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The Making of Incarnation
From the author of Remainder, and two novels short-listed for the Booker Prize, C, and Satin Island, a widescreen odyssey through the medical labs, computer graphics studios, military research centers, and other dark zones where the frontiers of potential—to cure, kill, understand or entertain—are constantly tested and refined.
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. But 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 geopolitical fault lines and through strata of personal and collective history. Meanwhile, work is under way on the blockbuster movie Incarnation, an epic space tragedy.
As McCarthy peers through the screen, or veil, of technological modernity to reveal the underlying symbolic structures of human experience, The Making of Incarnation weaves a set of stories one inside the other, rings within rings, a perpetual motion machine.
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. But 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 geopolitical fault lines and through strata of personal and collective history. Meanwhile, work is under way on the blockbuster movie Incarnation, an epic space tragedy.
As McCarthy peers through the screen, or veil, of technological modernity to reveal the underlying symbolic structures of human experience, The Making of Incarnation weaves a set of stories one inside the other, rings within rings, a perpetual motion machine.
327 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 16, 2021
37 people are currently reading
920 people want to read
About the author
Tom McCarthy
99 books492 followersTom McCarthy — “English fiction’s new laureate of disappointment” (Time Out, September 2007) — is a writer and artist. He was born in 1969 and lives in a tower-block in London. Tom grew up in Greenwich, south London, and studied English at New College, Oxford. After a couple of years in Prague in the early 1990s, he lived in Amsterdam as literary editor of the local Time Out, and later worked in British television as well as co-editing Mute magazine.
His debut novel Remainder was first published in November 2005 by Paris-based art press Metronome. After becoming a cult hit championed first by British webzines (it was 3:AM Magazine’s Book of the Year for 2005) and then by the literary press, Remainder was republished by Alma Books in the UK (2006) and Vintage in the US (2007). A French version is to be followed by editions in Japanese, Korean, Greek, Spanish and Croatian.
A work of literary criticism, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, was released by Granta Books in June 2006. It also came out in France and an American edition is in the offing.
Tom’s second novel, Men in Space came out in 2007.
He has published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement and Contemporary Magazine, as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press) and The Milgram Experiment (Jan van Eyck Press). His story, “Kool Thing, Or Why I Want to Fuck Patty Hearst” appeared in The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth (Serpent’s Tail) in 2008.
His ongoing project the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that surfaces through publications, proclamations, denunciations and live events, has been described by Untitled Magazine as ‘the most comprehensive total art work we have seen in years’ and by Art Monthly as ‘a platform for fantastically mobile thinking’. In 2003 the INS broke into the BBC website and inserted propaganda into its source-code. The following year, they set up a broadcasting unit at the ICA from which more than forty ‘agents’ generated non-stop poem-codes which were transmitted over FM radio in London and by internet to collaborating radio stations around the world.
Tom has also tutored and lectured at various institutions including the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins School of Art, the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College and Southern California Institute of Architecture. He recently taught a course on ‘Catastrophe’ with Marko Daniel at the London Consortium.
His debut novel Remainder was first published in November 2005 by Paris-based art press Metronome. After becoming a cult hit championed first by British webzines (it was 3:AM Magazine’s Book of the Year for 2005) and then by the literary press, Remainder was republished by Alma Books in the UK (2006) and Vintage in the US (2007). A French version is to be followed by editions in Japanese, Korean, Greek, Spanish and Croatian.
A work of literary criticism, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, was released by Granta Books in June 2006. It also came out in France and an American edition is in the offing.
Tom’s second novel, Men in Space came out in 2007.
He has published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement and Contemporary Magazine, as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press) and The Milgram Experiment (Jan van Eyck Press). His story, “Kool Thing, Or Why I Want to Fuck Patty Hearst” appeared in The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth (Serpent’s Tail) in 2008.
His ongoing project the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that surfaces through publications, proclamations, denunciations and live events, has been described by Untitled Magazine as ‘the most comprehensive total art work we have seen in years’ and by Art Monthly as ‘a platform for fantastically mobile thinking’. In 2003 the INS broke into the BBC website and inserted propaganda into its source-code. The following year, they set up a broadcasting unit at the ICA from which more than forty ‘agents’ generated non-stop poem-codes which were transmitted over FM radio in London and by internet to collaborating radio stations around the world.
Tom has also tutored and lectured at various institutions including the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins School of Art, the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College and Southern California Institute of Architecture. He recently taught a course on ‘Catastrophe’ with Marko Daniel at the London Consortium.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 64 reviews
October 8, 2021
I always enjoy Tom McCarthy's writing, but he can be so frustrating at times. The Making of Incarnation -- much like C and Satin Island -- seemed always on the tip of revelation; on touching, through small moments of human experience, a sense of something so large and all encompassing that it might actually be able to answer questions as big as fate or God or universal order, and reading his work you almost feel like you are one word away from discovering the secret to everything, but there is always the same problem -- and it's what stops the book from being exceptional -- an absence of character.
McCarthy wrote what to me is one of the best books about writing, Tintin and The Secret of Literature, and in it he describes how Hergé's story, The Castafiore Emerald, is an example of pure character -- where all the action of the book is created by the characters alone, with an effect that none of it feels manufactured. It is a whirlwind of personality, where even the McGuffin (the titled emerald) is immaterial. The book is a bit tongue in cheek, McCarthy trying to prove that he can use literary criticism to pull apart low-art stories, but it’s forgivable because he does so successfully, I think.
But sometimes, when you read McCarthy's work, this is precisely the thing that he's missing. With the exception of Remainder and Satin Island (the latter of which I will still go to bat for as McCarthy's masterpiece, and a book that benefits from having only a single protagonist), his books are missing humanity. I liked a lot of The Making of Incarnation, but save for some early introductory chapters of Mark Phocan, I was never able to get a grasp on any of the characters (many of whom begin to feel interchangeable, particularly the women), and by the end, whatever sense of consequence that I should have felt had been lost, because, no matter how technically savvy the book was, it never felt tangible. Maybe I'm missing something, maybe the book is a joke at the reader’s expense, but as it is, it just wasn't enough.
