Gathering Evidence

by Martin MacInnes

The world is heating up, species are dying out, and data collection is thriving.

Shel Murray, a primate researcher, is sent to lead a small team investigating suspicious deaths in one of the last remaining troops of bonobo chimpanzees. Establishing base in a national park controlled by an elusive conglomerate, the team encounter odd, then alarming behaviour, suggestions of an unknown predator, and they begin to consider their own safety.

Back at home, Shel's partner, John, a software engineer, is attacked, suffering head trauma. As he tries to rebuild his memory, in a remote house shrouded in fog, he starts to question not only the assault, but his present circumstances. How can he explain the fresh wounds on his body, and the activity he hears during the night? Can he really trust his doctor? And how much should he worry about the pattern of mould growing along the front of the house?

Through their respective projects, Shel and John must confront the threat they face. And a surprise event means that they have never had so much to lose as they have right now.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Speculative Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

Martin MacInnes has been published in 13 languages and is the winner of a Manchester Fiction Prize, a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. His third novel, In Ascension (2023), was longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Kitschies award, and won the Arthur C. Clarke award, Blackwell's Book of the Year, and the Saltire Prize for Fiction. In Ascension is a Times bestseller and has been optioned for film.

Reviews

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

June told us more that once there were fungi inside us, there always had been, something I tried to forget as the growths bloomed out rapidly after the long rain, large blotches, wound erupting on the trees, appearing, I thought, like graphic interpretations of the alien levity, nausea and sickness I was intermittently still experiencing. In the built hollows of the trees, the long excavations drilled by social insects, were dazzling honeycomb designs, fungal architecture, fields and gardens painstakingly grown out by the ant, used to fees and fatten their insensate young. It seemed that everywhere we chose to look, something fascinating was happening. Every inch of matter, if approached slowly and carefully, seemed to fold out infinitely, to inflate rapidly, and I imagined pulling on a line, a thread, spooling it out and never reaching an end. The density of life here was such that every niche, every single pocket of space, was appropriated, developed its own rhythms and sequences, contained its original relationships and novel behaviour, producing, in total, an unfathomable variety. Each pocket was key, every action initiated a chain reaction, creating a dizzying array of nested hierarchies, and it was the quiet, autonomous, undirected nature of this total effect, the fact broadly speaking, that ecology worked, that was the most humbling and interesting detail of all.

The novel begins with what is effectively a 20 page sequel, a tech-dystopia presented as a future historic essay on the development of a new app – eventually christened Nest. The app starts as little more than a hyper-sensitive movement sensor with a patterned display – but quickly users realise that the graphical record of their every movement tells them everything about their outward movements, which in turn reveals their thoughts and emotions. Quickly users start to use the app to tell them how they were really thinking in preference to their recollection of their emotions – and before long are unable to deal with life’s challenges other than through analysis of the app, which grows both increasingly sophisticated (drawing on micro body sensors, sleep apps, dream analysis and much more) and ubiquitous (coming to dominate and redefine employment, relationships and healthcare) and then an object of personal veneration, before driving art, space exploration and religion.

Then we as the Nest story reaches an increasingly epochal scale we are dropped back into character driven narrative. Shel is a biological researcher, her partner John a coder. The book starts as John drives Shel to the airport through a suddenly onsetting fog.

Shel has been given a unmissable chance to join a small team (with a Doctor, an expert in group formation and a mycologist) to visit the last remaining troop of bonobo chimpanzees, based in now closed park owned by a large and shadowy mining conglomerate. The group are meant to investigate what might have lead to the mysterious death of two of the troop but their mission is shrouded in uncertainty (beginning with an inadequately explained no-show from the Doctor), mystery and threat (including what seems to be some form of predator spooking the bonobos and stalking them).

John goes to visit the building site of their new property and is suddenly struck on the head (possibly by a bird) and when he wakes suffers from amnesia and confusion, visited at regular intervals by a mysterious Doctor for wounds that seem to reappear every night, under virtual house arrest (albeit more from his mental state than physical barriers) and watching the house where he is staying being increasingly covered by a black fungus.

As Shel’s story (told in the first person) gets more confusing, John (whose alternating chapter story is told in the third person) gradually regains more of his memory. The book’s third section has the two reunited although their stories (both in the third person) still seem to alternate in sections – giving the impression that the two’s experience have driven a wedge between them that even their new circumstances (and an expanded family) cannot bridge.

But the above gives only a limited feel for what this book is really about. The novel (particularly in Shel’s section) keeps coming back to the idea of phenomenon which in themselves contain a record of everything into which they have come into contact (see the open quote for one example).

