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Review of "Ascension" by Nicholas Binge

6/23/2023

9 Comments

 
Ascension book cover on mountain background
​Ascension
Nicolas Binge | Riverhead | 2023 | 352 pages | ISBN: 9780593539583 | $27
Picture
​British novelist Nicholas Binge’s first American release, Ascension, garnered a large number of reviews because of its irresistible hook: In 1991, a mountain taller than Everest suddenly appears in the Pacific and a mysterious organization assembles a crack team of explorers to uncover a cosmic secret lurking upon its icy summit. Told in flashback as a series of increasingly bizarre letters from a possibly unreliable narrator, Ascension had all the elements to be an exciting, mind-blowing exploration of the uncanny and the unknown. However, the book ultimately proves itself to be a derivative remix of familiar tropes, married to paper-thin characters that alternate between unpleasant and unbelievable. When one character triumphantly notes that no one had noticed his frequent absences, I shrugged because the writing paid so little attention to the characters none of them was noteworthy a absence.
 
The frame story involves the discovery that scientist Harold Tunmore is not dead, as his brother had presumed, but has spent three decades locked in a mental hospital. When the brothers reunite, Tunmore promptly dies, leaving behind a series of letters written in the 1990s. The letters form the bulk of the novel, outlining how Tunmore came to be recruited to explore the new mountain alongside a team of forgettable, mostly military, associates, including his ex-wife. As the story progresses, tentacled Lovecraftian monsters pick off the crew one by one as a cosmic mystery involving the mystery of life unfolds and Tunmore reckons with the poor decisions he made in the run-up to and aftermath of the death of his adopted son years earlier and the collapse of his marriage. The story becomes, then, an effort to achieve emotional closure in the face of transmundane horror, paralleling the life of a family and fate of humanity—and it is no spoiler to recall that in the prologue set after these events, Tunmore’s mind is already shattered. The symbolism in the novel is, let’s say, not subtle.
 
A fair warning: The rest of this review will contain spoilers. If you plan to read Ascension, save the rest of this discussion until you’ve finished the novel.
​I’ll dispense with the human element first, since it is the most disposable. Tunmore’s crumbling marriage and his failed efforts to raise a child, who dies (symbolically and with foreshadowing for the cosmic plot) due to his own hubris form a trite backstory that adds little to the main narrative beyond padding. It is unoriginal and largely uninteresting. The other half of the book is more inspired, if by inspired we mean that it copies as slavishly from its predecessors as the marriage story does from melodramas.
 
Binge’s Ascension wears its inspirations on its sleeve. From the icy mountain setting to the caves full of ancient inscriptions and the mindless, violent tentacled creatures chasing our heroes, the story is quite obviously a riff on At the Mountains of Madness. When we learn that those creatures were failed experiment by a now-vanished master race that came to the earth in ancient times, it’s impossible not to compare them to H. P. Lovecraft’s shoggoths. Similarly, the resolution of the cosmic mystery of the mountain—that it is a multi-dimensional construct full of portals through space-time, operated by godlike entities from beyond the gate quite clearly stakes out the novel’s connection to Lovecraft’s and E. Hoffman Price’s “Through the Gate of the Silver Key.” Even Tunmore’s background as a brainy, whiny Anglo with little connection to the earthy world of the masses is straight out of Lovecraft.
 
A modernized Lovecraft pastiche could be fun. But this pastiche forgets what made Lovecraft’s fiction so powerful. Lovecraft abstracted his fears (sadly, these fears were almost always non-white people) into something alien and inhuman. He separated his stories from the everyday concerns of life, which helped the monsters and godlike aliens feel like something beyond human. Binge, by contrast, tries to ground his story in humanity. When Tunmore reaches the summit of the mountain—revealed to be the original inspiration for cosmic mountains like Olympus and Meru—and encounters the god that stands atop it, this cosmic being is depressingly human. He claims to be vastly superior, but he is little more than a projection of humanity’s hubris. It doesn’t help that Binge has him infiltrate the crew under the code name Neil Amai, which is “I am alien” backward. The characters point this out in shock and horror. This is exactly as dramatic and powerful as when Count Dracula travels under the name Count Alucard in Son of Dracula.
 