McCarthy wrote what to me is one of the best books about writing, Tintin and The Secret of Literature, and in it he describes how Hergé's story, The Castafiore Emerald, is an example of pure character -- where all the action of the book is created by the characters alone, with an effect that none of it feels manufactured. It is a whirlwind of personality, where even the McGuffin (the titled emerald) is immaterial. The book is a bit tongue in cheek, McCarthy trying to prove that he can use literary criticism to pull apart low-art stories, but it’s forgivable because he does so successfully, I think.
But sometimes, when you read McCarthy's work, this is precisely the thing that he's missing. With the exception of Remainder and Satin Island (the latter of which I will still go to bat for as McCarthy's masterpiece, and a book that benefits from having only a single protagonist), his books are missing humanity. I liked a lot of The Making of Incarnation, but save for some early introductory chapters of Mark Phocan, I was never able to get a grasp on any of the characters (many of whom begin to feel interchangeable, particularly the women), and by the end, whatever sense of consequence that I should have felt had been lost, because, no matter how technically savvy the book was, it never felt tangible. Maybe I'm missing something, maybe the book is a joke at the reader’s expense, but as it is, it just wasn't enough.
October 16, 2021
I always find Tom Mccarthy's books interesting if not a little frustrating at times. This one has a science fiction plot embedded within it that although wittily described didn't seem to be directly related to the main plot.
Once again McCarthy is concerned (as he was in Remainder) with simulations and the motion of bodies through space.
Once again McCarthy is concerned (as he was in Remainder) with simulations and the motion of bodies through space.
January 17, 2022
What is it about Tom McCarthy novels that just wallop you with finely tuned, smart and wildly satisfying prose but then as they approach the realm of greatness they linger at the precipice never to reach their full culmination? It's an experience I've had now with the three novels of his I've read. In Remainder, the level of detail and nuance as the narrator's world desperately works to recreate perfect moments from chaos are imminently fun and carry a haunting element of humanity to them--thoughts of the inability to re-experience things once they've passed, and our inability to let go of those feelings, etc., but there's a thin barrier standing in the way of it's greatness. Perhaps, and as is the case with The Making of Incarnation, the actual plotting elements are dreadfully dull. In Remainder it's setup by some vague but unspecified explosive accident which has rendered the narrator void of memory before said accident. In his latest novel, a motion-capture studio is tasked with making as realistic as possible implosion effects for a in-the-making space opera called Incarnation. A film within a novel sure sounds fun, right? I think so. But then when it comes to the chapters concerned with describing the scenes and the film, it's just painfully dull and not at all actually an interesting film. Maybe it's a comment on the popcorn drivel that comes out, but I still count it as a whiff considering much new sci-fi cinema (viz. Arrival, Dune, Bladerunner 2049, Annihilation [so I guess mostly Denis Villeneuve films]) is pretty out-of-the-box and intimately in conversation with the cultural zeitgeist more than Incarnation is made out to be in the novel.
Further, and possibly my favorite part of the novel, concerns itself with a kind of grail quest for Lillian Gilbreth's missing Box 808--the sleuthing throughout the novel is quite fun, taking the characters on traipses across the globe in search of this missing box, which may contain a movement that could "change everything." However, even as a macguffin, McCarthy cuts himself short by, well, cutting this plotline too short--in fact, if this novel were another 100-200 pages, with more focus and broader depth into the grail quest plotline, this book may have ebbed into that elusive category of greatness. However, that's not that book we have at hand.
It's a real killer. McCarthy's writing is really unparalleled by most active writers today (in my humble experience). His ideas are unique and interesting, and interrogate the liminal space between science and humanity in a way similar to someone like Richard Powers, who also often simply dabbles in greatness (although, he hits it quite frequently). This novel has all kinds of amazing and wonderful information and exploration of the science and technology behind motion capture, and the idea of creating perfect simulation of human and physical experience. There is depth there to plumb, and perhaps it exists more deeply in McCarthy's book, but when the plots are foreshortened or just uninteresting now matter how wonderful the prose gets, the reader feels short shrift.
But god dammit if I won't read every book he puts out.
Further, and possibly my favorite part of the novel, concerns itself with a kind of grail quest for Lillian Gilbreth's missing Box 808--the sleuthing throughout the novel is quite fun, taking the characters on traipses across the globe in search of this missing box, which may contain a movement that could "change everything." However, even as a macguffin, McCarthy cuts himself short by, well, cutting this plotline too short--in fact, if this novel were another 100-200 pages, with more focus and broader depth into the grail quest plotline, this book may have ebbed into that elusive category of greatness. However, that's not that book we have at hand.
It's a real killer. McCarthy's writing is really unparalleled by most active writers today (in my humble experience). His ideas are unique and interesting, and interrogate the liminal space between science and humanity in a way similar to someone like Richard Powers, who also often simply dabbles in greatness (although, he hits it quite frequently). This novel has all kinds of amazing and wonderful information and exploration of the science and technology behind motion capture, and the idea of creating perfect simulation of human and physical experience. There is depth there to plumb, and perhaps it exists more deeply in McCarthy's book, but when the plots are foreshortened or just uninteresting now matter how wonderful the prose gets, the reader feels short shrift.
But god dammit if I won't read every book he puts out.
November 22, 2021
Things are connected to other things, which are connected to other things.
I can’t say that I enjoyed reading this book very much. But it did give me some things to think about, so I suppose it has something going for it. It’s a novel so full of ideas that there doesn’t seem to be any room left for, well, a novel.
I’ve read most of McCarthy’s novels. My favourite by a long way is Satin Island (I still feel disappointed that it didn’t win the Booker) and I also enjoyed Remainder a lot. My memories of C are a bit vague but I think I enjoyed it. I haven’t read Men In Space (yet). McCarthy is always interested in bodies in motion and always interested in connections (in this latter case, he reminds me a bit of Richard Powers, one of my favourite authors, who is also continually exploring connections). It often feels as though McCarthy believes there is a “grand theory of everything” that will show how all the connections work.
