As of August 2024, Rachel Kusher has made the Booker longlist for her new novel, "Creation Lake." Kushner's work tells the story of a spy named Sadie (her code name rather than her real name) who must infiltrate a potential eco-terrorist organisation in France. From the beginning, we know that she is a shape shifter who takes on a new identity with every assignment. She becomes obsessed with the philosophy and emails of Bruno Lacombe--the man who serves as a confidante/inspiration for certain members of this environmental group. As she begins to infiltrate this French group, she questions her past assignments as a spy (including charges of entrapping people) so that the narrator unconsciously seeks to find her true self in this new assignment. She sees Bruno's emails as a way to understand the life she has chosen.

Kushner writes beautifully, and the novel works on a sentence-by-sentence level. Kushner builds the tension for how this new assignment will end. However, the book ultimately disappointed me. I wanted to like "Creation Lake," but I felt that the philosophical elements of the novel did not always mesh with the spy/ecoterroism angle. Kushner moves from the new assignment to the narrator's past to Bruno's philosophy. We hear from Bruno a lot, and it becomes oppressive after a certain point. I wanted to learn more about Sadie and less about Bruno's thoughts on every possible subject. We learn more about Bruno than the narrator, and I wish it had been the reverse.

Rachel Cusk is one the most brilliant writers. I loved all of her previous works- they are individual, inventive, inspiring and beautifully written. While there's lots to admire in Creation Lake, I felt the plot and characters struggled under the load of research and history. Rather endless descriptions overwhelmed funny and insightful passages.
thank you for the opportunity to read- I learned much but didn't love the experience

Creation Lake is about undercover agent Sadie Smith's efforts to infiltrate a group of radical eco-activists in a remote area of France for her shadowy big business paymasters. As with the infamous "Spy Cops" operation in Britain her job is to entrap and spy on people who put society and the environment above profit.
Billed as a Spy Thriller it's very well-written but short on thrills,that doesn't mean it's bad,it's far from it,but if you're expecting Lisbeth Salander.
A subplot is the musings of commune leader Bruno Lacombe on the Neanderthals ,that form quite a lot of the book, I found more interesting than the main plot.
A very good read but not quite "what it says on the tin" and while I found the parts about the Neanderthals fascinating I'm not sure that everyone expecting a Spy thriller. would share that sentiment.

<i>"We were doing what European activists spend hours and hours doing: simply talking."</i>

This was often good, sometimes okay, and I enjoyed reading it.

I thought the beginning was really strong, the middle a bit confusing but still good (setting up a lot of chess pieces), and the ending a bit disappointing. *looks around furtively before whispering the next part* I've wondered previously if the really "big" "famous" writers are not really edited anymore? IDK, maybe I was unfairly thinking of <i>Birnam Wood</i> when reading this, which I think just NAILED the ending so well.

My favourite parts of the book were Bruno's emails. If this was Kushner's main reason for wanting to write this book (to have philosophical musings from an 'anticiv' character living in a cave and obsessed with the Neanderthals) I was 100% on board. If this guy existed IRL I would 100% subscribe to his Substack, lol. I also liked the Sebaldian-like essays part about random elements of French culture/history, Polynesian sailors, politics + political action, etc. It would be interesting to compare this book to <i>Telex in Cuba</i> in terms of the theme of revolutionary external action vs. 'plumbing' inside yourself, doing the internal reflective work.

I also really liked the 1st-person voice and her character in general. <i>"My banal and conventional looks have served me well. People think I look familiar. Have I met you? they ask. But I'm merely what white women are meant to look at."</i> I loved the scene in the beginning where she pees on the side of the road and sees a pair of women's underwear, and thinks about the kind of woman the underwear might have belonged to: <i>"Her world is full of disposability."</i>

I was often confused by the timeline/the number of characters in this but I think the Kindle formatting of my ARC might be to blame for this (I don't think it was showing the formatting correctly i.e. page breaks etc). Also my brain is just not what it once was due to hormones. I didn't let being confused bother me, I just read on in blissful tranquility.

