Book Review: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

We only ever know her as Sadie, but that’s not her real name. She has been hired by an unnamed party to infiltrate Le Moulin, a French climate activist collective led by a charismatic man named Pascal. He has been strongly influenced by and remains in correspondence with Bruno Lacombe, an ex-revolutionary who has turned increasingly philosophical in his old age, now waxing on about the traces of Neanderthal man he finds in the caves near his hiding place and the ways that they may have been superior to Homo sapiens.

Le Moulin is up in arms over the French government’s plans to construct megabasins that would provide water to large corporate farms at the expense of the nearby countryside and is rumored to be planning some kind of action in protest. Sadie’s primary goal is to learn what that action might be and to try and find a way to take down the group with little concern for ethics.

Sadie is an interesting character who is simultaneously a pretty terrible person and also fun to hang out with. She isn’t an unreliable narrator; it’s safe to take what she tells us at face value even as she infiltrates the group under a false identity. But she operates within her own cynical, borderline-nihilist moral code, never thinking about the trail of destruction her missions leave in their wake. She has a witty and dry sense of humor though, and her acid-tongued observations about the world around her prove wryly amusing.

Bruno’s extended digressions into the history and potential superiority of the Neanderthal sometimes bring the already slow plot to a screeching halt, but they do contain some fascinating ideas. As he uses his discoveries to try to bring Pascal around to his increasingly serene way of thinking he is unknowingly influencing Sadie, who has hacked into and is reading his emails. Bruno and Sadie are both able to reexamine their beliefs and question the way they’ve been living, while Pascal remains steadfast, enjoying the respect of his followers.

The exact plot and what Sadie will do about it are gradually doled out across the novel, allowing for some suspense to develop, especially towards the end, but this is not a thriller. Instead, it is a call for us to learn from our collective pasts, to take the best parts of them and merge them with new ideas to find a way to move forward, and to try to recognize that in an era of seemingly limitless information we actually know very little. ★★★★