Here McCarthy presents us with chapters that progress several different storylines. I say “progress”, but it felt to me as though the ideas were continually getting in the way of any story progression. The first chapter sets the scene as we watch what we quickly learn is one of the main characters of the novel but many years ago as a child in an art gallery: what happens is incidental to the fact that he ends up watching multiple view of it simultaneously on a security guards’ screens. Multiple views of the same movement - here’s a first idea.
Then we move on to Lillian Gilbreth’s Time & Motion studies, to ideas about copyrighting movement sequences, to breaking motion down into its individual components. Along the way we are asked to consider questions such as how far back do you have to go to find the start of an event, or how far forward to find its end (this reminded me of Richard Powers’ novel Gain which tracks the development of a major company showing how different events shape the company in unexpected ways many years later)? Or what happens when a predictive model of a system is so effective that it gets incorporated into the system it is modelling?
The ideas are interesting but the novel itself is, to put it bluntly, rather boring. This, of course, is just my opinion and other opinions are (probably) available, but I do defy anyone to read the section on aerodynamics of a bobsleigh without putting the book down for a break at some point.
Meanwhile, Incarnation is a movie with a very well-used sci-fi plot (based on Tristan and Isolde) on which a vast fortune is being spent to generate realistic computer graphics with such a sophisticated model that everything, yes, everything is taken into account to generate each image in the sequence. And Monica is chasing Box 808. And someone is trying to crash a plane on a beach in a remote atoll.
I don’t know. There’s lots going on but I never quite managed to engage with it. Which is disappointing because I was expecting to enjoy it like I have enjoyed McCarthy’s other books that I have read. My rating is more a reflection of my feelings about the book than about any literary merit, or otherwise, that the book may have. I may have missed the point.
I can’t say that I enjoyed reading this book very much. But it did give me some things to think about, so I suppose it has something going for it. It’s a novel so full of ideas that there doesn’t seem to be any room left for, well, a novel.
I’ve read most of McCarthy’s novels. My favourite by a long way is Satin Island (I still feel disappointed that it didn’t win the Booker) and I also enjoyed Remainder a lot. My memories of C are a bit vague but I think I enjoyed it. I haven’t read Men In Space (yet). McCarthy is always interested in bodies in motion and always interested in connections (in this latter case, he reminds me a bit of Richard Powers, one of my favourite authors, who is also continually exploring connections). It often feels as though McCarthy believes there is a “grand theory of everything” that will show how all the connections work.
Here McCarthy presents us with chapters that progress several different storylines. I say “progress”, but it felt to me as though the ideas were continually getting in the way of any story progression. The first chapter sets the scene as we watch what we quickly learn is one of the main characters of the novel but many years ago as a child in an art gallery: what happens is incidental to the fact that he ends up watching multiple view of it simultaneously on a security guards’ screens. Multiple views of the same movement - here’s a first idea.
Then we move on to Lillian Gilbreth’s Time & Motion studies, to ideas about copyrighting movement sequences, to breaking motion down into its individual components. Along the way we are asked to consider questions such as how far back do you have to go to find the start of an event, or how far forward to find its end (this reminded me of Richard Powers’ novel Gain which tracks the development of a major company showing how different events shape the company in unexpected ways many years later)? Or what happens when a predictive model of a system is so effective that it gets incorporated into the system it is modelling?
The ideas are interesting but the novel itself is, to put it bluntly, rather boring. This, of course, is just my opinion and other opinions are (probably) available, but I do defy anyone to read the section on aerodynamics of a bobsleigh without putting the book down for a break at some point.
Meanwhile, Incarnation is a movie with a very well-used sci-fi plot (based on Tristan and Isolde) on which a vast fortune is being spent to generate realistic computer graphics with such a sophisticated model that everything, yes, everything is taken into account to generate each image in the sequence. And Monica is chasing Box 808. And someone is trying to crash a plane on a beach in a remote atoll.
I don’t know. There’s lots going on but I never quite managed to engage with it. Which is disappointing because I was expecting to enjoy it like I have enjoyed McCarthy’s other books that I have read. My rating is more a reflection of my feelings about the book than about any literary merit, or otherwise, that the book may have. I may have missed the point.
May 23, 2022
Tom McCarthy continues to be my favorite author that I would never recommend to anyone. His first new novel in six years keeps up his streak of producing stories that are light on most of the elements you'd expect to find in something labeled as fiction, including plot, characters, character development, dialogue, romance, dramatic tension or emotional stakes.
That being said: still pretty good!
Like most of his works, you can tell McCarthy just got really excited about an esoteric topic, learned everything there is to know about it, and then dumped all of that new knowledge onto the page. In this case, it's the study of motion-capture, as we learn all about what current technology is doing in this space and how it relates back to its earliest forebears, specifically the work of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth.
If you're not familiar with Gilbreth's work (as I'm betting most of us aren't), it's pretty interesting stuff. She was one of the first female engineers to earn a Ph.D., and considered to be the first industrial/organizational psychologist. This means that she studied time-and-motion studies of how workers performed their tasks, and then used that info to implement environmental conditions to make them more effective. You can practically feel McCarthy's eyebrows raise in excitement as he saw some of Gilbreth's diagrams, and then tried to turn it into a story.
As usual with McCarthy, it's less of a story and more of a textbook with fictional characters. There are tons of industry acronyms and terms thrown around with little or no relation to any kind of narrative thrust; McCarthy was just having fun learning stuff and wanted us to know what he knows. Which is great! It's just not always particularly exciting. There is a Pynchonian subplot of conspiracy and paranoia that lurks in the background (and is admittedly very interesting), but it only rears its head occasionally, and doesn't really go anywhere.
One of my favorite parts about McCarthy's work is that he relates all of these strange and fascinating things so well to human behavior, weaving connections between the past, present and future, and you start to think he is on the verge of making some kind of profound breakthrough, really touching on something incredibly universal and important. I can never put my finger on what it is exactly, but you can feel its presence. There is SOMETHING there. It's both frustrating and exhilarating; when you're in the middle of those sections where McCarthy is in the zone, it's transcendent in a way that very few (if any) modern authors have the ability to reach. I'm sure McCarthy is much more concerned with those moments than with the trappings of traditional narrative, but I can't help but wonder what it would be like if he gave those elements a little more attention. His two finest works (C and Remainder) are a little closer to that point; this one is several steps further away.