Patterns, impressions, memory, complexity, layers of understanding, fluidity, perceptions of reality, interconnectedness, the relation of observer to object, decay and growth (and how they interact), transmission and reception, the interplay of the natural world and mankind, the influence of traditional corporates and cutting edge tech companies. The book is about all of these.

And the novel itself has a nested, fractal type structure – with repeated often meta parallels and recurring imagery between the Shel and John sections and frequent references back to the Nest section.

The book reminded me of Tom McCarthy but has very much its own style and take.
Overall it is perhaps not a surprise that this book did not make the Booker longlist (a non-debut novel, by a non-US citizen man neatly sits outside the Venn diagram that seemed to define this year’s prize) but more so that it did not make the Goldsmith shortlist, given by contrast, Celtic author is normally a description of the winner. It would have graced both.

One of my favourite reads of the year.

Instead I saw something like an infinite series of distinct, studded iterations; a vast aggregate of separate pockets, each one unique, original, harbouring living events, microsecond by microsecond, that had never happened before and were never to be repeated again. I had convinced myself, at least, that I could see like this, see the area not as a single field but as an array, a patchwork of individual points ……… A structure billowing out, unfurling exponentially and in the same instant contracting back to zero, a complex reiterative, non-linear growth

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I loved Martin MacInnes' first novel Infinite Ground, I was delighted to learn a second was imminent. 'Gathering Evidence' is set in the near future. The remaining bonobos are confined to an alleged wildlife sanctuary run by a mining company and surveillance capitalism is becoming more esoteric. The protagonist couple, Shel and John, study the bonobos and are disorientated by a mysterious injury respectively. The tone and settings are similar to Infinite Ground, as Shel spends much of the book in a jungle and mould is a recurring presence. However the structure is different and the themes made a bit more explicit. One thing that both novels definitely had in common is that I absolutely adored them. I was enjoying 'Gathering Evidence' so much that it was an effort to put it aside for long enough that I could go to the library. And I really love libraries.

MacInnes has an absolutely brilliant way with introspection and the spatial uncanny. His characters reflect on how their every decision, their every breath, has implications for the world around them. Yet these reflections are written so skilfully that rather than impeding the narrative (as can occur), they deepen it and draw in the reader. The characters all have a sense of curiosity about the world that is tempered by awe, which I find very pleasing. The settings, meanwhile, are extremely atmospheric, vivid, and strange. The jungle of 'Gathering Evidence' is somewhat different to that of Infinite Ground, yet equally beautiful, uncanny, and threatening. The incursion of mould and fungi is once again significant. I struggle to find examples of these two strengths to quote, as they are pervasive throughout. This wasn't a novel that I noted specific highlights within, so much as one I adored consistently from beginning to end.

Regarding the ending, it was clear from the moment that Shel started being sick in the mornings that she was pregnant. I initially thought this a rather uninteresting twist, but that proved to be entirely unfounded. The final chapters deal with Shel and John's parenthood of Dorothy, their baby who was born prematurely. John is the stay-at-home parent, which is refreshing, and to my delight the narrative treats the newborn baby as profoundly uncanny. As indeed should be the case! Babies really are existentially unsettling. I was also happy that Jane's death was not explained, and neither were the deaths of the bonobos. As in Infinite Ground, it seemed fitting not to know. Instead, the reader observes the corporate stonewalling experienced by Shel and is left with the ongoing mystery of collapsing ecosystems. The bonobos are a fascinating presence in Shel's story. The sequence in which the mother bonobo carries around the corpse of her child is haunting, especially with the knowledge that Shel is unwittingly pregnant as she watches.

It rather fascinates me that elements of 'Gathering Evidence' are very similar to other novels that I've appreciated less. The injured man without a memory, isolated in a cottage shrouded in mist, is the exact same concept of Paul Kingsnorth's Beast. While I found Kingsnorth's interpretation too abstract and aimless, MacInnes grounds his in material details (mould, wounds) and evokes mental disequilibrium more effectively. Similarly, Shel, Jane, and Alice's journey into the jungle is not unlike the expedition central to Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. Much as I enjoyed that (and the film is fantastic also), here the strangeness does not have the excuse of being alien and incomprehensible. It is based within the unknown and unanticipated effects of human intrusion into ecosystems, a subtler and much more frightening angle. Likewise, the extrapolation of surveillance capitalism that MacInnes describes as Nest has similarities with Joanna Kavenna's Zed (which I also liked). Yet MacInnes extends the implications of his technological extrapolation further than Kavenna, into philosophical and theological realms, to extraordinary effect. Then the narrative pulls back from technology, to immerse itself instead in the materiality of the living environment.

