Book review: Gathering Evidence, by Martin MacInnes

This is a most unusual and extremely cerebral novel. It is, I should say, also very good. It is compelling, full of intriguing ideas, and yet retains an emotional sincerity and sensitivity. It also has a surprising denouement that it would be high reviewer treason to reveal. The British have quite often rather held their noses at the “novel of ideas” – bit too French – and in some ways this is far more philosophical than ideological. It worries around thoughts and the connections between thoughts like rubbing a handful of pebbles in your fingers.

Martin MacInnes

Gathering Evidence begins with an overture. It details the emergence of a technology that comes to be known as a “nest”. At the start, it is merely a tracking app that displays your movements. But as it upgrades, more and more data is harvested and displayed as patterns, and then holograms. Imagine all the information about you, from sleep patterns to photographs, and from shopping preferences to facial tics, all translated into the real world from the virtual.


At the finale of this opening section, there are even priests who think accessing all the facts about everyone will reveal the mind of God, and tech billionaires who are moving their nests off-world, as there is insufficient raw material for the processing power required. Asteroids are scarred in order to preserve the nest; part gravestone and part immortality.


Fascinating though all this is about how we are being reshaped by technology, I did pause after the first 22 pages and think, “Yes, all super smart, but when are we going to get some characters?”


We do. John is taking his wife Shel to the airport, as she heads off on a research expedition. The setting is clearly in the novel’s own fictive past, as there are no nests. He is a code-writer; she a specialist on the diet of higher primates. She is to be accompanied by Jane, a mycologist working on fungal networks (you can see the rhyme already), and Alice, who works on group dynamics.


For this field expedition, they are also due to be met by an unnamed doctor and blood specialist, who mysteriously does not turn up. They are to discover what they can about bonobo or pygmy chimpanzees, now perhaps on the brink of extinction, especially since two of the last few have been found dead in mysterious circumstances.


Back at home, John has a mysterious accident and awakens with amnesia. Help is at hand when a mysterious, unnamed doctor arrives to help him reconstruct his memories and deal with his now habitual unconscious habit of causing bleeding by scratching and reopening his wounds (another rhyme). John also thinks that someone else might be coming into his house while he is asleep, and is worried about the inexplicable mould encroaching on their rented cottage.


In terms of genre, MacInnes is gloriously promiscuous. There is catch-all term, “weird fiction”, that covers everything from science-fiction to horror to dystopia, and MacInnes manages to breeze through all this and more. The Shel sections, as she tries to understand the bonobos – including an odd moment where she sees one fashioning a pillow for its nest (rhyme, again: do these chimpanzees have technology?) – are a kind of environmental Heart Of Darkness. Of course, there is something nasty in the jungle as well. The John sections are more eerie. What did happen to him? How is it connected with the new home they were having built? These parts have the same quality as recent works by, say, Andrew Michael Hurley or Jenn Ashworth, parts of the rural Gothic resurgence. As these plots ravel together, we eventually get a finale as well, but not one that I was expecting in the slightest.


MacInnes is as broad-ranging in terms of the intellectual interests. We take in coding (described with a beautiful precision), zoology, anthropology, theology, ecology, psychology, evolutionary science and much more. It is curious, I think, that so many recent books (Richard Powers, Robert Macfarlane and others) have been obsessed with the idea of mycological (or even mythological) communication between trees and the wider environment. But what is most impressive here is that this profusion of disciplines is held together with the notion of what being interconnected might actually mean and entail. What does “to have a connection” mean? Mobile phone signal or deep recognition of another person, or even creature? Gathering Evidence mirrors its own themes in the breadth of its reference.


Yet this is eventually also a book about humans being humans, in all their loves and griefs and wonders and horrors. Despite its fascination with webs of all sorts, the novel still keeps its interstices. There is room for mystery, and the frisson comes from the reader riddling over what is withheld as much as what is explained.


It is above all, I think, a novel about loss. It covers loss of identity, loss of species, loss of privacy, loss of confidence, loss of innocence.


It is written in a beautifully understated style – when you are dealing with big concepts, it’s probably best to steer clear of too much flash prose – and will indubitably linger in my mind for a long time to come. Stuart Kelly



Gathering Evidence, by Martin MacInnes, Atlantic Books, £12.99