Creation Lake - Rachel Kushner
I received a review copy of this novel via NetGalley.
- Publisher – Jonathan Cape
- Published – September 5th, 2024
- Price – £19.88 hardback | £9.99 Kindle
When the Booker Prize longlist was announced, Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake was one of the titles I was most excited to read and I was slightly frustrated that I was going to have to wait until September to be able to get my hands on it. Imagine my delight, then, when the people at Random House/Vintage agreed to provide me with a review copy. I immediately put the rest of my reading on hold in order to devour this over the course of a couple of days.
Here's the synopsis:
Sadie Smith – a thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics and bold opinions – is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her mission: to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists influenced by the beliefs of an enigmatic elder, Bruno Lacombe, who has rejected civilisation, lives in a Neanderthal cave, and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism.
Sadie casts her cynical eye over this region of ancient farms and sleepy villages, and finds Bruno’s idealism laughable, but just as she is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.
Beneath this taut, dazzling story about a woman caught in the crossfire between the past and the future lies a profound treatise on human history. Creation Lake is Rachel Kushner’s finest novel yet – a work of high art, high comedy and irresistible pleasure.
My early impressions of Creation Lake were that this is the most un-'Booker Prize Longlist' Booker Prize Longlist book I'd ever read. Initially it reads like a pacey thriller, and I was pleasantly surprised by it.
Our main character - 'Sadie', an international secret agent working un a pseudonym for a shady company that's never identified after being ousted from the FBI - is every modern thriller secret agent you've ever met. She's brash, she's cocky, she's funny, she's amoral, she has absolutely no doubt that everybody she wants to meet will fall into bed with her at the slightest provocation. The only difference here is that she's a woman, rather than a self-insert for an aging middle-aged author who wishes women would fall into his bed. It almost feels like Kushner is satirizing the leads of your classic modern thriller protagonist, and at times it's hilarious. And yet when you swap the roles like this it becomes much less unbelievable that our spy can seduce her way across the world, because of course rich old white men absolutely want to believe that the mysterious woman who's just shown up in their lives can't wait to sleep with them. "Charisma," Sadie observes, "does not originate inside the person called “charismatic.” It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist".
Although it feels like a thriller to begin with, it never quite delivers on the promise of page-turning action. Sadie infiltrates her group of eco-terrorists, but we spend most of our time taking in the scenery of southern France and perusing rambling emails about Neanderthals and pre-historic man written by the literal cave-dwelling hippy who founded the group Sadie is pursuing but is now largely absent from it. There's a strange juxtaposition between writing style and content here, where the rhythms of the language make us feel like the action is going to jump forward at breakneck pace but what's actually happening on the page is quite languid and introspective. I found it really gripping as a result, always wanting to know where it was going next despite it never quite seeming to actually go anywhere until the very end.
Much of the time we spend with Sadie is in exploring the motivations of the "terrorists" she's infiltrating, learning about their lives and their beliefs and why they're taking the action they're taking. At the start of the book we're rooting for Sadie, eagerly watching while she wheedles her way into the confidences of the group and begins to uncover their plans. Yet by the end we've learned that actually they probably aren't much of a threat, and that Sadie is - and has previously been, in her past postings - very much an agent provocateur.
While sifting through emails and discussing philosophy with the activists she's infiltrating, Sadie contemplates what it means to be human while at the same time stripping away her own humanity in order to mould herself into a simulacra of a person who the group can trust. Her name, her morals, her beliefs, even her body are all fake, augmented and reshaped to be whoever she needs to be at any given time. What begins as a thriller turns into a meditation on genre, and also on the nature of humanity itself. It asks us to think about the stories we tell ourselves about who we and what we believe, and to think about the way in which our fictions often strip the humanity out of characters in service of entertainment.
Creation Lake wasn't what I expected, but in the best kind of way. This one is definitely worth picking up.
This blog doesn't have a comments section, by design. If you want to chat about any of the posts here, drop me an email at chris @ loottheroom dot uk.