Not only does 'Gathering Evidence' combine these elements into a distinctive and coherent whole, but it does so in a style that I find thoroughly beguiling. I haven't come across a writer who so perfectly fits my tastes in a very long time. Perhaps once MacInnes published another few books and I've read them, I'll be better able to articulate precisely why. I think it's something about how he evokes the vertiginous instability of reality, while also grounding it in physical embodiment and the natural environment. Whatever it is, he's a fantastic writer and this is easily my favourite novel of the year so far.

[Olivia Cooper · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a little confused....

This book follows Shel, a biologist sent to monitor gibbons in a protected park. It also follows John, a programmer who is attacked. John is considerably more compelling than Shel, and there are few other interesting characters involved.

I like MacInnes' descriptive writing style, and he manages to create and maintain a creepy atmosphere throughout. The world is pretty cool, with themes of corporate monopoly and the effects. The idea of the NEST is innovative and the plot is mostly logical, although I found the moving timelines at the end a little tricky to follow.

The plot is a little weird. John's attack is not fully explained, and we never find out what was disturbing the gibbons. Personally I feel that even if a book is part of a series, it should wrap up the main plot points. I feel a bit frustrated, like I've somehow missed a big plot point.

Overall I enjoyed this book until the end of part two. The ending was just a bit disappointing.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has annoyed the heck out of me. I know many people have rated this highly but I appear to have completely missed the point. After building up loads of mystery across 2 parallel plot lines there's virtually no resolution or explanation of anything whatsoever. What was the point?

[Maarten · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gathering Evidence suffers from the worst form of literature syndrome, in which an author desperately wants to say something without actually saying it, mangling any semblance of plot or actual meaning in the process. This book is exactly that - there is no development, we learn nothing, and nothing is resolved. Yes, as many positive reviews note, the book has themes. Whoop-tie-do. It does nothing with these themes, aside from some creative wordsmithing. The book touches on things and describes them, with the only coherence residing in the realm of abstracted abstractions. Otherwise, there is absolutely nothing here.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this novel sometimes brilliant, sometimes dull, but most of all baffling. It demands to be read more quickly than I did (a week). The first section is amazing, but has, to me, a tenuous relationship to the rest. The first-person voice of alternating chapters did not grab me (although the content interested me), and the third-person narrative of the other chapters did not interest me much. I sometimes felt as manipulated as the characters feel they are.

I can’t condemn what I don’t understand; I can just say this wasn’t a novel for me, although there were parts that were fantastic.

[n · Rating 5 out of 5]

haunting, unsettling, precise, beautiful!

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shel travels with two other female researchers to a national park where one of the last remaining wild populations of bonobos are increasingly cloistered. Camping in the park, the women observe the bonobos' behaviour and take blood samples, trying to figure out the unknown ailment that has killed some of them (the park is called 'Westernra', as in Lucy from Dracula, which seems to refer both to what may be preying on the bonobos and the scientists' own blood draws - or are they one and the same?). Back home, Shel's husband John is trapped in his house after a head injury, unable to remember much of his own life and troubled by visits from a mysterious doctor. However, the key to Martin MacInnes's second novel turns out to be the seemingly irrelevant essay on a new kind of artificial intelligence with which it starts. In the future, we are told, each human has their own nest, a unique digital footprint that can be expressed as a light sculpture, and which has started to break down interpersonal relationships as people start to relate more to their own and others' nests than their actual bodies. Gathering Evidence seems to be about fungal blight, faceless predators or environmental destruction, but it's actually a puzzle for the reader: what led to the creation of these nests? I was impressed again by the intelligence of MacInnes's writing, and how he links together AI, animal behaviour and ecology. But unlike In Ascension,  I can't say that I enjoyed reading this; it's definitely a very cerebral novel, and I just wasn't as captured by the story of the nests as I was by Shel's relationship with the bonobos that initially looks like the main focus of the story, even though I liked how MacInnes implied how the nests emerged from very human feelings: distress, isolation, loneliness, protectiveness of an infant. I admired Gathering Evidence but I doubt I would read it again, and I'm going to steel myself before embarking on his debut, Infinite Ground.

[Angie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought Martin MacInnes's debut (INFINITE GROUND) was one of the most original and exciting things I'd read in years, and it was a delight to discover he's only surpassed himself here. GATHERING EVIDENCE is a novel that begs to have entire essays written about it; it's literature of the highest order, offering an enormous amount for the brain to chew on, seamlessly weaving together an extraordinary web of fascinating ideas in which every detail is significant. The novel is a close-reader's dream-come-true; I won't do it justice in any length of review, but here are some of the things that most stand out for me.

