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The Making of Incarnation

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The Making of Incarnation

By: Tom McCarthy
Narrated by: Ben Onwukwe
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About this listen

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

 Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Metaphysical & Visionary Technothrillers Thriller & Suspense Technology Fiction Thriller Military Suspense

Critic reviews

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.
A typically ambitious mille-feuille of modernity, symbolism and myth. (Katy Guest)
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. (Stuart Kelly)
Hugely interesting, energetic, wise and well written. (Sam Leith)
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 (Charles Arrowsmith)
A Kafka for the Google Age.
Should you read the new Tom McCarthy book? (A: Yes. Always yes.)
Favourite novel of 2015.
Here...McCarthy writes at the height of his powers, interweaving the new future with the recent past... The Making of Incarnation McCarthy adds to his reputation as one of our most knowledgeable and perceptive novelists.
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Most relevant
Tom McCarthy is too cool to write a plot, as such. Instead this ‘anti-novel’ comprises two or three skimpy plot-lines that float independent of each other, mostly, occasionally touching like strands of seaweed in an ocean of words. Tom McCarthy is a human thesaurus. In each sentence he tries out several ways of saying the same thing, then side-tracks himself by thinking of an amazingly random-seeming connection between what he’s writing about & something else, then he introduces several subclauses, & finally loops back to - you’ve forgotten where. It’s like navigating Spaghetti Junction with a map written in Elvish. Also, he’s an artist, venturing into technology, & occasionally science. A scientist would make their prose plain, so as to render something complicated in a comprehensible way. Tom McCarthy does the exact opposite, maybe to convey something of the dizzy bewilderment one gets from trying to contemplate everything in connection with everything else, all at once. For the Audio-book the narration is, frankly, quite poor (although obviously one sympathises - this must be awful prose to speak aloud). Having said all that - the “Making of Incarnation” has kind of got to me a bit, & I can imagine going back to it for another bite. As the plotting is irrelevant I wouldn’t have to read the whole thing, & it does have a distinctive flavour.

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