In Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, intrepid ex-FBI agent Sadie Smith is a cunning freelance American spy who is sent on an assignment by her employer to infiltrate, investigate and sabotage the actions of an eco-activist farming co-op from Le Moulin. The co-op, it’s suggested, are bent on trashing a government-backed crop-growing scheme in the south of France.
Smith successfully infiltrates the co-op, disguised as a translator, and gets to meet their spiritual adviser Bruno who lives in a Neanderthal cave and wishes for life to return to that kind of simplicity. As Smith digs deeper, things seem to get increasingly murky in the co-op, and at the same time is she really a reliable witness that can be trusted?
All of this adds up to a fast-paced, clever eco-themed espionage adventure which provokes as many questions as it does answers relating to the past, present and future. Although Booker Prize nominee Kushner’s Creation Lake is set in a very different ballpark to her excellent, San Francisco-based prison noir The Mars Room, it shares the knack of reeling a reader in from start to end. There is dark humour, too, and as a protagonist, Smith makes for a refreshing alternative to fusty, male-dominated Oxbridge and MacKintosh spy yarns.
Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner (Jonathan Cape)
Price: £18.99/£9.99 Ebook/£14 audiobook. Info: here
words DAVID NOBAKHT