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.
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