Creation Lake, by the American author Rachel Kushner, is a dazzling, genre-defying novel, satirical yet profound. In her 2018 novel The Mars Room, Kushner took us inside the US prison system and eviscerated it. Here she goes back a decade, as well as 40,000 years, interweaving into the main plot notes on the extinction of the Neanderthals. The book is a spy thriller which also interrogates the human condition, our origins, and the conundrum of mankind’s future.
The year is presumably 2013 (the song ‘Get Lucky’ blasts from every radio) and a 34-year-old American spy named Sadie Smith has landed in France, nursing a bruised ego after a failed FBI mission. She has been hired by a private ‘tri-state security firm’ to infiltrate and quash an eco-warrior group in Guyenne (the archaic name for the region of France that is home to the Lascaux cave paintings). The group is called Le Moulin, and its members attack new ‘megabasins’ and the modernisation of agriculture in la France profonde.
This ‘radical farming cooperative’ is run by the charismatic Pascal Balmy. Sadie coolly sustains a year-long relationship with his friend Lucien, in order to infiltrate Le Moulin and work as a translator. The honey trap is reminiscent of the ‘spy cops’ scandal, but gender-reversed. Will Sadie go off-piste and be indoctrinated?
Woven into the novel are hacked emails sent to Pascal from an elder/mentor, a former activist called Bruno Lacombe with a ‘fanatical belief in a failed species’. The Neanderthals, Lacombe believes, were cruelly expunged by Homo sapiens – the ‘inter-glacial bully who shaped the world we’re stuck with’. We are 2-4 per cent ‘Thal’, he asserts, concluding that Homo sapiens is the evil coloniser of human DNA. There is recent revisionist thought that the Neanderthals’ knuckle-dragging stereotype is erroneous. Is Homo sapiens the villain of human history? And what has this got to do with a novel about the mission of an American spy called Sadie Smith?
Sadie is beautiful, with perfect breasts, a brash outlook and a drinking problem. She is a woman of hazy origins, with an amoral compass, breezily justifying both stealing and drink-driving: ‘I am a better driver after a few drinks, more focused.’ In a supermarket, she wryly observes the ‘glass jars of jellied meats that look like cat food, and which French people eat as if it were not cat food’. She is refreshingly un-PC, describing English as a ‘wildly superior language’ to French, adding: ‘The French might have better novels and better cheeses. But in the grand scheme, that’s basically nothing.’
When Sadie approaches the commune for the first time and observes the ‘sun-singed squashes and scraggly lettuces’ she quips: ‘Only activists from Paris would take up subsistence farming in a place like this.’ She mocks kibbutz living – which seems merely to collectivise women into being primary caregivers – and the fallacy of the sisterhood: ‘If you please the men, you will not please the women.’
Though marketed as ‘spy novel’, Creation Lake has very little action; but it is rich in thought. The showiest violence comes from days long gone. We learn about the persecuted medieval Cagots and their short-lived rebellion, when they played ‘pétanque with severed nobles’ heads’.
While our anti-heroine may be a mercenary without ideals, Balmy’s utopian commune and the idea of the ‘Better Before’ are painted as futile. Ideology can be driven by emotion; Lacombe’s beliefs are ‘a naked expression of grief sprung from personal tragedy’. Beneath Sadie’s cynicism lies a pertinent question: is all evolution positive? Le Moulin’s members reject ‘state surveillance’ and ‘self-surveillance’ (social media), and aren’t they right? According to Lacombe: ‘We are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car, and the question is – how do we exit this car?’
When describing what it feels like to sit facing backwards on a train, Sadie says: ‘It is like rowing a boat: you enter the future backward while watching scenes of the past recede.’ This novel is like that train ride; the only problem is, we can’t see the journey ahead. Sadie Smith remains an elusive and beguiling secret agent, worthy of a new adventure.
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