It's another interesting piece of work from a truly singular author, and I hope he keeps doing his thing for as long as possible.
That being said: still pretty good!
Like most of his works, you can tell McCarthy just got really excited about an esoteric topic, learned everything there is to know about it, and then dumped all of that new knowledge onto the page. In this case, it's the study of motion-capture, as we learn all about what current technology is doing in this space and how it relates back to its earliest forebears, specifically the work of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth.
If you're not familiar with Gilbreth's work (as I'm betting most of us aren't), it's pretty interesting stuff. She was one of the first female engineers to earn a Ph.D., and considered to be the first industrial/organizational psychologist. This means that she studied time-and-motion studies of how workers performed their tasks, and then used that info to implement environmental conditions to make them more effective. You can practically feel McCarthy's eyebrows raise in excitement as he saw some of Gilbreth's diagrams, and then tried to turn it into a story.
As usual with McCarthy, it's less of a story and more of a textbook with fictional characters. There are tons of industry acronyms and terms thrown around with little or no relation to any kind of narrative thrust; McCarthy was just having fun learning stuff and wanted us to know what he knows. Which is great! It's just not always particularly exciting. There is a Pynchonian subplot of conspiracy and paranoia that lurks in the background (and is admittedly very interesting), but it only rears its head occasionally, and doesn't really go anywhere.
One of my favorite parts about McCarthy's work is that he relates all of these strange and fascinating things so well to human behavior, weaving connections between the past, present and future, and you start to think he is on the verge of making some kind of profound breakthrough, really touching on something incredibly universal and important. I can never put my finger on what it is exactly, but you can feel its presence. There is SOMETHING there. It's both frustrating and exhilarating; when you're in the middle of those sections where McCarthy is in the zone, it's transcendent in a way that very few (if any) modern authors have the ability to reach. I'm sure McCarthy is much more concerned with those moments than with the trappings of traditional narrative, but I can't help but wonder what it would be like if he gave those elements a little more attention. His two finest works (C and Remainder) are a little closer to that point; this one is several steps further away.
It's another interesting piece of work from a truly singular author, and I hope he keeps doing his thing for as long as possible.
October 6, 2022
I should start by saying that, to me, this novel is a masterpiece, the place where his earlier novels that I’ve read (Remainder and Satin Island) were leading. What holds it together, besides motion, is specialized language from various fields. The experience is something like listening to great music sung in foreign languages (an experience I seek out). I didn’t want to look words up; it would have made it a completely different reading experience. The rhythm of so many latinate words is remarkable: beautiful prose. I hope they got the right reader for the audio version.
The novel's many characters are secondary (or, at least seem that way; two fictional characters within this fiction are as important as any). There is a quest plot, the search for a grail, which could have made this a mystery or thriller, but it’s secondary, mostly an excuse for more specialized language. All is connected, but not in the form of a conspiracy.
There are some hints in the novel about what McCarthy is up to. “Writing’s an operation, just like sewing, cutting steel plates or assembling boxes.” And “Isn’t your work—our work—all about accessing and deploying underlying sequences and patterns? Mapping particulars on to great universals? Isn’t that the art to which, in one way or another, we’ve both devoted our best years?”
The length is just right. The font is too busy and there isn't enough leading, but otherwise for me everything worked. Just don't ask me to explain it.
The novel's many characters are secondary (or, at least seem that way; two fictional characters within this fiction are as important as any). There is a quest plot, the search for a grail, which could have made this a mystery or thriller, but it’s secondary, mostly an excuse for more specialized language. All is connected, but not in the form of a conspiracy.
There are some hints in the novel about what McCarthy is up to. “Writing’s an operation, just like sewing, cutting steel plates or assembling boxes.” And “Isn’t your work—our work—all about accessing and deploying underlying sequences and patterns? Mapping particulars on to great universals? Isn’t that the art to which, in one way or another, we’ve both devoted our best years?”
The length is just right. The font is too busy and there isn't enough leading, but otherwise for me everything worked. Just don't ask me to explain it.
February 17, 2022
This is a helluva book; me: I'm not smart enough to exact criticism or encomium enough, enough either way but know a whole lot of idea synthesis was working its way through these pages and razzle-dazzle were its outcomes!
November 6, 2021
This novel is a repository for awful writing
And asinine, semi-functional character names
Book reader as mathematical oddity
Mankind is the running joke of the universe
And with this knowledge, one need only -
Disengage, rearrange your time and breathe for sanity.
#poem
Chris Roberts, Patron Saint to the Impossible People
And asinine, semi-functional character names
Book reader as mathematical oddity
Mankind is the running joke of the universe
And with this knowledge, one need only -
Disengage, rearrange your time and breathe for sanity.
#poem
Chris Roberts, Patron Saint to the Impossible People
January 5, 2022
I appreciate Tom McCarthy’s originality and don’t-a-give-fuckness but sometimes I just don’t even know what is going on
Read
October 11, 2025This degree is going to be … interesting
November 5, 2021
This uber-brainy (and funny!) book bends the idea of the novel into a gordian knot of time, motion, art and technology that is constantly morphing, perplexing and delightful. Fans of Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon and Charlie Kaufman take note!
