty is…part of the pleasure of reading McCarthy… The Making of Incarnation is a novel of motion rather than emotion; imagine an even chillier JG Ballard… a rich and fascinating exercise in observation

    Independent

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