I thought the book could have done a better job of having more satisfying dramatic pay-offs but perhaps I was 'tricked' into reading this as a thriller. I liked how Kushner was paying attention to entertaining the reader throughout (this is something I think <i>The Mars Room</i> did SO well) but the final 20% dropped the ball on this a bit imho.

Questions I had (SPOILERS):
<spoiler>- The guy she was having an affair with and the confrontation with his wife - I felt like this could have had more of a payoff/effect on the story, particularly in the final climatic sequence
- What about the couple (Mao I and Mao II)? What was the point of them?
- The daughter and her truffle-hunting pig... really seemed like they just kind of disappeared from the story? Seems like her main role was to lead Sadie to Bruno's house?
- The American with the liver condition (Burdmoore) that she recruited to be the assassin - I didn't understand why he was like listening to her????? When she recruited him to be part of her plan? As a 'newcomer' to the commune, I didn't understand/find it believable why anyone would see her as having 'authority' in this way (I may have missed a beat in this regard). But his final confrontation with her at the protest was really confusing to me (when he's like "are you nuts?" after she hands him the gun) - so was he just playing along with her the whole time and was never actually 100% on board?
</spoiler>

Overall I'm glad I read this but I don't know if I would go out of my way strongly recommending it to people (like I do with <i>Birnam Wood</i>). But if you're a Kushner fan there is a lot to enjoy here! Definitely one of the most substantive, skilled, and interesting writers of our times!!

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

<i>"Love confirms who a person is, and that they are worth loving. Politics do not confirm who a person is. People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organised... What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises... the quiet truth... is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt."

"The point of this maxim was that bringing down capitalism would require a more robust imagination. But just because something is harder to imagine does not mean it's correct."

"'To live in a cave and renounce technology, renounce everything, that's like' - he laughed - 'about the most modern thing a person could ever do.'"</i>

Although the book read itself quite easily, I have not really enjoyed this book. I feel that the text on the back cover is not summarizing properly the story. I was constantly waiting for something that finally didn't really happened. It is, I realize after my reading, not the kind of story I usually read and appreciate. Thank you Random House UK Vintage for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Creation Lake is an ambitious and propulsive spy thriller which explores ecology and human history.

The narrator, known only to us as Sadie Smith, is an undercover agent working for shadowy corporate interests who has been tasked with infiltrating Le Moulin, a commune of radical eco-activists in a remote part of France in order to entrap them into committing terrorist acts. In order to get close to the group's founder, Pascal Balmy, Sadie ends up seducing his childhood friend Lucien, a film-maker. As well as involving herself in the life of the Moulinards, she becomes fixated on Pascal's e-mail correspondence with the older reclusive figure of Bruno Lacombe, who now spends most of his time underground exploring the vast network of caves around his farm and ruminating on the 'Thals' (Neanderthals) who, Bruno argues, were possessed more sophistication than they have been given credit for,

There is much to enjoy and appreciate in this novel, not least Sadie's narrative persona - on the outset she is totally detached, self-reliant, amoral and highly skilled, but different facets emerge as we learn more of her back-story and she becomes more immersed in the world of the Moulinards and Bruno's e-mails, which form a large proportion of the text. This is also a profound philosophical and political novel which asks big questions about what it means to be human and our relationship with the earth. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

First of all, potential reader, this is the type of review where the reader’s personal tastes
The pros: Eco-terrorist group; a cult, and a former FBI agent working in the private sector now, trying to infiltrate it. She is fluent in multiple languages (a pro as a character trait. and a must in her case). Her voice is peculiar and distant in the beginning. So, to sum up, the premise and the setting of a French commune are cool, as well as someone spying them.
I enjoyed Kushner’s prose (my first read of her novels, as far as I remember). It is ‘alive’ and modern.
The anthropological subplot.
The room for improvement: This part is personal. I understand why Bruno makes use of astrology, but since he becomes the main voice later into the novel and I couldn’t care less about astrology, it distracted me.
I expected more thrill, an even and progressing thrill and horror throughout/till the very end, and a slightly different pacing.
I also wanted to get to know Sadie and Bruno more. To be fair, we get glimpses of both characters’ back stories, but I like more in-depth narratives.