January 28, 2024
maybe slogging through this one was a little bit worth it for the emotional breakdown i had over pages 311-315. all of my stars to those pages. but for the most part i just spent all my time reading this deeply confused.
there are whole chapters that seem almost entirely irrelevant to anything and i could not keep any of the pov characters bar phocan, diamond and dean straight in my head. i'm not sure why the book is called 'the making of incarnation' when all the scenes about the making of the film are some of the ones that seem most out of place in the book.
i will not be recommending this book to anyone but i might just yell at them my own interpretation of 311-315 and a few other critical plot points just so i can get it all out.
for now though. love is the whole point. and i am going to go and scream into my pillow for 3 hours. <3
there are whole chapters that seem almost entirely irrelevant to anything and i could not keep any of the pov characters bar phocan, diamond and dean straight in my head. i'm not sure why the book is called 'the making of incarnation' when all the scenes about the making of the film are some of the ones that seem most out of place in the book.
i will not be recommending this book to anyone but i might just yell at them my own interpretation of 311-315 and a few other critical plot points just so i can get it all out.
for now though. love is the whole point. and i am going to go and scream into my pillow for 3 hours. <3
October 27, 2021
I liked the use of foreign language, and appreciate how utterly not dumbed down this book is. I liked the opening which was about a 5th grade (or year 5, as this takes place in London) field trip to an art museum, where a couple kids get into trouble. I liked the plot line about Monica Dean, a researcher at a law firm called Dorley and Grieves, who stumbles upon a series of historical workplace efficiency films that somehow lure envoys of the world's major figures in metaphysics and AI and stuff like that into complicated machinations. And I didn't mind the Shakespeareanesque story of the two star-crossed space travelers, a princess named Tild and Tszvetan the warrior who have feuding uncles in common. Sadly for me I couldn't follow how all these fragmented premises came together, except to assume they're all involved in the making of Incarnation, which from what I could gather, is a fictional starship, or a movie about a starship. This is a book for fans of extremely detailed and highly technical science fiction film FX.
February 10, 2022
Probably Being Nice
Yes I read the whole novel but was a bore. Lots of verbiage and meanders all over place. This novel was not for me.
Yes I read the whole novel but was a bore. Lots of verbiage and meanders all over place. This novel was not for me.
March 28, 2022
Maybe McCarthy's most difficult book but also insightful, timely and engaging, especially for someone working at the distant periphery of entertainment/infosec. Bodies in space, floating through infowars and a total hypermodern erosion of meaning. What more could one ask for? (Maybe some Pynchonian ditties)
April 5, 2025
This book didn’t do it for me, but I am 80% sure most of the film nerds in my life will love it.
October 6, 2021
Very complex novel, in a good way, that is just a really interesting read. Tom McCarthy's best book and he had already written some pretty good ones. Definitely recommended.
February 5, 2022
Tom McCarthy is a writer of ideas. Though his novels may be ornamented with inventive prose and a subtly morbid satire, they draw their animating force from the kind of idiosyncratic concepts that can only be arrived at through deep interrogations of reality’s nature, involving the deceptively simple, apparently naive questions which, in the words of Milan Kundera, “set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.” What, as McCarthy asks in 2005’s Remainder, is motion? Are movements discrete, singular phenomena, briefly existent then gone forever, or are they ontologically identical to their subsequent reproductions? Can a past action - even the past itself - be repeated? Can it be perfected? At his best, McCarthy poses questions like these in terms of narrative and character, constructing fluid, intellectually visceral stories that seem to incarnate the abstract concepts upon which they’re based.
It’s fitting, then, that his latest novel should be so explicitly concerned with the ethics, tensions, and maddening beauty of his primary creative strategy. No longer limiting his philosophical purview to the purely physical realm of bodies and spaces, The Making of Incarnation finds McCarthy employing his consistent interest in science and technology to expand his conceptual storytelling into the domain of virtual reality, a subject replete with its own ontological quandaries (derivative of, and therefore pertinent to, those of our own physical reality). And therein lies the novel’s ostensible goals, if McCarthy’s past efforts are any indication - to locate these quandaries, reify them in the context of a specific narrative, and formulate fresh (if somewhat amorphous) insights about them, particularly their effect on human experience. Such goals underpin The Making of Incarnation’s parallel storylines, while also assigning a third, decidedly meta valance to the already punny title. And so the question of the novel’s success becomes a question of how skillfully and insightfully McCarthy has incarnated his ideas within it.
Although the story takes shape gradually, with the first hundred or so pages demanding rather diligent attention for the reader to sense the emergent trajectory, it’s all relatively straightforward: on the one hand, there’s Mark Phocan, a motion-capture expert working as a consultant on the production of an upcoming space epic film titled Incarnation; on the other is Monica Dean, a junior legal associate whose research into the field of time and motion studies on behalf of a mysterious client sparks an international search for an artifact missing from the archives of Lillian Gilbreth, the field’s pioneer, a search in which Phocan ultimately finds himself embroiled. Reading this synopsis, one might expect a story laced with urgency, driven constantly forward by the inexorable momentum of conflict and shifting alliances between characters. That’s not quite the case. McCarthy is patient, perhaps too patient - it isn’t until just past the novel’s halfway point that the storylines begin to appreciably intersect, and even then, the narrative voice’s loquacious tendencies continue keeping the burn slow. Neither is there much overt conflict to speak of, owing to McCarthy’s wise decision to amplify the mystique of the aforementioned international search by withholding as much information as possible about it, relegating all but the most potent details to the realm of the extratextual.
Unfortunately, it often feels like the same has been done with the characters themselves. Even Phocan, whom we first see during a formative boyhood experience and whose story comes to take priority over that of Dean and the mysterious client, seems strangely hollow or undefined, as if McCarthy is less interested in illustrating his characters’ interiors and arranging their interests into conflict than he is in describing their external physicalities, the courses charted through space by their bodies. Many of the more minor characters have little to distinguish them, causing their presences to blur together and cast a vague pallor over certain stretches of the novel (the group interaction in the opening chapter of Book Two (“And Down We Went”) is a glaring example). But there are still other moments, like the dinner scene in “The Norbert Wiener Appreciation Society”, that are handled excellently. Here, Anthony Garnett, a veteran of the mo-cap industry and Phocan’s boss, dines with old college buddy Pilkington, now a member of an undisclosed intelligence agency, who shares with Garnett the information compiled by Dean about Gilbreth’s missing artifact, which Pilkington’s agency has “passively captured.” The scene, ranking among the novel’s high points, is a formidable synthesis of science, intrigue, and character, moreover serving as the crucial link between storylines and therefore as the catalyst for the second half’s more robust pace. What also contributes to the greater sense of plot movement is the gradual recession from the foreground of Incarnation, the titular film-within-the-novel, the sardonically formulaic story of which seems intended to exemplify the rote ends to which the creative act of incarnation can be applied by unthoughtful practitioners operating within a system as unabashedly capitalistic as the contemporary film industry. This comparative approach, though certainly interesting from a formal perspective, might have yielded more fruit had the passages detailing the film’s plot more fully cohered with the novel’s other elements, and, more importantly, had The Making of Incarnation’s own story acted as a stronger counterpoint.
