Review: “Creation Lake”

Rachel Kushner’s dispassionate novel has all the makings of an existential spy thriller.

There’s a cynical undercover agent, a mysterious sage who communicates only by email and a radical commune of eco-anarchists scratching out an existence in rural southwest France.

The undercover agent is a cocksure Sadie Smith. A thirty-four-year-old disgraced FBI agent who’s fled to Europe and now working for shadowy interests to infiltrate and destroy said eco-anarchists who might (or might not) be foiling government plans to construct mega-basins for said shadowy interests.

Why is Smith in Europe? Because in America she’d been pressured by her supervisors to incite some animal liberationists to violence so the FBI could come in and save the day. Unfortunately that resulted in losing an entrapment case after she had to plant the idea of bombing a research facility in some young man’s head since he was doing such a poor job of coming to it on his own. She even had to drive him to buy the fertiliser.

Losing the case saw her tossed to the wolves by the FBI. How? Let’s see how Smith describes it in her own words.

I lost my job. I had cost the Feds two convictions. The agency who had hired me more or less touched a button: their tinted windows went up, and that was it.

So Smith finds herself in France juggling contracts and contacts, intercepting the emails of Bruno Lacombe, a cave-dwelling sage who escaped the 60s Situationists and serves as the eco-anarchists’ mentor and spiritual icon.

Along the way, there’s more than a few nods and musings to prehistoric man, literary enfants terribles and domestic terrorism. Any novel that mentions Guy Debord sixty-one times is my kind of novel.

As the story and intersectionality unfold, Smith finds herself caught between her mission and her growing fascination with Lacombe’s cave-dwelling philosophy.

Will she complete her assignment or will she side with the eco-anarchists?

Will she live in the dark or see the light?