Ultimately, though, the joke about “I am alien” is actually the whole point of the book. It’s absurd, and the absurdity is the essence of the novel. While Binge took the form of a Lovecraft story and stretched it beyond the point it could hold interest, his real intellectual inspiration was something else entirely. Most reviewers missed the repeated references to the myth of Sisyphus in Ascension, seeing Tunmore’s repeated reference to the Greek story of the man condemned to repeatedly push a rock up a mountain in the Underworld only to see it roll back down merely as a mythic parallel to Tunmore’s own desire to climb the mystery mountain. (Indeed, they do so because that’s what Tunmore says he’s using it for.)
 
But it’s really a reference to Albert Camus’s most famous essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), in which Camus laid out his philosophy of existentialism as a battle for meaning against the absurdity of life. Tunmore all but quotes from Camus uncredited, and the ultimate revelation that human life is simply a meaningless experiment by bored, flawed aliens, doomed to run down into stagnation, void of any grander meaning, is Existentialism 101. (Camus himself rejected the term “existentialism,” but we don’t need to get into the fine details since no one I will discuss in this review would seem capable of making such fine distinctions.) In both Camus and the novel, with the universe stripped of any meaningful divine presence and the possibility for progress voided, only the individual’s effort to find personal meaning in the absurdity of life holds any hope. As in Camus’s essay, the novelist’s hero resists the temptation to seek death and instead continues on, and if you didn’t know Camus, you wouldn’t be able to tell which book this line came from: “The struggle itself ... is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
 
To an extent, existentialism and Lovecraft’s philosophy of cosmic indifference are compatible, with Lovecraft perhaps almost a proto-existentialist. Both sought to reckon with a godless, indifferent cosmos and both argued that meaning derives from the individual’s relationship to society and to history. However, Lovecraft sought meaning in tradition, continuity, and (sigh, again) race, with an emphasis on the rigid order created by scientific truth, while existentialists did not see history and tradition as a source of dignity but viewed the whole of reality as absurd and unreasonable. Lovecraft was not praising the Cthulhu cult when he described them as “free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy,” but this is more or less the end state that Camus envisioned for the absurd man.
 
What I found striking in Binge’s Ascension is how his marriage of a fairly straightforward ancient astronaut narrative straight out of Ancient Aliens (the aliens are, like those of the show, basically humans with better tech) and existentialist philosophy closely mirrors what we see in the UFO / ancient astronaut community right now. There is perhaps no better proponent of this than Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer and head of the Galileo Project who has written extensively not just of his personal love of existentialism but his belief that space aliens are existentialists who share his belief in the absurdity of reality. This, too, is the basic message of Ancient Aliens, though in a more postmodern way: believe what you want, make your own meaning, everything is absurd so no belief is too crazy not consider possible.
 
I’m not sure why existentialism and aliens are circling each other right now, except perhaps as a backhanded acknowledgement of the silliness—the absurdity—of the mythology of extraterrestrial encounters. But whether in Ascension or on Ancient Aliens, the underlying feeling of disconnection from history, tradition, culture, and faith is likely the bigger motivating factor. Rejecting science, particularly evolutionary theory, in favor of absurd aliens and their nonsensical, and far too human, plots is what happens when it becomes impossible to imagine a just world with a benevolent god but the alternative of cosmic indifference in an atheistic universe is too cold to contemplate. 
9 Comments
Yawn
6/24/2023 12:11:25 am

Lovecraft is boring anyway. Lovecraft the anti-Semite.

Reply
Kent
6/24/2023 11:43:25 pm

Plus all those heard vocabulary wuds ! Hulk sad.

