Martin MacInnes’s disquieting second novel opens with what amounts to an essay about a new social media app. Nest is the ultimate self-monitoring tool, a minutely sensitive personal algorithm so addictive that its usage and influence have become more or less universal. Nest is effectively unhackable, creating its compelling “pattern” from personal data fields so deep and diverse they cannot be copied, or lifted, “as a body part might be”. Users – and for that read everyone – quickly become so dependent on their “nests” they find themselves unable to make decisions, initiate relationships or even leave home without measuring the impact on their behaviour pattern. The book then offers us a glimpse of future catastrophe, before projecting us backwards in time to the point at which this story truly begins. We will not comprehend our direction of travel until much later.

John is a programmer for a large technology company, working on the development of new applications. His wife, Shel, is a primatologist, about to embark on a field mission to Westenra Park, a conservation reserve for the last surviving troop of bonobos (the country is not specified). Two of the animals have recently died in unexplained circumstances, and a team of experts have been called in to investigate. Westenra Park itself is underwritten by a mining corporation specialising in the production and transport of breeze-block infrastructure. The company’s main export is airport hubs, which are now considered to be prestige destinations in themselves. Tourism to Westenra Park has been suspended, supposedly to protect the integrity of the chimpanzees’ environment, though visitors continue to flock to the “nearby” lake resorts hundreds of miles away:

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘On a planet consumed by vested interests, there is nowhere left to escape to but inner space’ … Martin MacInnes. Photograph: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images

The actual animals, though, themselves weren’t the attraction; it was the idea of them that brought people in. And the obvious thing to say was that if their attraction was virtual – if people were happy to meet them virtually – then their existence could be virtual, too. There was little doubt tourists would continue coming after extinction was formally declared, an act the affiliates were still nervous about, still reluctant to commit to and had managed to postpone, despite the definitive, irreversible point passing some time ago.



Shel runs into problems from the start. The team’s doctor is prevented from crossing the border and his place is taken by a young mycologist, Jane, who has no specialist knowledge of primates and little field experience. As they progress deeper into the park, Shel cannot help noticing how the bonobos’ life cycle and bonding rhythms have become compromised by the erosion of their natural habitat. The forest ecosystem seems to be changing, and when contact with their support base is suddenly lost, the women find themselves caught between the desire to complete their investigation and the need to extricate themselves from a dangerous situation. When tragedy strikes, Shel blames herself, though she suspects there are other, more sinister forces at work – that the company has deemed them ultimately disposable.

Meanwhile, back (presumably) in the UK, John’s increasing anxiety about Shel’s safety is further heightened by the fog that has engulfed their cottage and refuses to lift. Seeking distraction, he drives out to check on the semi-completed house they are supposed to be buying, only to be beaten unconscious by an unknown assailant. He wakes up back at the cottage, where he begins to receive daily visits from a mysterious doctor. As with his wife, his contact with the outside world has effectively been severed. As John’s memories gradually return he starts to sense that he and Shel are experiencing variations of the same trauma, a loss of identity that feels personally directed but may simply be symptomatic of the way the world at large is beginning to slide.

MacInnes’s first novel, Infinite Ground, came clothed in the durable outer garments of a detective thriller; Gathering Evidence employs the same tactics, a narrative subversion signalled in advance by the novel’s title.John and Shel pursue their own separate investigations, but as the gathering of evidence progresses we intuit a proliferation of parallels between their situations: the sensation of being under surveillance by malign authorities, the unexplained presence or absence of a nameless doctor, the unstoppable growth of fungus in a once-familiar environment.

For the women in Westenra Park, there is an increasing atmosphere of unspecific tension, compounded by the sense of being kept in ignorance of their true purpose. John, isolated in the cottage, teeters on the edge of breakdown, his obsessive-compulsive tendencies unbearably heightened by the drugs administered to him daily by the secretive medic. In Infinite Ground, MacInnes’s discredited cop follows his quarry into a primeval landscape that is portrayed as the ultimate escape, a rejection of the over-regulated world that threatens to throw us all under suspicion. In Gathering Evidence, the forests themselves are being pushed to the brink. On a planet consumed by vested interests, there is nowhere left to run to but inner space, the sterilised virtual realities created by the very conglomerates that are destroying the trees. MacInnes is showing us breakdown as Möbius strip, a catastrophe fuelled by the data harvested from the data we ourselves provide.

The idea of fungi as effecting an undermining of integrity appears to be the ultimate metaphor for our unsettled times

In his two novels, MacInnes has created claustrophobic, frightening, increasingly circumscribed worlds. We turn the final page of Gathering Evidence in little doubt as to who created Nest, or of where John’s obsessive experimentation will eventually lead him. Nest is technology as fungal infection: an infinite mycelium.

In her 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing examines how the matsutake fungus – an expensive delicacy in Japan, freely occurring in forests of the northern hemisphere – lives in symbiosis with the trees that sustain it, encouraging new forest growth in seemingly untenable locations. The essential alienness of fungi – neither truly plant nor animal – has provided a wealth of recent inspiration for writers, especially in works of speculative fiction, as an expression of increasing disquiet in regard to the capitalist excesses of the Anthropocene. Readers familiar with Jeff VanderMeer’s work will be aware of his fascination with fungi even before he ventured into Area X in the Southern Reach trilogy. MacInnes’s detective in Infinite Ground comes to believe his behaviour is being influenced by mind-altering spores, while MR Carey makes still more terrifying use of the Cordyceps fungus in his 2014 bestselling post-apocalypse novel The Girl with All the Gifts. The idea of fungi as effecting an undermining of integrity that may not become apparent until the situation is irreversible appears to be the ultimate speculative metaphor for our unsettled times.

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MacInnes’s writing is rigorous in its abstraction, almost stern in the complexity of its expression, yet there is a beauty to it, a quiet compassion that gets under the skin, rendering his traumatised characters not just familiar but sympathetic. For all his gathering of evidence, he offers scant conclusions and in this he is like every one of us, sharing our fear for the future even as he charts its progress in meticulous detail. This novel confirms MacInnes as a writer of serious ambition and an uncanny degree of talent.

• Gathering Evidence is published by Atlantic (£12.99).