It's best to be upfront about this: I really did not like [b:Ascension|61813107|Ascension|Nicholas Binge|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1675642495l/61813107._SX50_.jpg|93144065]. It was one of those novels that provoked periodic loud expostulations, thus fortunate that I read it at home rather than on a train. Although the concept seemed really promising, the execution was not to my taste and I straight up hated the protagonist. The idea is that a gigantic mountain suddenly appears in the middle of the ocean, accompanied by odd phenomena. Naturally, scientists are called in to investigate. Aside from a perfunctory framing mechanism, [b:Ascension|61813107|Ascension|Nicholas Binge|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1675642495l/61813107._SX50_.jpg|93144065] is told via the letters of one such scientist to his niece in which he recounts an expedition to the giant mystery mountain.

While reading [b:Ascension|61813107|Ascension|Nicholas Binge|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1675642495l/61813107._SX50_.jpg|93144065] I wondered: are Special Genius Man protagonists getting worse or is my tolerance for them dropping? Most likely the answer is both. Current pop culture certainly lauds the Special Genius Man, despite their documented tendency to gather unbelievable amounts of money via exploitation then waste it on idiotic vanity projects that make the planet burn even faster. Harold 'Harry' Tunmore, the narrator of [b:Ascension|61813107|Ascension|Nicholas Binge|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1675642495l/61813107._SX50_.jpg|93144065], is not a billionaire but that is the best that can be said for him. I found him both unbelievable and incredibly annoying. At the start of his career he is a House MD-esque genius in diagnostic medicine, but cannot understand emotions until a woman teaches him about them, falls in love with him, and marries him. His wife Naoko is also very talented at medicine, yet gives up work to raise their adopted child. Harold then switches to being a genius physicist without any discernible specialism nor a lab. Instead he travels the world giving physics advice:

"We'd been contracted to look into a bizarre set of murders taking place across the Balkans [during the Cold War!?] - local police were confounded and Interpol were at a dead end. They'd brought me in because the locations of the murders seemed to make uncanny geometric patterns on the map, like the murderer was leaving a code. They wanted a physicist to unpack the implications, and I was recommended."

I read speculative fiction constantly so am not unfamiliar with suspension of disbelief or stretching my credulity. But why should I bother doing so with something so manifestly stupid. Imagine working in a university department with this guy: "Can we get Harold to supervise some of these masters students?" "No, he's on sabbatical tracking the fucking Zodiac Killer." At least a giant mystery mountain that violates the laws of physics is a more reasonable pretext for hiring a physicist.

When the giant mystery mountain manifests, our protagonist is plagued by guilt as he feels responsible for the death of his adopted son. This dead child/wife/girlfriend stuff is typical for a male main character, and usually means the death was a tragic accident and he wasn't actually to blame. In this case, Harold was entirely to blame and should have been prosecuted for gross negligence manslaughter. I couldn't believe what I was reading when the events were finally described. The man made not one but several obviously terrible, extremely stupid judgements that killed his son. No-one else contributed to his son's death; it was his fault and he should feel guilty about that! He never considered going to therapy about any of this, because Special Genius Man protagonists never seem to entertain such a possibility. Astoundingly, when he reunites with his former wife she instantly forgives him for killing their son and coaches him to forgive himself.

Perhaps Harold's narrative voice would have been a bit less grating had the plot been more involving. There were some weird elements that I liked, but I found it excessively predictable. Obviously the mountain was going to contain a tesseract, as there was an extensive infodump about them in a flashback. Obviously there would be a godlike entity, given all the god chat. Obviously Neil would be an alien, as he was weird and shifty from the start. Obviously the adult female characters would all die, since they only existed to reassure Harold that he shouldn't feel embarrassed or humble about his incredible genius and to teach him about feelings. (Among Naoko's last words while dying are, "Harry, it's okay. This isn't your fault." Nothing ever is, apparently.) Obviously Bettan the cartoonish Übermensch would kill himself, because he was perpetually self-destructive and went on about being master of his own fate all the time. While it's fun for events to be signalled in advance, this went too far.

It became clear early on that this book and I were not on the same wavelength, when Harold came up with this interpretation of Sisyphus:

Why does Sisyphus keep pushing the rock up the hill? Why do any of us? If you has asked me a decade ago, the answer would have come quickly to my lips: faith. A belief in something greater than ourselves.

I thought the whole point of Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill was that the alternative was to be crushed by it! What choice does he have but to keep pushing? I don't know where I got my interpretation from, but I find it much more meaningful than an empty appeal to faith.