As it stands, that story is a bit of a dud. Rather than focus on the search for the artifact to any extent further than Phocan’s leisurely climactic trip to the dacha of the former Soviet physicist who might hold the mystery’s key, McCarthy instead expends his ink on profuse descriptive flourish and vague gestures toward a philosophical depth which, by novel’s end, feels more rhetorical than substantive. This isn’t to say that he should have written a thriller - for it’s the abundance, quality, and sheer propulsive force of these descriptions that constitute the novel’s chief virtue and testify to McCarthy’s mastery of prose writing. Consider the following passage regarding a window pane - the sole remaining original, its counterparts having been long since broken and replaced - in the Soviet physicist’s study:
“Unlike the newer ones, it contains bubbles, waves, inclusions, reams and pleats. Looked through from study side, it introduces to the garden little folds, occlusions, doublings - each one near-imperceptible alone, but in amalgam overlaying the flow of branches, well and wood stump with a set of tiny visual hiccups, backwashes or eddies that’s at once bewildering and quite hypnotic.”
Despite the inhibitions such visual descriptiveness puts on the plot, its vibrance and dynamism is often electrifying, denoting a genuine passion for incarnation’s tangible possibilities. But if prose of this density isn’t deployed for purposes of storytelling, it would nevertheless seem necessary for McCarthy to articulate some relevant philosophical point to it, and his failure to do so is what shifts more weight to the story than it’s structurally capable of bearing.
There are some notions that recur and accumulate undeniable import. Suspicions of predestiny; the contingency of reality systems; a hope or fear that everything, from air particles to people, are indelibly marked by their previous states (whence the significance of Mark’s name and his introductory boyhood chapter) - although these each find adequate incarnation at one point or another, McCarthy never manages to assemble them into a comprehensive and compelling perspective. That the key to the central mystery of the missing artifact lies in a private moment of interpersonal love once experienced by the Soviet physicist might be understood as an admission of defeat by McCarthy, whose questions about the meaning of existence can only be answered in the highly specific terms of the inquiring individual, terms unintelligible to any external observer. With questions of this implacability at its foundation, small wonder that The Making of Incarnation stumbles where McCarthy’s earlier efforts soar.
October 11, 2021
Too contrived, and (but that might be very personal) I didn't like the writing style.
August 15, 2023
It's hard to fully appreciate just how difficult it is to write about high-level science and math in a way that's not boring and/or pedantic. Richard Powers is the master of this; Neal Stephenson veers wildly between doing this well and showing off.
The concept here is interesting, but it feels like McCarthy is just showing off his research ("Look at all the cool things I learned about making movies and science!"). And the worst miss of all is the "Studio 60 error" - making the cultural thing at the heart of your work be boring. "Incarnation" the movie has a labyrinthine plot too convoluted to care about. Between that gap, and the lack of true character development, there's nothing to latch onto here.
The concept here is interesting, but it feels like McCarthy is just showing off his research ("Look at all the cool things I learned about making movies and science!"). And the worst miss of all is the "Studio 60 error" - making the cultural thing at the heart of your work be boring. "Incarnation" the movie has a labyrinthine plot too convoluted to care about. Between that gap, and the lack of true character development, there's nothing to latch onto here.
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November 14, 2021i actually didn't "finish" it.... but i'm finished
seems like it collects a lot of interesting threads / points of inquiry but i just don't find this fun to read at all
seems like it collects a lot of interesting threads / points of inquiry but i just don't find this fun to read at all
May 31, 2023
"bifurcates into sluiced sections before merging back into a single flow out of whose grain all knots, spirals and other traces of the past interruption or obstruction have been smoothed" p.3
"Across the side of one someone has finger-scrawled the word Fuck, beneath this, somebody (the same person perhaps) has written Thatcher, but this name has since been scored through, substituted with GLC Commies - which, in turn, has been struck out and replaced with You. p.11
“The ancients held sufferers in esteem, thought them possessed of a second sight; and Medievals attributes to them the votive fervour of the followers of Vitus, shaking in rhapsody before his statue: choreia, a choir, a chorus. You don’t have to see it as a curse.” p.88
“They’re to notate, in terms of not just route but also rhythm, the passage of self-selecting, of unwitting, subjects through the area of enquiry, translating every eddy and coagulation, every bump, swerve and dispersal into data-clusters that will form the basis of a model that in turn will inform Ruff’s, and Bedford’s, reconfiguration if the space under investigation.” p.101
“.. and the depicted room becomes a king of loom all of whose yarns converge on the shooter’s position, as though its contents and dimensions were being knitted by, from or around this single point, the muzzle of his gun. The geometry’s so clear, so perfect, that it seems to Diamond inconceiv-able that the space, the living room, could ever have been designed for anything other than this one event; it seems that the converging warp-lines were all there already, and the comic section too - not over - but underlay, integral design key announcing: This is the bullet’s trajectory, and always has been;; this is the point at which Plane A is intersected by Line B…” . 202-203
"Its Dante, Divina Comedia whch she also should have known: she also had to study that in school as well. The final, sign-off line, he 'out': the poet or his stand-in, after passing all the way from Hell and Purgatory, through the spheres of the Inconstant, the Ambitious and the Wise, then onwards through the Contemplatives and the Fixed Stars right to the Primum Mobile, after plotting the entire machinery of circles driving other circles, wheels within wheels, then passing even further, on into the centre, the Empyrean, finally gets to behold, face-to-face, l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle, the love that moves the sun and other stars...the one that seeded her mind in the first place with the notion that each action has its best way, its diritta vita, and the one that, at the end, old eyes beautitudinous, towards the fading stars..."