A lot of the techniques which seemed so fresh and interesting in INFINITE GROUND are present here as well and seem increasingly representative of a signature style of writing and thought which I've never encountered in another writer. There is something incredibly distinctive about his technique for sketching a scene, a controlled skill in leaving conventional things out and filling strange details with meaning that simultaneously adds power to his descriptions and creates a sense of disorientation which is by turns unnerving and euphoric. He writes incredible descriptions of his characters experiencing a heightening and distorting of sensory perception. This frequently includes an uncanny hyperawareness of and dissociation from their own bodies, somewhat Kafka-esque experiences of themselves as grotesque that in MacInnes's writing seem more indicative of an unsentimental insistence that humans are, quite simply, undeniably organic entities. His writing is full of mini thought experiments, peculiar extrapolations, pushing descriptions and ideas beyond conventional or logical conclusions. It's packed, just generally, with observations, ideas, images, and parallels that simply never would have occurred to me; I love to be shown how to see the world in new ways, and in this sense I find his work thoroughly mind-expanding.

Part of his MO is playing with scale, magnifying and telescoping, a kind of perceptual zooming in and out that assumes, I think, an especial significance in this novel, which has as a prominent theme (one of many) the presence of the infinite in the minute, of the whole residing in the tiniest part, reality composed of metaphorical fractals, both in terms of the material and the temporal. What he's done with the concept of 'nesting' is completely ingenious; the whole novel embodies a sort of matryoshka vision of the universe, reality as a giant cosmic onion, a universe which builds itself outward in layers, with the added notion that humans, in a sense, add new layers through information technology and data. Part of what this novel does is draw attention to these layers and attempt to peel them back. There is homage too, to the idea that all of reality might in fact be merely a giant hologram or simulation or hallucination -- perhaps the most obvious: a daughter called 'Doll'.

It's a novel full of parallels, some literal (scratches down a neck, lines of fungus along a well), some abstract and analogistic, illuminating the relatedness of disparate things (memory and fungus, a brain and a planet), as well as countless phantasmic echoes between the two parallel storylines. The whole novel is shot through with motifs and recurring images, some beautifully subtle (the arc of an arm in movement, a sock pulled halfway off), others more obvious but unfailingly ingenious, always in service to a coherent overall vision. Some are quite abstract: patterns/prints, hollows or shell-like impressions (the concept of nests again), habits/ritualised behaviour (another type of pattern), interconnectedness, sound/acoustics. Others are quite visceral: blood, mouths, faces, fingernails (as human/primate shell, perhaps), and still others link us to the substance of the earth: disorienting imagery related to water and the ground. Perhaps the idea the fascinates me most is the repeatedly-suggested notion that individual human identity can itself be encoded, in various ways and with varying levels of sophistication, as a pattern.

As a second-time novelist he's outdone himself in virtually every way--I see improvement in his writing, compared to the debut; in terms of mechanics, there is a better command of rhythm and flow here, and his dexterity with imagery has also improved: what was great before is now stellar; there are descriptions in this novel which made me dizzy with their beauty. Perhaps most notably, he shows a much greater emotional range here than in IG; in the novel's final section, especially, he manages to translate his signature sensibility/thought-style into highly original scenes of surpassing tenderness, which frankly caught me a bit off guard, so different are they to the feeling of relative emotional neutrality which pervaded INFINITE GROUND.

I could easily spend the rest of my day pulling out more quotes and examples to illustrate all this,
but there is a scene which describes a feeling of paralysis in the the face of the 'pure unknowable potential' of a given moment, of being overwhelmed by the possibilities and information and scale of change in every instant, which I found to be especially powerful and resonant. I suppose if I had a favourite scene, that would be it.

It's a novel in which the powers of a fascinating mind are on full display. GATHERING EVIDENCE is a hyperaware, mind-bending bombshell of a book that demands to be read with the greatest of attention.

[Alexandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s poetic ambiguity and then there’s a dog’s dinner. This initially gripping, intelligent and well-written story slowly but surely descends into verbose, disjointed and thoroughly unresolved drivel. Deeply unsatisfying and best avoided.

[Katrin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came to this book through a Guardian review which praised the artfulness of the writing and construction of the story. Judging by various goodreads reviews this notion certainly has resonated with some readers although I am afraid I am not one of them. I have read this book both from the perspective of a scientist and someone who frequently, nearly daily, judges and marks other people's writing and whilst I appreciate the originality of the premise, I found it rather wanting in those two points.

