Infinite Ground, Martin MacInnes's strange, cerebral and incredibly assured debut novel, begins like a standard police procedural, a routine mystery. At the height of an intense heatwave a man meets his family for a reunion in a restaurant. Halfway through the meal he vanishes. A former inspector is roused from retirement and tasked with tracking him down. So far, so straightforward.
However, instead of captivating the reader by upping the pace and deploying the usual thrillerish twists and turns, MacInnes confounds by gradually turning a disappearance into a reality-warping puzzle and a police investigation into a metaphysical inquiry.
“Carlos had gone to the bathroom,” he writes, “and then to all intents and purposes he had stopped existing.”
As the unnamed inspector gets to work in an unnamed South American country, the oddities mount up. The company Carlos worked for – also nameless – employs “outside performers” to stand in for real staff members, and has “contingency sites” outside the city to which workers can relocate in an emergency or “post-disaster”. The woman claiming to be Carlos’s mother admits to being an imposter.
After weighing up two plausible theories – Carlos was kidnapped; Carlos was involved in fraud and fled – the inspector learns from forensic expert Isabella that Carlos was ill and wasting away. Suddenly fearing that he too has become infected by something in the victim’s office, and believing that locating Carlos means finding an antidote, the inspector doubles his efforts and swaps his search of the city for a sweep of the country’s vast forest.
We arrive at MacInnes’s last section wondering if the inspector has reached his journey’s end by checking into the Hotel Terminación, or if he can still pick up the trail by veering off the beaten track into an alien and hostile environment.
MacInnes is Scottish but his setting and bouts of weirdness put us in mind of South American authors. We get the dark tones and psychological struggle of Ernesto Sábato, the vertigo-inducing flights of fancy of Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and the queasy atmosphere and maddening open-endedness of Roberto Bolaño.
Despite its surreal content, the novel unfolds by way of conventional storytelling – chapters, dialogue, streamlined prose, even-length sentences – and this blend of eccentricity, familiarity and clarity recalls the Argentine writer César Aira.
MacInnes’s original voice can still be heard, both in the main narrative and the sections that interlard it – case notes on the forest, forensic reports, hallucinatory dreams, excerpts from a book on tribes – and it always speaks with confidence.
All that is lacking, for this reader at least, is a smattering of humour. Missing men, virulent infections and sinister landscapes needn’t be all doom and gloom.
MacInnes makes us scratch our heads and lose our purchase, but being baffled is half the fun. The inspector doesn’t just retrace Carlos’s footsteps, he attempts to reconstruct him in a duplicate office. A killer he locked up for scalping his victims disappears in prison.
In time, MacInnes’s novel starts to resemble Carlos’s shape-shifting corporation – “priding itself on innovation and experimentation, alert to the power of appearances”.
As we near the end and the inspector is drawn deeper into the heart of darkness of the rainforest interior, we come upon a section called Suspicions, Rumours, Links which offers up 29 explanations as to what happened to Carlos. They range from the possible to the absurd. The last one reads: "Carlos isn't here. Carlos isn't gone. This isn't everything. This is a brief light."
Complex but rewarding, Infinite Ground owns up to being a book of multiple fates, boundless interpretations, numerous planes of reality.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance reviewer based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