3.5 rounded down because of my personal preferences, but for what it is, this is an enjoyable and clever read and deserves much recognition.
Plus, now I am curious about Kushner’s previous work, and will seek them.

I love Rachel Kushner's voice -- to some I've spoken to it apparently comes across as a sort of non-style, but for me it's an incredibly impressive vehicle that can accommodate massive narrative payloads, as it does here. Creation Lake is perhaps slightly too busy, but it's often brilliant, and deserves to be on the Booker Prize shortlist. Thank you NetGalley for an advance reading copy of this book.

Long-listed for the Booker Prize, Rachel Kushner's latest novel, Creation Lake, is a tour-de-force of storytelling. Sadie Smith, our central character, infiltrates an eco-commune in France as they maybe about to commence acts of violence. This makes it sound like a thriller, though, which will disappoint readers coming to this novel looking for thrills. What Kushner does instead is ruminate on various themes - anthropology, ideology - and thought on where the human race has been and where it is headed. It is a complex novel, full of deep, raw energy, and one I was thoroughly engaged with. It might not be as successful, ultimately, as The Mars Room, but still marks her out as one of the interesting writers working today.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024. This is a book that seems to mix the idea of a spy thriller with huge sections that discuss anthropology to name but one. Our narrator, who is in my opinion unreliable, is Sadie Smith. At least that is the name she is using at the moment. She is a former spy who was sacked from the federal agency she was working for and in now freelance. We don't know who has employed her, but her job is to infiltrate a sort of ecoterrorist commune that is working to stop corporate farming. The group's mentor is a man who has taken himself off to live in a cave and who hasn't been seen for years. He communicates with the group by email and talks about Neanderthals, astrology, stars, and non-violence - something at odds with Sadie's mission which seems to be not only to find out what the group is planning, but at the same time manipulating them to act as her employers want them to do which even means the killing of a government minister. Sadie hacks into these emails and these long sections look at how for the future, humans must looks back at the past and we see Sadie becoming taken with them. It is not so much a thriller - we watch Sadie as she infiltrates the group and how she uses all the means at her disposal to 'get in with' the right people - even sex. We get a little of some of her 'past lives' and how one incident might be coming back to haunt her, but overall you never really get to know her - but isn't that the whole purpose of being a spy - to drift in and out leaving very little trace. There is some action at the end of the novel but I think this is more - through the long emails, a contemplation of modern life and whether we are better off than the Neanderthals who lived with nature and the earth. An interesting read.

Unfortunately I didn't enjoy this book at all. I found the pacing to be very slow and in spite of it being pitched as being somewhat of a thriller, lacking in anything particularly exciting. I was very disappointed- I wanted something interesting and with depth and I didn't find that in this book.

My first time reading a Rachel Kushner novel and, while I can appreciate her skill as a writer, the story itself wasn't for me.

We are with Sadie Smith, an American spy for hire as she moves to France to try and inflitrate a group of secretive eco activists led by Bruce Lacombe. The plot is interspersed with long descriptions of the history of Neanderthals (Thals, as Bruce calls them) which, while interesting, took away from the pace of the main story.

I didn't find Sadie to be a character I cared much about. She was certainly intriguing at first and I waited (and hoped for) an interesting turn in events or something to grip me but, for me, it just didn't quite happen. Again, she's a skillful writer but the plot itself felt quite wayward and didn't keep me engaged.

Eco warriors, early homo sapiens, an infiltrator spy (our narrator who, given where this is set perhaps should be called agent provocateur/provocatrice?) and rural France. All elements which I felt would provide a magnetic narrative.

