Ascent: A Novel [Hardcover]

Jed Mercurio (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 13, 2007

Fascinated with the secrets still surrounding the Soviet Union's race against the Americans to put a man on the moon, Jed Mercurio proposes a compelling scenario: What if the Americans weren't the first? And with its inscrutable but intriguing hero, Yefgeni Yeremin, a brilliant Soviet cosmonaut, Ascent allows us to imagine what that terrifying journey might have been like.Yeremin, a Soviet MiG pilot, rises from the privation of a Stalingrad orphanage to the heights of the cosmonaut corps. During the Korean War, as a member of an elite squadron, he shoots down the most American fighter jets-a feat that should make him a national hero, but because the Soviets' involvement in the war is secret, Yeremin's victories go unreported. When he is recalled from obscurity to join the race to the moon, he realizes it is his chance for immortality. In hypnotic, deceptively spare prose, Mercurio tells a haunting tale that questions the power of ideology and the nature of fate.

--This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

British author Mercurio's American debut, a techno-thriller about a Russian pilot, offers plenty of action and suspense, but not enough characterization. We first meet Yefgenii Yeremin as an orphan in Stalingrad in 1946, the rest of his family having died in WWII. We never learn his age, only that he is big and strong and good at math. His math skills get him a scholarship to an aviation school, and from then on Yeremin dreams only of flying—first as one of the Russian MiG pilots who wore North Korean uniforms to attack American jets during the Korean War, then as an unsung hero of the Russian space program. Gripping action scenes include a gut-wrenching solo flight in which he's almost killed, but too many details of training pad out a short book, and nothing in it really tells us enough about Yeremin to make us care what happens to him. Mercurio (Bodies) trained as a doctor and served with the Royal Air Force. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Orphaned by the Great Patriotic War, Yefgenii Yeremin is raised in an orphanage. He stoically studies mathematics, does hard labor in the ruins of devastated Stalingrad, and endures brutal assaults by the bullies in the orphanage. He wins a scholarship to an air institute, and when the Korean War breaks out, he becomes the ace of aces in his MIG-15--even though, officially, no Russians are serving in the war. He is posted to an air base in the Arctic as the cold war grinds on before being selected to become a cosmonaut. Mercurio's U.S. debut is haunting, powerful, and mysterious. His nearly skeletal prose spends no words to illuminate Yefgenii's stoic endurance of loss, privation, isolation, and pain, but the style works and has an austere, icy beauty. In scenes of aerial combat, Mercurio breaks from spareness to create vivid descriptions of tactics and the physical stresses of G-forces on the human body, and Yefgenii's ride into space, though equally vivid, is cluttered with the nomenclature of Russian rocketry and astronomy. All in all, a stunning debut from a writer who bears close attention. Thomas Gaughan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (March 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743298225
• ISBN-13: 978-0743298223
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,169,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jed Mercurio is a novelist who regularly works in TV as a writer, producer and director. His books are Bodies (2002), Ascent (2007), American Adulterer (2009) and, for children, the Penguin Expedition (2003). He grew up in England and currently splits his work between London and Los Angeles.

Jed trained at the University of Birmingham Medical School and, following an internship in trauma surgery, he practiced as a resident in internal medicine for three years. While still a medical student, he joined the Royal Air Force and received extensive flying training, with the intention of becoming a physician-pilot. Instead, after replying to an advertisement placed in the British Medical Journal, Jed detoured into writing the controversial, ground-breaking BBC medical drama Cardiac Arrest (under the pseudonym John MacUre). The show was a gritty and blackly comic expose of hospital life. Jed went from never having written a script to creating a primetime hit.

Next he scripted the 6-hour miniseries Invasion: Earth, a coproduction between the BBC and the US Sci-Fi Channel, before returning to dark medical fiction with his first novel, Bodies, published by Jonathan Cape (2002). He adapted the novel for TV, winning the Royal Television Society Award for Best Drama Series of 2005. Bodies dealt unflinchingly with issues of negligence, cover-ups and whistleblowing. Following broadcast on BBC America in 2008, Bodies was ranked #2 Best Show of the Year by Entertainment Weekly; in December 2009 The Times ranked it #9 TV Show of the Decade and in January 2010 it was ranked #20 Best TV Drama of All Time by the Guardian.

