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.

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.

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.

Rachel Kushner is that cool girl novelist who's also deeply smart and thoughtful. This book is closer to [book:The Flamethrowers|18460081] than [book:The Mars Room|36373648] but what they all share is an anarchic energy and a wayward trajectory epitomised by an unruly, unbound female protagonist-narrator (I'm discounting here Kushner's finding-her-feet-as-a-writer book [book:Telex from Cuba|2495094]).

Kushner's women have a kind of androgyny about them: they're sexy - here self-consciously and manipulatively so - but they also operate in environments that are more often gendered masculine: here as an ex-FBI-style agent now independent and possibly a bit rogue; in other books as part of a motorbike speed-racing group, and in prison.

The mood of this novel is unmoored: 'Sadie Smith', our protagonist, is operating under a pseudonym as she infiltrates a kind of eco-commune in France who may or may not be planning acts of violence. But Sadie's clients are shadowy and morally questionable - is she working for a government agency or for big corporate business interests who want to paint protesters as criminals and terrorists?

This sense of disorientation permeates the text and is complicated by the presence of Bruno's voice: a man with a troubling twentieth century past whose theories of Neanderthal man and whose retreat into the caves of France paint him initially as something between a crank and a cult guru but whose thoughts on how to live under late-stage capitalism form a parallel narrative to the main storyline - and seem to become increasingly judicious and perceptive.

This is not, I'd say, a book for readers who want a clear pull-through and who are uncomfortable with ambiguities at all levels. But for me, this is a fascinating exploration of where we are today, where we have come from and how we might be at a form of crossroads in terms of where our future lies. All that wrapped up (but never neatly or tidily) in a questing, searching, probing narrative that asks serious questions without making itself earnest.

Yep, Kushner is right up there on my list of exciting writers working today.