I was disappointed. Whilst many aspects were constructed cleverly - the tension being built with the brilliance of a great writer, the deft use of a narrative voice that is self reflection after the event making me feel party to a unique perspective and the layering of episodic telling gave great pace.

However the plot somehow lost the plot. Whilst I generally love loose ends and ambiguity with the reader having to do some of the heavy lifting, I felt that this novel required more than was given. I think it was just not a personal good read although I imagine it garnering wide appeal.

With thanks to #NetGalley and #Vintage Books for the opportunity to read and review

Creation Lake is an intriguing read- a mix of spy novel , an exploration of an extinct human species ( Neanderthals) and a dive into the world of eco activists and their lives.

Sadie Smith is a spy-( free market) hired by invisible figures to discreetly manipulate circumstances and bring the downfall of others- in this instance she is employed to penetrate a community of eco activists following the beliefs of the enigmatic Bruno Lacombe.

This is a deeply reflective novel as Sadie reveals her past in intermittent bursts whilst describing how she works her way into the lives of others.

As much as she holds a cynical view of the environmental campaigners' lifestyle in rural France and the words of their "leader', there is an element of her that is beguiled by this man. His story is told in reflection throughout the novel

There is no denying the literary power of Rachel Kushner and the intelligence of this novel but at times it is hard to sympathise with the lead protagonist- her goal is to befriend, manipulate and in many senses destroy the targets of her benefactors- simply disappearing from the mayhem she causes.

There is a sense of a Le Carré novel as we enter the world of espionage and blatant double crossing but without the high stakes pace and drama.

This is a hypnotic and intelligent tale that will win plaudits and further opens our eyes to what is reality but ultimately when you can't feel a warmth/ empathy to the main character then you question was it a good read?

Sadie Smith has been sent to France to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists influenced by an elder called Bruno Lacombe who rejected civilisation by living in a Neanderthal cave. Bruno seduces Sadie with his tragic story but Sadie is a seductress and believes herself to be the puppet master.

This wasn’t for me in any way so I’m giving it 2 stars. It wasn’t a bad novel and it feels very unique but I just didn’t get it at all. Parts of it just made zero sense to me and I didn’t understand what was going on half of the time. Just not for me at all. It feels like it’s trying to be clever but it just didn’t work for me.

Sadie Smith (not her real name) is an American freelance agent, who is being paid to infiltrate a commune of eco-activists in rural France, to report on their criminal activities, and - if none are forthcoming - to incite them to violence...

Sadie is a fascinating character, as irresistible to the reader as she is to the characters she befriends and betrays, and I loved the way we are drip-fed details about her history and her current assignment, always leaving us wanting more. The more we learn, the more we realise how much danger Sadie is in, and my favourite aspect of Creation Lake was the slowly mounting tension, as the plots (in both senses of the word) keep piling up. It also feels like Sadie's (understandable) paranoia comes to infect the reader, as we never know if anyone suspects her, or whether it will all work out the way she has planned. Creation Lake is mostly written in brief chapters, which make it more readable but also somewhat break the flow of the story, and I would recommend giving this one chance to get you hooked. It's quite a long book, but the more I read of Creation Lake, the more I wanted to keep reading it.

Creation Lake is less big-picture oriented than I would expect from a Booker-longlisted novel, but while some readers might be left wanting more, I never found it ambiguous in the way that I did with The Mars Room. I loved that Creation Lake is a page-turning but thought-provoking read, and the emails that Sadie hacks into, which muse on whether the key to humanity can be found in its pre-human past, add an extra layer to the story. I also loved the way Rachel Kushner writes, with such wit and insight into how people think and how the world works. Not quite a five-star read for me, but definitely one I would recommend.