Personally, I am rather impressed with the praise that the writing in particular has received. McInnes is admittedly very good with lexicon, he throws around synonyms and terminology (occasionally inaccurately but that may be forgivable), and generally appears to enjoy exploring descriptions of sensory awareness, perceptions and processes. This he does really well although I quickly tired of it because these descriptions - and they were always descriptions, never reflections - bordered on the repititious both in detail and language. Towards the end of the book, the sentence structure, which had been fairly monotonous at times already, became positively perfunctory, and it may well be that this was intentional (an expression of the overall doom and gloom which was the other thing that drives this novel) but it felt rushed and careless; in fact I cared less about everything that was happening asking myself where the point of finishing the novel was given that I got what it tried to tell me. At times, the sentences, in all their artfulness, bordered on the senseless, McInnes trying a bit too hard to come up with new impressions and technical descriptions. No scientist I know speaks like Shel does, using lingo so excessively, but then McInnes is no scientist and seems to think very little of them, or indeed of humanity as a whole, which brings us to the persistent theme of dread that builds up throughout the book.

The sense of doom is a key theme of this book. We do not find out why the nightmarish things that happen to the characters take place because that is not the aim of this novel. McInnes has no interest in offering an explanation, let alone a solution - he condemns, projects a dark, hopeless future, amplified in its doom by science and business interests and perpetuated by characters who do not learn throughout the book, but are driven by - yes, you probably guessed it: science and business interests. Science is here represented by Shel, in particular her field trip which is unsuccessful and destructive, and occasional contemplations on scientific progress (usually bad although it is arguable whether it is just science or science governed by corporate structure that is the evil) such as in the ludicrous three pages in which McInnes subjects the reader to his pseudo-scientific, near sensationalist musings on the impacts of genetic modifications of mosquitoes - according to the narrative driven by the WHO which clearly is supposed to represent the "corporate" structures (also bad, definitely worse than science), nevermind that the WHO is not a corporate institution and lacks power to drive interventions like this; it can only promote them, and even then, they will only be implemented if there is a political interest behind them, so maybe if he had researched this better, McInnes would have found that this more complex angle aligns better with his worldview... but I digress. As science and business in the novel form a not-exactly-evil but unwittingly regressive pair, the business interest is fittingly represented by John, Shel's partner, who as a character is kept at arm's length from the reader. We never really get a good picture of him, his perspective being given via a third-person narrator as opposed to Shel’s first-person narrative. Together, Shel and John seem utterly unequipped to deal with the sense of dread that is enveloping them: They are justifiably terrified by it, powerless and impotent and unable to react to it, then have short moments of clarity, but end up resuming their old behavioural patterns despite the evidence that the dread still persists. McInnes goes so far to project this association of 'scientific', or in the widest sense, numerical, with 'contagious' onto the bonobos who - as the most inventive apes - become equally corrupted by picking up an affinity for patterns, thus becoming more human.

The constant dread is realised very effectively in the book and McInnes succesfully projects his angst onto the reader. As a statement novel, I can respect this, despite worrying a bit about the simplification and reductionist approach (the suggestion that science is powerless and the puppet of corporations is not exactly accurate and unhelpful when anti-expert discourse is still having momentum; there is also a section in which McInnes appears to link abortions for health reasons into his overall criticism). Using the human tendency to see patterns everywhere as the root cause for dissonance is also original and well-aligned with ongoing discussions about the effect of social media on opinion building. So I can absolutely see why this is so critically acclaimed. I want more from books though. I am not easily satisfied with someone telling me how bad everything is, how bad we as humans are, and whilst I can relate to the sense of ecological gloom, I find books that explore solutions more interesting, less descriptive, and, quite frankly, less depressing.

[G Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read and fallen in love with In Ascension, I was excited to read Gathering Evidence. Unfortunately I was slightly disappointed - the story is very clever but it takes a long while to get into, hits a peak and then trails off a bit.

[Deea · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5*

[Oliver Silvester · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed the world building and the never ending tension but the pay off is not really there. Suffers from being too subtle I think. I love the two parallel stories that keep you guessing, baffled and longing for the characters to work it out, get to the bottom of their strange happenings. But unfortunately they don’t which feels like a kick in the shins.

It’s hard because I think MacInnes would probably struggle to put down a hard, definitive answer and culprit and ending that didn’t feel underwhelming or odd or bizarre in response to what we develop ourselves through the book. And perhaps that’s the point, we develop answers based on what is the most scary or strange to us and he is simply feeding us the environment in which to grow these theories and fears, which I guess is what the book is all about. All the things we are and experience make up all the things we think, therefore our fears and theories are tailor made for us. Hence why the pay off would be hard to execute as his hard-copy-climax wouldn’t be what we had built up ourselves.

Does this make the book excellent? Maybe in some ways but it does feel a little underbaked in some places still. It’s a great concept and it really uses you as a catalyst to file the fear and tension, but I think it doesn’t quite hit all the notes to really pull you through the other side feeing like it was all worth it.

Also there are some WORDY passages that feel a bit like dragging yourself through sludge. He clearly loves the minutia and thrives on pulling apart details to see what is underneath but it is a bit hard to chew through in places.