After writing a children's book, The Penguin Expedition, Jed's second novel, Ascent, was published by Jonathan Cape (UK) and Simon and Schuster (US) in 2007 and made the Guardian's list of "1000 Novels Everyone Must Read". Ascent tells the story of a fictional Soviet fighter pilot, later cosmonaut, set against the background of the Korean War and the Space Race.

In 2007 Jed wrote and directed a modern-day television film of Frankenstein, starring James Purefoy, Helen McCrory and Lindsay Duncan.

Jed Mercurio's latest novel for Cape and Simon & Schuster, American Adulterer, a fictionalization of President John F. Kennedy's personal life, was published in Spring 2009. The paperback will be published in March 2010.

Jed's next published work will be a graphic novelization of Ascent, coming out in 2011.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars imperfect, frustrating and absorbing, June 30, 2007

By 

Rottenberg's rotten book review (nyc) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ascent (Hardcover)

Much of the following review will try to compensate for the negatives I've seen in the other reviews.

You know what it's about - the synopsis not only tells you exactly what the basic story is about, it basically eliminates all surprise. However, for the faulst that other reviews here have aptly cited, "Ascent" is still a worthy read. Much as the flap describes, "Ascent" follows the unlikely life of a Soviet orphan who finds his way to the Cosmonaut program. Yefgenii first tangles with glory flying MiG-15 jets in the skies over Korea, one of the "Honchos" of the Soviet VVS who fly their Soviet-built jets in North Korean markings. His job is "to kill jets" of the UN forces, mostly Sabres and some RAF Meteors, an occupation with which he will excel with murderous precision. After rising to the pinnacle of "Ace of Aces", often crossing oaths with future astronauts, Yefgenii's final flight will see him returned in ignominy. He will spend the next 15 or so years patroling the Soviets' arctic frontier in a MiG-17PFU against western spy -planes. All but bereft of hope for a new war which might return him to glory, Yefgenii regularly patrols the arctic skies until "min-fuel". At the last moment (for his age) Yefgenii is virtually rehabilitated - under an assumed name, he is allowed to join the Cosmonaut core. It's 1968, and a series of mis-steps have allowed the Russian space effort a fighting chance of beating the Americans to the moon. In Russia, the moon is worse than an avowed lost-cause: the Soviets, knowing the moon is already an American footstool, proclaim that there was never a race to begin with. Secretly, they ready their slip-shod hardware (a dangerously over-engined launcher, and a lunar-ship stack that cannot be traversed without EVA) for one final stab at beating NASA. Yefgenii - already a man who technically doesm't exist - is the perffect candidate for a mission that need not be reported if it fails. In the wilderness of cislunar space, Yefgenii's emotional shell will be pealed like an onion, and he will learn the true meaning of survival.

This was an especially frustrating book. Yeah, the .22 shell was a minor error, but an unneccessary one that highlights what's wrong with much of the combat sequences. The author didn't have to say what kind of shell it was - but this was only one example of much of the unneeded and often intrusive information that the author jacks in. Maybe Mr. Mercurio doubted his grasp on he science of air combat, and decided that the only way to maintain his "street cred" in aviation was to toss in repeated reminders of more famous pilots and their histories - reminding us that Yefgenii was sharing the skies with John Glenn, Neil Armstrong & Ted Williams. The effect was pretty nifty the first time, but Comrade Mercurio abuses the privilge. When he's not reminding us about the legends patrolling the skies on the other side of the Yalu, Mercurio makes other needlessly histrionic leaps, ramming into the story all sorts of historically important tidbits that would be relevant if "Ascent" wasn't supposed to be an intensely personal story. Mercurio so compulsively leaps to the Astronautica website for filler that Yefgenii is frequently shunted aside in his own story. (No wonder he's emotioanlly remote.)The error is even more glaring because Soviet censorship likely meant that Yefgenii was entirely in the dark about much of the information that Mercuior uses to fatten his story. This means that Yefgenii is sharing a book with a story for which he has no frame of reference. Readers who were frustrated by the lack of focus in "Flyboys" will find all-too familiar airspace in "Ascent". Yefgenii himself is an especially weak character around which to form a story of survival - he's basically a big blank, lacking any concrete motivation.