Reply
An Over-Educated Grunt
6/24/2023 07:44:48 pm

I occasionally wonder if there's a book you'll give your full-throated endorsement to. Your reviews tend to read like you, too, are searching for something, but don't find it in any of these books, and therefore punish the author, as far as you can, for not writing to your specific tastes.

As far as the book itself, it sounds a lot like Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, but a lot less... fun. If you're going to learn into the absurdity of existence, lean into it.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
6/24/2023 10:38:25 pm

I've loved many books, but most of them tend to be older and therefore not really review material. Books are noticeably different now than they were even 20 years ago, and I don't care for a lot of the current trends. I don't read as many books now as I used to because I don't have the time, so I tend to hold them to higher standards. As for searching--well, yes, I would like to occasionally read something that doesn't tell me what I already know, already thought of, or read in another book.

Reply
Knet
6/25/2023 12:13:41 am

Well Jason, you’re in luck because I am just now putting the finishing touches on a novel that will be considered the greatest work of literature in history — think of a combination of “Ulysses” and “Gravity Rainbow” with some Kafka and Proust mixed in and you’ll have an idea of the magnificence of my coming work. It’s sure to be a bestseller likely grossing sales in the billions. Not that I need the money of course, as I am already one of the ten richest men in the world, but I feel that I have a personal duty to share my genius with the world.

Former Avid Reader
6/25/2023 03:05:04 pm

"I would like to occasionally read something that doesn't tell me what I already know, already thought of, or read in another book."

EXACTLY!!! Is original thought too much to ask for? Don't get the trends of banning books from libraries either. It's hard enough to get kids to read in the first place.

An Over-Educated Grunt
6/26/2023 11:53:00 am

I disagree on two grounds.

First, I own about half a dozen books with names like "A Brief History of the Vikings." I do that so that, when asked whether there's a handy one-volume history of Viking-Age Scandinavia, I can recommend Magnus Magnusson. The actual content of the books hasn't changed radically since the '80s, so the only real outlier is from the '30s. The content isn't a surprise to me, everything in them is rehashed material I already know, but I'm not the target audience, a complete novice is. Reviewing from the very narrow lane of "is this new to me" is a recipe for disappointment. Otherwise you'd be reading WAY outside your genre, and you're not. Of course it's going to seem like a pale rehash of other ideas.

Second, if you ARE going to read in your field, looking for truly original work is equally a road to disappointment. I own a good number of copies of books in technical fields. Very rarely is there anything truly new in any of them; in theory the only engineering text you should need is Newton and the only sword text a single good fechtbuch, because everything flows from those sources and is just variations on the theme. You don't read them because you expect to find some earthshaking new insight, you read them to form a synthesis. If in the process, you find something new and earth-shaking, great, but you don't, or at least shouldn't, open the cover expecting it.

Hannah W
7/6/2023 08:54:38 am

I share Jason's frustration over the scarcity of really original fiction these days. especially fiction about other worlds with their own brand of magic and danger.

I did stumble on one outstanding exception last year, The Wingfeather Saga (4 books). It's a fantasy for older children. But not really.
Or rather, not only.
There are equal parts of hilarious, charming, and mysterious, mixed in with deadly serious dilemmas, including loss of faith in the idea of a good God.

I bought it for the precocious 9-year-old in our extended family, but in the end all the adults devoured it too.

Reply
Kent
7/7/2023 04:41:08 pm

Since no one's mentioned it I'll take the pedant's bullet: there already is a mountain taller than Everest in the Pacific. It's called Mauna Kea.

For a palate cleansing book about mountains, might want to try Rene Daumal's Mount Analogue. It has the virtue of brevity and is tentacle-free.

https://www.pdfread.net/ebook/mount-analogue-rene-daumal/

https://kupdf.net/download/ren-eacute-daumal-mont-analogue_5afdcdaae2b6f5f152fc20aa_pdf

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