“The pole looks old and rusty; it stands blinking intermittently, a fragile finger raising to the sky it’s bulbous matrimonial band.” P. 303
"Across the side of one someone has finger-scrawled the word Fuck, beneath this, somebody (the same person perhaps) has written Thatcher, but this name has since been scored through, substituted with GLC Commies - which, in turn, has been struck out and replaced with You. p.11
“The ancients held sufferers in esteem, thought them possessed of a second sight; and Medievals attributes to them the votive fervour of the followers of Vitus, shaking in rhapsody before his statue: choreia, a choir, a chorus. You don’t have to see it as a curse.” p.88
“They’re to notate, in terms of not just route but also rhythm, the passage of self-selecting, of unwitting, subjects through the area of enquiry, translating every eddy and coagulation, every bump, swerve and dispersal into data-clusters that will form the basis of a model that in turn will inform Ruff’s, and Bedford’s, reconfiguration if the space under investigation.” p.101
“.. and the depicted room becomes a king of loom all of whose yarns converge on the shooter’s position, as though its contents and dimensions were being knitted by, from or around this single point, the muzzle of his gun. The geometry’s so clear, so perfect, that it seems to Diamond inconceiv-able that the space, the living room, could ever have been designed for anything other than this one event; it seems that the converging warp-lines were all there already, and the comic section too - not over - but underlay, integral design key announcing: This is the bullet’s trajectory, and always has been;; this is the point at which Plane A is intersected by Line B…” . 202-203
"Its Dante, Divina Comedia whch she also should have known: she also had to study that in school as well. The final, sign-off line, he 'out': the poet or his stand-in, after passing all the way from Hell and Purgatory, through the spheres of the Inconstant, the Ambitious and the Wise, then onwards through the Contemplatives and the Fixed Stars right to the Primum Mobile, after plotting the entire machinery of circles driving other circles, wheels within wheels, then passing even further, on into the centre, the Empyrean, finally gets to behold, face-to-face, l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle, the love that moves the sun and other stars...the one that seeded her mind in the first place with the notion that each action has its best way, its diritta vita, and the one that, at the end, old eyes beautitudinous, towards the fading stars..."
“The pole looks old and rusty; it stands blinking intermittently, a fragile finger raising to the sky it’s bulbous matrimonial band.” P. 303
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 29, 2022
Less a novel than an essay, this book incorporates fiction to capture a preoccupation of the author's: a search for the perfect, most authentic movement. I thought of a passage from Houllebecq in the Map and the Territory - the narrator wondered if the novel would forever be trapped by the anchor of character. This novel feels an attempt at leaving character and meaning and intention and success behind. It's hard not to almost admire that.
A scene in the novel depicting a team working, through motion capture, to identify torsion points and motions that would need to be accounted for in developing artificial limbs (or something like that), has them observing a couple having sex. The pair, with mo-cap nodes affixed, are concerned about privacy but the lead technician assures them that, because of the nature of what they record, they wont see faces or bodies, simply lines of movement and trajectories. There wont be anything pornographic captured in the way their bodies appear or are penetrated - there will only be an abstraction of the act captured. That is what this novel more or less does - it provides a thin abstraction of character, tracing lines of motion and flight, whiffs of thought, compulsion, and mental illness all as if on a smooth gradient.
A book about disappointment would have to have a disappointing ending. But we don't have to enjoy it. More interesting than pleasurable, this is a novel of ideas that stimulates but doesn't satisfy. Only recommended for those who are devotees or who, like me, love DeLillo (I think there is some affinity between the authors). There's something like a less entertaining DeLillo novel here. I would recommend Remainder instead if you are considering this for your first McCarthy.
A scene in the novel depicting a team working, through motion capture, to identify torsion points and motions that would need to be accounted for in developing artificial limbs (or something like that), has them observing a couple having sex. The pair, with mo-cap nodes affixed, are concerned about privacy but the lead technician assures them that, because of the nature of what they record, they wont see faces or bodies, simply lines of movement and trajectories. There wont be anything pornographic captured in the way their bodies appear or are penetrated - there will only be an abstraction of the act captured. That is what this novel more or less does - it provides a thin abstraction of character, tracing lines of motion and flight, whiffs of thought, compulsion, and mental illness all as if on a smooth gradient.
A book about disappointment would have to have a disappointing ending. But we don't have to enjoy it. More interesting than pleasurable, this is a novel of ideas that stimulates but doesn't satisfy. Only recommended for those who are devotees or who, like me, love DeLillo (I think there is some affinity between the authors). There's something like a less entertaining DeLillo novel here. I would recommend Remainder instead if you are considering this for your first McCarthy.
November 17, 2021
Tom McCarthy asks a lot of his readers. His books are impossible to recommend, but reading them are uniquely fascinating experiences. He seems to have a singular fixation on the underlying mathematics that bind our world and that somehow, by exploring endless frequency modulations, data simulations, and behavior modeling, an immutable truth will be revealed, a formula that defines our existences. To the reader this can scan as endless technical jargon, divine communion, or both. That response seems wholly up to the reader, almost independent of the text in the way that, perhaps, god is present on every page of the Bible but one’s own experience determines in which words deliverance is found, if at all. For me, that eye-opening, transformative experience was found in C; as I read, I felt like I’d peered behind the curtain and learned secrets not just about the world but about myself that had gone hitherto undiscovered. I still think about that book regularly, almost a decade later. I have no doubt that some will find similar magic in this book, but, while there were glimpses of something transcendent, it mostly went over my head. This is McCarthy’s wordiest book (and also funniest, though the humor is extremely dry) and the first one where I’ve truly understood people’s “instruction manual” complaints about his other work.
(3.5)
(3.5)
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July 18, 2022This should have been a slam-dunk for me, given its focus on technology, intrigue, and archives, its work-within-a-work (Incarnation is the name of a science fiction movie in production during much of the novel) structure as well as its crisp, if not lyrical, prose, and yet the sum of all this came out in the red compared with these individual parts. McCarthy's deep research into motion studies, beginning with Taylorism and continuing to modern film's use of motion capture, his command of the minutia of mass observation and big data, is fascinating but at times overwhelms the story. And the intrigue, protagonist Mark Phocan's search for the mysteriously missing Box 808 from the archival holdings of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth, ultimately fizzles, dispersed in the ambiguity of the ending. It's hard to call this a failing of the novel because McCarthy is on record as being uninterested in the usual development of emotional depth in his characters, taking rather a dim view of such: Charles Arrowsmith, in his WaPo review, noted that McCarthy has "disdained the notion of writing as self-expression and the tendencies of middlebrow fiction toward what he sees as uninteresting humanism," so that's a loud caveat emptor if ever I heard one. Still, a disappointment.