A slow-boiling psychological thriller which gives the reader insights into what it is like to be an intelligence agent.
There is a lot of interesting background detail on France, Neanderthals and other earlier (than us) life forms.
Life in an alternative society is also showcased, and what the state may do to break such a life up.
Some of the topics covered in this novel are deep, but I enjoyed them.
Thank you to the author for opening my eyes to lots of different aspects covered in the novel.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

2,5 stars
I liked ‘The Mars Room’ and ‘The Hard Crowd,’ but I had some trouble with Kushner’s new book. This book is filled to the brim with information, theories and ideas about the Neanderthals, the Cagots, astrology etc. And even though Kushner is very smart and I admire her knowledge, I personally didn’t really care about all the anthropology. I would have liked to learn more about the characters and what motivated them, but I felt I hardly got to know them. Also, this was presented as a spy novel about eco-terrorism, but nothing much happens and except for the ending it wasn’t very thrilling.
Most people on Goodreads seem to love it and maybe my expectations were just too high, but this was not my kind of book and I found myself to be rather disappointed.
Thank you Jonathan Cape and Netgalley UK for the ARC.

A mix of a female style agent provocateur and some James Bind style escapades, some post Marxism philosophy, a Neanderthal rebuttal of Yuval Noah Harari and an expose interconnections of the French elite.

The first is a genre I would not normally read and the next three might make great non fiction books (but I don’t enjoy non fiction).

So blended into the type of book I do read - literary fiction - this melange fell short for me.

Jean-Patrick Manchette (French crime novelist) meets David Reich (ancient human population geneticist) with a backdrop of post Marxist radicalism and to a soundtrack of Daft Punk.
 
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2024 Booker Prize.
 
Rachel Kushner has previously published 3 novels – of which I have only read the last – Mars Room, eventually shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize.
 
When asked the “what are you working on next” question on the Booker website at the time of “Mars Room”’s shortlisting Kushner talked about “A novel about the tyranny of the human face, which is, so far, its title. It’s partly about early humans, wanderers of separate tribes—sapiens and Neanderthals—who either snubbed one another, or simply didn’t know, for half a million years, that they coexisted, until one day, two met on a path, cataclysmically, as thrilling new genomic analysis tells us. That part’s the love story. There are some contemporary people in it too, less romantically, and in particular a person of unknown provenance who covers their face, unsettling the rules and lives of those who choose not to.” 
 
However this idea mutuated somewhat into this novel set instead set in 2013 France (although with a couple of minor inconsistencies in timing) - and which fits the way the author’s novels progress forwards in time – 1950s, 1970s and early 2000s previously.

The novel as published coalesced around a number of other elements which she has described in more recent interviews:

Setting: an area of remote southwestern France she knows well and one rich with caves and traces of ancient early human habitation).

Milieu: commune of idealistic young Parisians attempting to farm the inhospitable land.

Research interest: the early genetic origins of humanity.

Narrative tension: the Parisians resistance to the French authorities and in particular their policy of building megabasins – large scale, artificial reservoirs which divert water from small farmers to agro-industrial irrigation.

Narrator: a female “spy” acting as an undercover informant and agent provocateur. The idea inspired by the IRL story of Mark Kennedy – the UK police officer who infiltrated various environmental organisations (including some of which Kushner’s friends were members of) forming sexual relationships with a number of the activists before – after a scandal blew up – switching to working in the same line for private organisations.

“Sadie Smith” (we do not know her real name) is a 34 year old America – multilingual, ruthlessly focused, self-confident and opinonated, master of seduction with her conventionally beautiful face and cosmetically enhanced body, and even greater master of dissimulation and misdirection. She is a heavy drinker but also heavy thinker and as a first party narrator we gain close access to her thoughts and motivations (unlike anyone around her).

Sadie was we learn dumped many years ago by the FBI after a honey trap sting in which she lured an young US environmental activist into planning a bombing, was thrown out by the courts for entrapment (as a running background to the novel the documents for that case are just being released).

Now she works for an anonymous but clearly well connected set of masters who we and she surmise represent French big-business interests.