[Meg Rushton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really glad I sat with this one for a while rather than just get frustrated with it and move on. I think a lot of MacInnes as an author and so I found I was left high and dry by the ending of this one initially.

On the surface this novel feels quite slow and meandering, while saying what it wants to say within the first 30 or so pages.

But actually, if you consider that prologue as the nucleus of the story, a sort of manifesto for what MacInnes is going to explore, I think it allows you to enjoy the rest of the novel in all of its experimental complexity.

There's a lot I could go into, as I really do consider this a powerhouse of a novel and certainly something I'd love to keep and reread. But, essentially, I feel MacInnes tests the reader in their ability to find meaning in the ambiguous. We are set apart by a lot of the animal kingdom by our tireless desire to find pattern and meaning, but we live in a world where stark situations that are not up to interpretation are rare. MacInnes presents us with images, situations and passages that are willfully ambiguous and dares us to find meaning in them. Are we conspiracist, realist or nihilist? How many times must we go over something before we come to a conclusion we consider "true"?

The rendering of this idea through the use of sci-fi, ecology and nature writing was right up my street. There are also some wonderfully romantic passages about John and Shel which, even for someone who lacks sentimentality like me, were really profound. John finding his way back to himself through the image of Shel's arching arm? The fungus disappearing at the prospect of her return? Just lovely.

Read it, fool!

[Angus McKeogh · Rating 3 out of 5]

After someone suggested this book I was expecting deep intrigue or groundbreaking twists. Instead it’s a story that meanders and plods along, never getting too thrilling, and never answering the intriguing questions it posits here and there. Was expecting something much more spectacular.

[Selina Griffin · Rating 3 out of 5]

a strange book but a good one. preferred the bits in the jungle with Shel.

[David Kenvyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think that I can now say, without any fear of contradiction, that I know far more about Bonobo chimpanzees than is strictly necessary for someone who lives just off the Great Western Road in Glasgow. The Bonobos are, however, essential to the plot. They are what Alfred Hitchcock called the McGuffin. Everything centres around them and without them there would be nothing. The three of them have gone there to study the Bonobos, who are on the brink of extinction. (I do not know if this is actually true, but it is a necessary motor for the plot). Things go wrong from the start. The company that own the park in which the Bonobos live is sinister, to put it mildly. One of their party, a doctor, goes missing on arrival, and the three have to start their project without him. They are marooned three days walk away from the main gate, and they are in danger. Something cloven-footed visits their camp at night. They do not see it, but it makes its presence felt.
While they are in the jungle, Shel’s partner, John has moved to oversee the building of their new house. He is assaulted by something. We do not know what, but it has left him hospitalised and seriously injured. He is allowed to go home, and receives daily visits from his doctor. Think Dr Jekyll here, and you would not be far wrong.
This is where the book starts to become eerie. The narrators are Shel and John. Shel is in a nightmare situation, completely isolated, in a jungle. John is suffering from concussion or a much more serious head injury. It is very clear that neither of them has a grasp on reality, have a sure understanding of what is happening to them. This is a cross between “Robinson Crusoe”, “The Shining” and “Rosemary’s Baby”. This is a seriously unsettling story. It plays to our fears in a way that would make MR James proud. You do get the feeling that if someone whistled, something really nasty would be the result.
The Shel comes home and has to understand what happened to John, and he has to understand what happened to her. That is when the real terror begins, and that is where you the reader are left with nothing resolved.

[Ignacio Peña · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's no denying how eager I have been to read this second novel by Martin MacInnes. I have held over the years since his first novel how brilliant a piece of writing I consider it to be. With Gathering Evidence, Martin sets himself firmly as one of my favorite new writers around.

Across both Infinite Ground and Gathering Evidence, Martin's style is boldy his own. Across all the works of his that I have read, his creative landscapes are in the micro-details that build a greater narrative. I was undeniably floored by the end of the first section of this novel, "Nest." I was quietly impressed as I continued to read at how the rest of the book proceeded like a slow burning candle, never relenting in its languid storytelling pace as the stories of John and Shel proceeded, but yet somehow still feeling like a high-speed crash by the last words in the novel. Everything about Gathering Evidence is itself a piece of art: from the very object of the book itself, the cover art priming the reader without the reader even knowing it, before each of the book's sections lead the reader further into the novel's nest of words. This novel is Martin MacInnes growing as a writer; this isn't to say that Infinite Ground is now a lesser work when framed in this book's context, but that there is just so much more that MacInnes has to say, and it is magnificent.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly gorgeous, delicate and nuanced exploration of the effects that technology and corporate power have over individual lives; where the boundaries between human and animal lie, and what humanity is doing to shift that line; how nature fights against our colonisation of it and what it means for everything. This is, under everything, a story about real love, and how we must cling to it. Martin MacInnes has always been a brilliant writer, but this shows how much beauty there is in his work, too.

[Rosalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've never gotten to the end and of a book and felt so confused. This one was complex, maybe too philosophical for me. I wanted to get to know the characters more intimately but it felt like I only grazed the surface and so many thing were left unresolved. Everyone has their own personal experience when reading a book and for me this one just didn't connect on a deeper level. Beautiful imagery and meaning but lacking something that I can't quite put my finger on.

[Nathalie Larsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

So many unanswered questions…

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my third Martin MacInnes novel so there must be something about his writing style and subject matter that appeals to me. I would be fibbing though to claim that I pick up the book where I left off with unalloyed excitement and anticipation. The reader needs to work at this novel; and beware if you are suffering from a bad night’s sleep.
Most books are something of a challenge at the outset as the reader attunes to the writing style. MacInnes asks an awful lot of the reader at the start of this novel (Part One entitled “Nest”) and you are catapulted into a slab of descriptive text. This is abstract conceptualising with a total absence of either place or characters.

The shift into Westenra Park is a huge relief, though I found it hard to shake off the images of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, with perimeter fences, high secrecy and the knowledge that something is going to break down.

If you have read MacInnes before, his distinctive style and interests become clear. The world of nature is challenging mankind for the use of resources. There is no sign of algae in this novel, but in its place a spreading fungus, with its own agency, which manifests many of the characteristics of the algae present in other MacInnes works before and after this one. The points of reference that I can relate to would be dry rot, or the ubiquitous knot weeds that spreads so rapidly.

It has to be said that MacInnes is prescient in his choice of subject matter. Gathering Evidence was published on 6/2/20 - at the very moment that Coronavirus Covid 19 introduced itself to the world.
Here we have the Bonobo monkey; guarded and protected from infection.
“a double helix rising up and revealed in global epidemiology maps charting infection rates from a supervirus” (159).

While the majority of the book story takes place in an unnamed South American jungle, there is a parallel story running, back home in the UK, where our bonobo lead scientist, Shel, is moving house. Her husband, John , a coder, has emotional and physical problems of his own.

What does it all mean?; what are the conclusions? Reader, you decide, and that’s what MacInnes decides to serve up. Its not a book that provides many answers, ultimately, to life’s puzzling conundrums; but it is a book whose subject matter and writing creates senses of menace, fear, uncertainty.
And more than anything else, the realization that each of us is only a tiny, tiny, part of the earth’s evolution and existence way beyond homo sapiens.

[Eleanor]

MacInnes’s second novel (and the second I’ve read, the first being his excellent 2023 In Ascension) is noticeably well put together, each of its plot strands echoing and reinforcing the other. In one, primate researcher Shel is seconded onto a research trip by a strange, secretive corporation who own the last remaining population of bonobos in the world, and although things are odd right from the beginning, it’s only at the end of the expedition that a violent climax occurs. The second strand focuses on her husband John, who’s mysteriously attacked and suffers a head injury while visiting the construction site for their new home, and whose subsequent disorientation is not ameliorated by periodic visits from an enigmatic doctor. Both of these strands, we know, are bound to coalesce into an explanation for the novel’s prologue, which describes the development and eventual apotheosis of a new form of artificial intelligence arising from an app named Nest, which is able to fully map and represent every facet of its users’ lives. MacInnes’s spare, intelligent writing is on full display, and these characters are perhaps more traditionally sympathetic than In Ascension’s Leigh. He also evokes shapeless dread and menace superbly—John’s sections are especially saturated in this—and you can trace the thematic preoccupations through every page: security, control, the futile effort to achieve total purity of research conditions, which is troubled by the reality that merely existing in a place disrupts the equilibrium of that place; maybe even thinking about a place does that. As a fictional argument, it’s very well made, and as a piece of weird fiction it’s excellent. I still think In Ascension is the better work, though, perhaps because in it, he manages to produce a hopeful vision of transformation instead of Gathering Evidence’s basically despairing one. Source: kindly passed on by Laura T.—thank you!