November 23, 2022
You can see how the author spent considerable effort doing the research behind this book, with wave talks and video motion capture and academic papers along with conferences and passages about digital telemetry. All these things combine to push out the other things a reader usually looks for in a novel: characters, a story with a purpose, personal stakes. The individual vignettes are told with some care, with rising actions and generally some kind of climax, but then we switch to another set piece without any linking transition and just repeat the process. There is a plot point regarding the enigma of "Box 808" that is intended to keep you going in hopes that it will turn up towards the end. I don't think this really worked, however. There is jargon and explanation of abstract concepts mixed in with arch dialogue, a couple love stories sketched out, and dark hints of dirty dealing, but these seem as though they could have been dropped in as ornamentation, not carrying any real lasting significance each.
I listened to the audiobook version, which probably is what got me through this long production. I know I ought to give the UK narrator some slack for his 15th hours of hard work producing this, but every time he said the name "Purdue" (as in the Midwest university) with stress on the first syllable I simply had to cringe a little. Oh well.
I listened to the audiobook version, which probably is what got me through this long production. I know I ought to give the UK narrator some slack for his 15th hours of hard work producing this, but every time he said the name "Purdue" (as in the Midwest university) with stress on the first syllable I simply had to cringe a little. Oh well.
November 20, 2023
It’s no doubt a function of my particular psychology and taste, as I’m as much of a sucker for a neat theory of everything as I am for a nicely wrapped-up conclusion, but I’m very much at odds with other reviews of this book. I think it resolves perfectly.
For me, its whole point is that there’s no way to grasp the centre, only ever to try to interpret your own reading of it from the traces of waves and lines it not only leaves behind but actually consists of. That you can only take part in that endless dance, giving and taking what you can to and from it, that there’s never going to be the revelation we’re looking for, because our eyes can only see that there’s a curtain but never quite behind it - and that that’s a central struggle, paradox and tragedy of life, in all its beauty and tragedy and splendour and loss.
I came to this book with no expectations, not having read or known anything about Tom McCarthy beforehand. To me it’s an elegant fractal elegy to its core concept, elaborate and expansive in structure, eloquent and erudite in conception and construction, and exacting but ultimately empathetic in intention and execution. Magnificent imagination, invention and research, and pretty breathtaking scope.
For me, its whole point is that there’s no way to grasp the centre, only ever to try to interpret your own reading of it from the traces of waves and lines it not only leaves behind but actually consists of. That you can only take part in that endless dance, giving and taking what you can to and from it, that there’s never going to be the revelation we’re looking for, because our eyes can only see that there’s a curtain but never quite behind it - and that that’s a central struggle, paradox and tragedy of life, in all its beauty and tragedy and splendour and loss.
I came to this book with no expectations, not having read or known anything about Tom McCarthy beforehand. To me it’s an elegant fractal elegy to its core concept, elaborate and expansive in structure, eloquent and erudite in conception and construction, and exacting but ultimately empathetic in intention and execution. Magnificent imagination, invention and research, and pretty breathtaking scope.
November 5, 2023
I found reading this book exhilarating but probably would not recommend it for most people. There are some characters and a bit of plot, but that’s not really what the book is about. Instead, the author somehow ties together things like the relationship between co-orbiting stars, geopolitical superpowers, a hawk hunting a sparrow, industrial ergonomics, and the nature of measurement. It prompted my own thoughts about the connections between concepts and images that recur throughout the book—it’s been a while since I’ve read a book so mentally engaging and intriguing.
But the “action” mainly involves depictions of academic research and the production of a sci-fi movie. There’s a lot of overly exact technical jargon and James Joyce-style sentences riddled with subordinate clauses. Like Joyce, though, I found that it really did reward concentration and slow reading rather than being (or maybe despite being) pretentious and neurotic. It feels like the author is getting at some deeper truths about the universe beyond creating interesting characters engaged in an entertaining plot. Refreshing to read a book like this once in a while.
But the “action” mainly involves depictions of academic research and the production of a sci-fi movie. There’s a lot of overly exact technical jargon and James Joyce-style sentences riddled with subordinate clauses. Like Joyce, though, I found that it really did reward concentration and slow reading rather than being (or maybe despite being) pretentious and neurotic. It feels like the author is getting at some deeper truths about the universe beyond creating interesting characters engaged in an entertaining plot. Refreshing to read a book like this once in a while.
November 8, 2021
No Limits
Tom McCarthy outdoes himself in this extraordinary novel structured around the physical and metaphysical reverberations of "motion-capture" technology." Ostensibly an account of how an extreme space-epic film, comically based on "Tristan und Isolde," was made, it's really an attempt to examine in full the abiding connections that bind the universe together. Lest this sound intimidating, let me assure you it is anything but. It is enthralling. From a heart-stopping sequence involving a bobsled team in a wind tunnel, to the attempted test crash (gone radically wrong) of a jetliner on a Pacific atoll, to the countless ways the objects around us, both ancient and contemporary, have embedded in them the dreams, chitchat, and motions of their makers, "The Making of Incarnation" is a revelation. Highly reccommended.
Tom McCarthy outdoes himself in this extraordinary novel structured around the physical and metaphysical reverberations of "motion-capture" technology." Ostensibly an account of how an extreme space-epic film, comically based on "Tristan und Isolde," was made, it's really an attempt to examine in full the abiding connections that bind the universe together. Lest this sound intimidating, let me assure you it is anything but. It is enthralling. From a heart-stopping sequence involving a bobsled team in a wind tunnel, to the attempted test crash (gone radically wrong) of a jetliner on a Pacific atoll, to the countless ways the objects around us, both ancient and contemporary, have embedded in them the dreams, chitchat, and motions of their makers, "The Making of Incarnation" is a revelation. Highly reccommended.
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