I am working my way through the Booker Prize shortlist. This is something I routinely did when I was teaching English so that I could talk to the students about what was current. I still do it most years because it’s often a way of finding authors who are new to me but whose work I find like very much. This is how, for example, years ago I discovered David Lodge and the late, much-missed Carol Shields. I was also the only person I knew who had actually read The Satanic Verses, several months before the appalling Fatwah was announced against its author, Salman Rushdie.
Anyway, this year I have just got to Creation Lake and it’s a powerful novel. An unnamed narrator, using the fake name of Sadie Smith, is a professional, freelance spy and very good at what she does. Her current job in a remote part of western France involves penetrating a fairly peaceful group of eco-activists, the Moulinards, who live in a colony. She is tasked to the secret setting up of the assassination of a politician who is scheduled to visit a nearby town. Her responsibility is the ground work. She is not the assassin. That involves getting into a relationship with a man whose family own a house in the area and whose close friend leads the Moulinards – and a lot of very convincing acting. She’s American but speaks several languages including French.
The philosophy of the Moulinards is driven by the thoughts and discoveries and of Bruno Lacombe, a recluse who sends them emails. “Sadie” hacks into these and is gradually drawn into his views about how homo sapiens and homo erectus may have interacted, overlapped and interbred with the Neanderthal. Of course caves were vital to all these people and that’s what the Moulinards are trying to prevent the destruction of, because the government plans to despoil some ecologically and anthropologically important subterranean lakes.
It’s fascinating, cerebral, impeccably researched stuff and I was intrigued to see how Kushner would end it. Surely this Villanelle-like woman wouldn’t succeed in her aims and then just drive away to safety and her next assignment? What actually happens at the placard-waving demonstration is quite neat but “Sadie” is changed by it all and chooses a denouement for herself which I didn’t see coming.
A long and meatily absorbing novel, Creation Lake is well worth reading.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Purple Hibsicus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