[Mark Milne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having recently finished Macinnes’s In Ascension, I felt prepared for the style of his writing here. But this book was quite mysterious and for me, I’m afraid, disappointingly so. I have to say that the book description given here by Goodreads, which I am only seeing post-read, gives more detail than is given in the book itself, including the back-cover teaser, as Goodreads mentions global warming but Macinnes does not, at all. That description should be removed: GR does not have the right or wisdom to write such a description, assuming it was written by them. Back to the book: I don’t understand what I’ve read. Can’t piece it together. No spoilers here, but the story starts easily enough, a team of scientists going to study bonobos in a park shortly after two had been discovered dead. But then the story cuts to a new character unknown to us, whose identity and place in the wider story comes quite late. It is difficult to place the time of the story: bonobos are said to be close to extinction but is that due to the extinction event linked to global warming and the extinction in store for us from it? It seems not to be, but as no mention of global warming is given in the story here (typical for novelists today to write present-day and even later tales in which the phenomenon of GW, which is so massive in its implications and so poetic, simply does not exist) one has to assume that this is most likely a story taking place today, give or take… This second storyline never becomes fully clear. What is with the mold growing in his cottage? No idea. What is with the child and the concern about and concentration on its development? Who knows? It seems as if vital elements of a story have been omitted. I’m lost here, and I don’t think that was intended. DNA? Okay, why? What exactly is his work about? We are left in too much darkness here.

[Claudia Lady Circumference · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that you can’t help thinking about long after you’ve finished. It’s set in the not too distant future and is rich with ideas, observations and implications.
In the main part of the novel, the two protagonists, Shel and John, are separated and their story told in alternating chapters. Shel and her team are in a lush and eerie rainforest, John is completely isolated, confined to a cottage recuperating from an injury. Neither of them is safe.

The plot zips along nicely with some elements of dread building up layers of unease but it’s the internal worlds of Shel and John that make this book special. Shel, a scientist, and John, a programmer, are both trained in observing and analysing. Their views often shift from big, societal issues to the microscopic. Everything is connected and there is a feeling of the wonder but also the terror of our surroundings and how it is only too easy to be overwhelmed and to lose oneself.

It is an unsettling novel that needs to be read with concentration but is utterly rewarding.

[Andrew Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gave this 4 stars because I read it quite quickly for me, I had some long sessions and kept wanting to come back to it quickly.

However I can't really say why I "really liked it". In fact I felt a little let down by the official description, which makes it sounds a bit like a thriller or racy conspiracy theory novel, yet it's neither of those.

I should have read a few more journalists' reviews, which give a slightly better idea of what the novel is about. Having said that, if I had known better I probably wouldn't have read it and I'm glad I did.

It's part wildlife documentary (you will learn a lot about bonobos, assuming the author has done his research properly). It's part psychological drama as the two main protagonists undergo separate traumatic experiences and suffer from paranoia. It's also a novel about how unrelated events, that are almost inconsequential at the time they occur, work together to have earth shattering consequences that could never have been foreseen.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

MacInnes is a genuinely unique and stunning talent. This is the third book of his I have read, and like the other two, this one is spectacular. There is so much happening here, from the dual narrative arcs (arcs that seem to superimpose themselves on each other in places, and repeat from changed perspectives too), the smart-as-fuck intellectual trajectories and ideas and potentialities that fill the pages. Other writers can turn braininess into info dumps or "see how smart I am!" paragraphs, but MacInnes just weaves his brilliance into a complex and freakishly apt story of, well, a lot of things. I had to stop in places to absorb the things he was using as background or foreground or underground (ha!) for the narrative. Simply fascinating, and quite sobering too. I don't summarize plots, and couldn't here if I tried, it is that complicated, quasi-theoretical, boldly scientific, and deeply, emotionally human.
You'll not find a better book, except maybe his other two.

[Jacob Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really hazy, clinical, surreal stuff. Floats through this weird mix of Kafka, VanderMeer and a bunch of biology textbooks, which is to say, it slaps. Not a lot happens until it sort of does, and the weight given to each event, juxtaposed against the overwhelmingness of the overwhelming everything of life is a fantastic move that carries the book. The characters are all a bit nothingy, but that's clearly the point - they're such tiny aspects of such a sprawling and oblique cosmology they couldn't expect to be anything other than stoic, lightly inscrutable nerds. Entirely too much about childcare in the last section though, babies are boring and it was a surprisingly obvious move for a book that's otherwise quite hard to pin down. Keen to read his other stuff though, come on paperback release!

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved In Ascension and this had similar qualities to that and the Southern Reach trilogy. I love a spooky haunting sci-fi mystery kinda thriller and this was exactly that. However, I'm not sure the payoff was totally worth it, which was disappointing as the book made so many interesting nuanced points around connectivity, humans/animals, ecosystems, capitalism, technology etc.

Like why did it end on a cliffhanger? Lots of plot parts were left unanswered, and even though I liked the gradual realisation of the protagonist male being the creator of the software from the story at the beginning, and how it all might be linked together to some infectious god-like purpose with the bonobo, it just didn't really feel that well finished?? If the last 1/5 was slightly different or a bit more expanded on I think it would have been an easy 5* for me