Her immediately previous job had her shadowing the hugely unpopular figure of Paul Platon - Deputy Minister for Security in the fictional Ministry of Rural Coherence (loosely modelled on Manuel Valls) - whose job is to persuade areas to accept the installation of unwanted state infrastructure.

Now she has been asked to infiltrate Le Moulin, an agricultural collectivist of anarchistic and idealistic subversives run by the charismatic Pascal Balmy, and suspected of unproven sabotage. Her introduction is engineered by her by way of Pascal’s cousin Lucien, a filmmaker, her current adopted lover and and (in his eyes) her fiancée - who sets her up to translate the group’s manifesto.

As part of her research she hacks into the emails of the group’s mentor - Bruno Lacombe - often seen as the successor to the notorious IRL Marxist filmmaker and philosopher Guy Debord. But disillusioned by the complete absence of any communist/socialist uprising in the West in the second half of the 20th century, Bruno has tuned away from Marxism and rejected not just capitalism, not just a working class who seem content with their exploitation but the whole of humanity - or more specifically Homo sapiens.

Rather than harking back to an earlier pre-industrial era he instead goes back to Neanderthal times, believing that all the ills of modern society stem from the very same greed and rapaciousness that allowed Homo Sapiens to largely eradicate the ethically and artistically superior Thals (his term for them). His views on this - and his decision to retreat into a cave network which he believes have the more visionary Thal cave art (not just pictures of hunting and killing) - are set out in a series of emails to the collective and which Sadie summarises for us - being it seems increasingly seduced herself by the shadowy figure of Bruno.

We sense too that Kushner rather enjoys exploring these ideas - and particularly the idea of restoring the reputation of the maligned Neanderthals aligns with the championing of the underdog that informs much of her work.

Meanwhile at the collective Sadie starts an affair with a man there and starts to find ways to carry out the directions of her shadowy masters which seem to consist of getting the collective to carry out an outrage which will lead to them being arrested en masse as terrorists, with Platon (who is visiting an agricultural fair at which the local farmers and collective were planning a smaller scale and largely peaceful disruption) as a sacrificial pawn - this fair forming the book’s climax.
 
Note that a setting in a Francophone country is something of a theme on this year’s longlist (Playground, This Strange and Eventful History, Held) and like all those books this book also features some famous French people (here for example the novelist Louis Ferdinand Celine as well as the Marxist philosopher Guy Debord). Interestingly both these first two of those books also feature French multinationals although in both cases focused on excavating minerals/metals.
 
Another recurrent theme on this longlist is the use of Old Testament scriptural references (Safekeep – Isaiah; Wandering Star – Proverbs, Job; Stoner Yard Devotional – Psalms; Enlightenment – Ruth and Esther) and here Sadie’s worldview (as well as her grooming technique) is heavily informed by the more world weary parts of Ecclesiastes.

She also has a strongly held view on the non political critical essence of people (whcjh she sees as salt) although disappointingly not linked in anyway to Lot’s wife.

Overall I enjoyed reading the book a lot - both the spy style capers and Bruno’s home spun prehistorically rooted philosophy in isolation would I think soon wear thin. However the alternating of them, together with the vivid picture Kushner paints of both the local community and of the upper echelons of a French society as well as the additional ideas she brings in - there is for example a thoughtful and fascinating link drawn with the local minority of the Cagots, treated for many centuries as a kind of untouchables caste - make for a novel which at no point overstays its welcome.

I also appreciated seeing a novel which tries something different - both from the author’s previous novel and from most literary fiction (with a sense of fun which is so often lacking from her more earnest contemporaries).

If I had a reservation it is that the novel felt like a story which was building to more of a series of twists, character revelations or just the unification of various plot strands (or revolution of the plot arcs of a faulty sprawling list of cast members) than did occur in the finale.

I first was made aware of this novel when the guardian’s Alex Preston, in his fiction preview of 2024, called it as his “early pick for this year’s Booker” - and while I would be surprised to see this as the winner unless it, in keeping with the song that is ever present in the book, gets lucky, it’s a welcome addition to the longlist.