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.