Admittedly, this wouldn't be a problem were "Ascent" not the effectively personal book that it finally becomes in its final chapters. Even the flight scenes, admittedly imperfect, are at least as absorbing as those of vets routinely hailed for their realism. If "Ascent" is not an exhaustively researched book on the technology of Apollo-era spacecraft, it manages an epic-performance as one. Mercurio leaves "The History Channel" behind, weaving technology and human drama into a heartfelt inquisition of the human spirit and the nature of heroism. "Ascent", in its flap asks "what if the Americans weren't firsat", typifying the question as "chilling". By "chilling" Mercurio doesn't mean that the result of the moonrace would have fundamentally changed the course of history beyond Apollo's iconic value. Rather, Mercurio wonders about what sort of world harnesses immense desperation, and then casts it out into the cold void.

This was a thin book that consumed an entire afternoon. All throughout, I knew it was a frustrating read, and one I never put down.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A SUPERB NOVEL OF PERSONAL & NATIONAL ASCENDANCY DURING THE SPACE RACE, March 31, 2007

By 

RBSProds "rbsprods" (Deep in the heart of Texas) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Ascent: A Novel (Hardcover)

Five STUNNING Stars! Author Jed Mercurio has created a great novel of flying, of edge-of-your-seat air battles, and of personal and nationalistic ascension aimed at space. The author parallels his 'novel world' with 'real world' space race events in a riveting feat of masterful writing that ends with both worlds converging. 'What if?' What if the achievements of the space race were not what they seemed to the world. The author centers his story on Yefgenii Yeremin, an orphan who had seen and experienced some of the worst of World War II, but who "ascended from the ruins of Stalingrad" and caught a break, through his intelligence and determination, and became a combat pilot. As the story proceeds, the reader is aware of space race personalities and events of both the Soviet Union and the United States, while the storyline centers on specific matters concering Yeremin's career.

The author's chapter on the "world's first jet war" and the 'MiG versus F86 Sabre' dog fights over Korea from Yefgenii's perspective in the early 1950's is absolutely spellbinding, and for American readers possibly quite unsettling: after all, this was the face of the 'Soviet enemy' flying incognito for North Korea, presented in remarkable prose. Yefgenii experienced long periods of being denied participartion in the air battles, but he eventually morphs into "Ivan The Terrible". His life drew meaning from flying: "He was a falcon and in the actions of a fighter pilot he expressed his true nature." Flying is supreme, even beyond his nameless family. But that just sets the stage for the remaining tension-filled parts of the novel.

In the "Franz Josef Land" chapters, the flying sequences during 'the hunt' are absolutely stunning as the author shows both his knowledge of flying and ability to deliver a tension-filled scene that any layman reader can follow. If this chapter doesn't give the reader sweaty palms, I don't know what will. And then he cranks it up another notch as the parallel story lines converge in a place called "Star City" but will Yefgenii take the chance of a lifetime? And what is the cost? For the reader, more sweaty palms as Mercurio ramps up even more on the matter of "N1-5L Soyuz-7K-L3-1", as Yefgenii careens toward his huge dilemma and the novel reaches a great conclusion. The last three paragraphs are AWESOME. This amazing writer in his American debut has produced a superb novel about a determined man flying amidst the pages of history on a fantastic journey. Caution: some unsettling, disturbing scenes, early on. My Highest Recommendation! Five DAZZLING Stars!!
(This review is based on an unabridged digital download in secure eReader format.)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unusually Good 'Aviation Fiction', May 7, 2007

By 

Harry Crowther (Massachusetts, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ascent: A Novel (Hardcover)

Is 'aviation fiction' a genre? 'Ascent' reminded me of 'The Flight of the Intruder'. A really well written story about an unusual person. A (fictional?) Russian jet fighter 'ace of aces', though Soviet pilots 'never' flew in Korea, who went on to be the (fictional?) first person to land on the moon, in the failed Soviet lunar mission we never knew of. Apparently, the Soviets were expert at 'disappearing' those they regarded as unsuccessful, and rewriting history to support this. Written from the perspective of a 'cosmonaut', so some will find it dry. There is the matter of the .22 caliber anti-aircraft shell, which seems an amateurish error, yet an unimportant one.