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Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner - 4* - My Review

American protagonist Sadie Smith (an alias) infiltrates an environmental activist group in southwestern France. Sadie is a former FBI agent whose last job had gone awry, resulting in her dismissal. Now working for the private sector (in what we presume is an organization sponsored by big business), she is trying to set up the activists to be arrested for ecoterrorism. The group follows in the footsteps of its former mentor, Bruno, who has retreated from society, lives in a cave, and studies Neanderthals. Sadie has hacked into emails between Bruno and the activists and is increasingly influenced by his views about renouncing technology and returning to the old ways of the Neanderthals. It is structured such that we hear from Sadie in first person and from Bruno via his writings.

In this case, the agribusiness interests desire to flood the region’s underground reservoirs to provide water in “megabasins� for their own crops, thus leaving the rural French farmers out of luck. I interpreted it as a novel about deceptive appearances. Just about everyone is trying to project an image inconsistent with their real persona. Sadie is cynical and jaded woman who has previously succeeded in a field dominated by men but is not above using the lures of her sexual presence to seduce her way into a position where she has access to the targeted eco-group.

This is not your typical espionage thriller. It is more a novel of ideas. It combines satire, environmental issues, deception (of self and others), and an (extremely) unreliable narrator in a creative manner. I enjoyed the humor the author inserts periodically, and the ironies, such as the idea of a man living in a cave writing emails to a commune. I read it due to its longlisting for the Booker Prize, and in my opinion, certainly deserves its place on the list.

“For nine-tenths of human time on earth, people went underground. Their symbolic world was formed in part by activities in caves, by modalities and visions that darkness promised. Then, this all ceased. The underground world was lost to us. The industrial uses of the earth: the digging, fracking, tunneling, are mere plunder and do not count, Bruno said. Modern people who build bomb shelters, planning to survive some version of apocalypse also do not count, he said. Yes, they go underground, but not in mind of a human continuum, a community. They think ‘I’ll be the clever one, the one who survives mass death.� But why would you want to survive mass death? What would be the purpose of life if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists, hoarding canned foods and fearing each other? In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.