Rachel Kushner’s new novel, Creation Lake, longlisted for the Booker Prize, begins with a 34-year-old American mercenary, Sadie Smith, on assignment in an ancient river valley in rural France. A controversial state-led project to redirect groundwater into above-ground “megabasins” for the benefit of large monocrop farming has begun. Smith’s powerful, unnamed employer tasks her with infiltrating Le Moulin, a radical subsistence farming co-operative where eco-activists are planning to sabotage the project.
Kushner seduces us with femme fatale Smith – a cynical, morally dubious spy who manipulates and exploits the eco-activists for her own chaotic ends. Smith is armed with dossiers on the group, a home base filled with high-tech gadgets, multiple six-packs of beer and a sardonic wit.
The backstory is revealed through teachings intercepted from Bruno Lacombe, a reclusive mentor who proselytises to Le Moulin from a cave via email. As Smith scans his emails for intel, she dismisses Lacombe’s ideas on humanity’s prehistory. However, his philosophy, anthropological insights and ominous predictions soon begin to affect her.
The narrative unfolds in the arc of a spy noir, with Kushner driving it through the antics and foibles of a living-on-the-edge main character – only to crash us into the wall with her “4am truths”: insights into the deeper motivations behind protest and opinion, the randomness of civilisation, and the absurdities of our technologically advanced world.
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At one point, during a wine-fuelled drive to her destination, Smith pulls over to relieve herself. The prose shifts from her noticing a pair of Day-Glo underwear snagged in the bushes to a reflection on the real Europe – not the elitist version, but the Europe of unseen workers toiling in a world of disposability. “The panties hanging on a bush in front of my face are a package of three for €5 at Carrefour. They are like Kleenex. You sweat or leak or bleed into them and then toss them on a bush or in the trash, or you flush them and clog the plumbing – someone else’s plumbing, ideally.”
Kushner swerves between profound wisdom, humour and glimpses of humanity’s path toward environmental disaster, making this novel both fun and devastating – and far more urgent than a typical spy thriller.
