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As the title of the debut novel by the Scottish writer maybe suggests, Infinite Ground is an endlessly searching look at surfaces and the balance of who and what inhabits them. Written mainly in the third person it hinges on the vaguely noir disappearance of Carlos, a Corporation worker in an unspecified city that we are told is in South American. A semi-retired Inspector is tasked with finding/finding out what happened to Carlos and in the process he almost loses himself.
The novel is unconventionally structured and has two main parts entitled ‘The Corporation’ and ‘The Forest’, with two smaller sections plus extracts from ‘Tribes of the Southern interior’ at the start of several chapters. ‘The Corporation’ introduces us to the Inspector, and via the absence of Carlos we are made aware of the facsimile culture that exists, where the workplace and or appearance to society is all and actors are paid to impersonate workers/family for a range of morally and culturally dubious reasons. We see the march of urbanisation, surveillance, consumerism and capitalist ideology via the marks Carlos leaves in a world where all is recorded but the truth is hard to pin down. A world where the places that we occupy and the spaces that we move through are shifting and the imposition of superstructures obscures the detail of truth.
As the Inspector searches for Carlos his own sense of reality dissipates and as readers we are psychologically and, by means of the sensory nature of the book, physically drawn into what it means to be real and present in life. The narrative becomes increasingly absurd and we parallel the Inspector’s confusion. His investigations lead him to retrace what he thinks of as Carlos’s steps and he ends up in ‘The Forest’. The Inspector then takes part in an expedition to meet some tribal natives and as readers we are again confronted with ideas of false reality, cultural voyeurism and the co-opting of private, public and community space.
Eventually the Inspector ends up alone within ‘The Forest’ and it is here perhaps that MacInnes most powerfully interrogates his ideas of the shared spaces that we occupy with all that is on us and both in and around us in terms of all that lives. This is a novel that asks the reader to cross infinite ground in questioning what it means to be corporeal, to evolve, to co-exist, to have memory and traces of others, and indeed interest and belief in other things but it does so with humour, invention and a large degree of skill. We become lost with the Inspector but stay with him partly because the sounds and smells of his immersion in his bizarre reality are so vividly drawn out and partly because we feel empathy for him and the lost wife that he mourns.
This is a novel that visually resonates through vivid set pieces. It asks readers to confront ideas and be accepting of doing so in an unconventional way. MacInnes rewards this reader input with pared down language and interweaving of ideas, repetition and retracing and the chance to be immersed in really thinking about who we are. MacInnes does not hide his literary influences and manages to pay homage whilst more often than not making Infinite Ground very much of his own creation.
Give or take a few tiny moments where I felt the voice slipped back to that of the Edinburgh author, one that I’m sure will leave no trace in the published edition, this is an accomplished, engaging debut that leaves a genuinely exciting mark on the Scottish literary map.
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Infinite Ground is published by Atlantic Books
ISBN: 9781782399476 Martin MacInnes can be found at www.martinmacinnes.com
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Clare is a writer living in Burntisland on the Fife coast in the East of Scotland. She has been nominated for The LiftedBrow/RMIT international non/fictionLAB Prize for Experimental Nonfiction. Clare has also presented work at Manchester Metropolitan University’s public humanities event, Digital Re-Enchantment: Place, Writing & Technology and been made an associate artist of the Digital Institute for Early ParenthoodDIEP.
Her work has previously been chosen for reading at Edinburgh International Book Festival as part of their Storyshop for emerging writers, appeared in the Project Afterbirth art exhibition that premiered at the White Moose gallery in Devon, 2015 and been published in various literary magazines and anthologies. Her piece ‘Meandering Route of the Muscle Memories’ was selected for inclusion in the Journeys anthology produced by Scottish Book Trust for Book Week Scotland 2015, and she was asked to write a leader piece for the Secrets & Confessions 2016 anthology call out. Twitter: @Archieislander Blog: https://clarearchibald.wordpress.com/