"Creation Lake" by Rachel Kushner

A fascinating mixture of thriller and novel of ideas that was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

‘Sadie Smith’, the narrator protagonist, is an agent provocateur for hire. Originally working for the American authorities, she was sacked after a court case in which the jury believed the defence of entrapment; now she is freelance in Europe. Her latest assignment is to infiltrate a commune of eco-activists in a remote and rural valley in France; she is to persuade them to do something illegal. To prepare for this, she has married the childhood friend of Pascal, the commune leader; she also hacks into the rambling emails of Bruno, a cave-dwelling, raw-food eating hermit and philosophe who acts as guru to the commune.

The tension is considerable. Will the communards trust Sadie or will they penetrate her lies? Will her past catch up with her? Will she locate Bruno or will his ideas seduce her so that she betrays her employers rather than her new friends? It all builds up to a nail-biting climax when ... Unfortunately, I found the denouement a bit of a damp squib.

My problems started early. Bruno’s emails. There are a lot of these peppered through the narrative, frequently interrupting the action. This is where the novel becomes a novel of ideas. I think that we’re supposed to see Bruno’s poorly evidenced assertions as profound; to me they seemed naive. There’s all the pseudoscientific nonsense about the Neanderthals, for example, and aphoristic posturings such as “Here on earth is another earth ... A different reality, no less real. It has different rules.” I failed to understand why anyone should be persuaded by this sort of stuff. The communards, perhaps, because they are a bit other-worldly. But Sadie? Cynicism is her middle name. Does the author think this pseudo-science is convincing? Or is this a satire?

Another point at which my belief refused to be suspended was in Sadie’s choice of assassin. She had spent such a long time preparing to infiltrate the commune, from dog-walking in Paris, but when organising an assassination she is careless. She expects the paranoid and suspicious communards to swallow her explanation of how she knows the subminister will be attending the fair. Her grooming of the assassin is perfunctory. When he asks her “Do you think I left my brain in a trash can someplace?” I wasn’t in the least surprised. But she is and I think the author thought the readers would be too.

Yes, I was disappointed by the ending. This was at least in part because the first three-quarters of the book was so good (I thought, then, Bruno’s shallow emails were designed to be exposed). The prose that Kushner writes is exquisite:

• “We’re like the children of a divorce ... It is on account of these two figures that we came here, and in the ashes of their split, we sift to find our own direction.” (Ch 4)
• “The gauzed sensations of toddlerhood” (Ch 5)

Kushner frequently mentions real-life French critical theorist Guy Debord, one of the eminence grises of the 1968 riots in Paris. I presume the character of Bruno is based upon him: Debord too wrote aphoristic theses and spent his final years holed up in the French countryside. My review of a biography of him can be found here.

She also mentions a persecuted minority, the Cagots, whom Bruno suggests are descended from the Neanderthals (given the number of generations this would have taken it seems incredibly unlikely that a pure genetic strain would still exist) and other historians suggest, with more credibility, are descended from the Cathars, or the Visigoths, or Arian Christians.

She also references Celine whose Journey to the End of Night is reviewed in this blog.

I wonder whether her chosen pseudonym 'Sadie' is inspired by the Beatles song 'Sexy Sadie' since it was written as a satire on the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru with whom the Beatles spent some time. In this novel, Sadie is in a rural location reading emails from Lacombe who could be regarded as a guru.

Selected quotes:

• “While the Neanderthal bravely risked his life with a short-range thrusting spear, the Homo sapiens opted for a long-range throwing javelin. To kill from a distance was less valiant. It was killing without engaging in an intimate commitment to mortal danger.” (Ch 1)
• “Look up ... The roof of the world is open. Let us count stars and live in their luminous gaze.” (Ch 1) Foreshadowing.
• “Charisma does not originate inside the person called ‘charismatic’. It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.” (Ch 1)
• “The more education person has, the more scare quotes they seem to use.” (Ch 1)
• “To misunderstand the adult world, and to misuse it, are the precursors to innovation.” (Ch 2)
• “The trick of riding backward is to understand that this orientation of travel is time honoured and classical. It is like rowing a boat: you enter the future backward, while watching scenes of the past recede.” (Ch 2)
• “For all its fame, rosy-finger dawn leaves no prints.” (Ch 3)
• “He looked as if he had been puzzling over some question at the moment of his death, trying to solve an unsolvable math problem, and he would travel into eternity that way, with a thicket of half-tabulated numbers lodged in his mind.” (Ch 5)
• “Hashing out some intrigue or annoyance among the piles of annoyances that would crop up for people attempting to live communally.” (Ch 5)
• “I'd rather be driven by immutable truths then the winds of some opinion.” (Ch 5)
• “Flapping laundry - the international flag for anonymous women's work.” (Ch 5)
• “Rotterdammerung.” (Ch 6)

April 2025; 404 pages

First published in the USA by Scribner in 2024

My edition issued in the UK by Jonathan Cape in 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God