To wrap up, [b:Ascension|61813107|Ascension|Nicholas Binge|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1675642495l/61813107._SX50_.jpg|93144065] combines a protagonist as unbearable as [b:XX|51075314|XX|Rian Hughes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1605089707l/51075314._SX50_.jpg|75888103]'s and a concept like [b:Purgatory Mount|54483293|Purgatory Mount|Adam Roberts|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1604314493l/54483293._SY75_.jpg|85030035] crossed with [b:Annihilation|17934530|Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)|Jeff VanderMeer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403941587l/17934530._SX50_.jpg|24946895] but not as sophisticated as either. I would have much preferred the plot be told from Naoko's perspective or by a mixture of narrators, with much less signalling of what was going to happen and not such a reductively Nietzschean ending. I strongly recommend that you read [b:In Ascension|197063361|In Ascension|Martin MacInnes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1698177121l/197063361._SY75_.jpg|98911813] by Martin MacInnes instead. It is also concerned with scientists exploring strange phenomena at the limits of human understanding and has a very similar title. However I found it much better in every way. ( )

At the center of this novel is a mysterious gigantic mountain that appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We're introduced to the main character, Harold, in the psychiatric hospital, many years after his involvement in the mountain research project. The story is told in retrospect through a series of letters he left for his niece.

What follows is a pastiche of horror, speculative fiction and family drama. It starts off really strongly and then at one point it just goes totally wild. There are so many different elements put together that I can't really decide whether it works or not. Ultimately, it was fun for the most part, but can't help to think it is a huge wasted opportunity.

The end was so poorly written, it felt so campy, like belonging to another novel. The whole alien thing was funny. It was anti-climactic for me. If those Leviathans actually turned out to be superior intelligence would make more sense than what was presented.
I would even go so far as to forgive the weird alien twist if it wasn't for Bettan becoming a god and then killing himself(???). That did not make any sense at all for such an alpha, power-thirsty character.
I tried to reason it as if he represents power-thirsty humanity not yet ready for spiritual ascension, but it was done in such a poor, anti-climactic way. It ruined the whole book for me.

I enjoyed the horror atmosphere and mystery in the first part by far the most. ( )

It says on Nicholas Binge's website that he writes 'literary science-fiction'. Fellow Goodreaders, you can imagine therefore the excitement with which I picked up this book (which I notice in fact by blissful serendipity is a Goodreads 'most anticipated read of 2023). What a refreshing change this will be, I thought, from all that non-literary or worse, contra-literary, SF, here is a chance to use my intellect and enjoy myself. As you might understand, I have been trying to work out what Binge's particular literary SF ingredients might be. Well. for a start there is a quotation from 'Le mythe de Sisyphe' as the epigraph. Pretty literary, no? Disappointingly it's in an English translation but credit to Binge for trying to meet all those readers picking up his book to better themselves by meeting them halfway. There is the form of the novel. Is Binge trying to revive an 18th Century tradition in modern SF by creating the first (asymmetric) epistolary literary SF/horror? Then, not very far in, there is a(n admittedly rather pedestrian) quotation from Cicero pulled out by one of the characters. Quite literary, although I couldn't help reflecting that Philip K Dick, that old literary charlatan, would by this stage have referred to Wagner, Schopenhauer and Teilhard de Chardin at least once. So perhaps the supreme literary device might be the fact that one of the characters is named The Warden'? Very All Souls. Indeed, I was hoping that it would be revealed that the Warden's mysterious companion would turn out to be the Sub-Warden and that somehow the book would become a SF allegory of the struggles between John Sparrow and AL Rowse. Afraid not. So whilst I am still scratching my head trying to identify the particular killer literary skills and tricks deployed which raise this above the quotidian in SF terms, the one thing I can definitively reveal which is not literary is the actual prose itself. Indeed of the dialogue I think it's certainly true to say that Binge demonstrates, as the late, great Martin Amis said of Cyril Connolly, 'what appears to be an anti-knack for catching human speech'. (The late, great Martin Amis: given Binge's indispensable addition to our critical taxonomy I suppose we should describe Amis now as the author of 'literary literary fiction'. I expect it will grow on me).
Anyway, given it's unlikely that Terry Eagleton is an avid Goodreads user I will be vulgar and non-literary enough to mention narrative. 'Ascension' is a about a huge mountain that appears in the middle of an ocean. It turns out to be a better yarn than you might expect given that premise, although incoherence is the dominant characteristic of its last third. ( )

I'm hovering between 3 and 4 stars.

It's the television show Lost, set on a mountain. I was fairly disappointed at the end of Lost, but I loved that show.

The god-bothering is amazingly pretentious. The action scenes contain way too much naval gazing. Also, the author 'pays homage' to a lot of other works, and it frequently pulls the reader out of the story. Stop it. Be your own work.

His choice of recipient is a bit odd, and his vision of the future as an old man is even weirder, but okay.

I also have to comment on the visual similarities of a certain movie and the god-like being at the end. WTF.

This book would have probably been better written in first-person narrative, but the epistolary is fine, given that I forgot that I was not the original recipient while reading. The action on, and effects of, the mountain move at a fast clip. The only thing that drags is the navel-gazing of the various characters. Character building is fine, but surrounded by life-threatening danger generally isn't the time to remember what led you to all of your poor choices in life. OTOH, that seems to be a feature rather than a bug. ( )

Pretty interesting, but not a page-turner. ( )