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’.
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