switterbug (Betsey)'s Reviews > Creation Lake

[4.5+]

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“…when you attempt to escape the world, to leave it behind, you bring things with you.”

Our unnamed narrator is an American spy. Current alias Sadie Smith worked for the FBI as an undercover agent, but was fired after an undesirable outcome on a case. She has a facility for languages, and is now freelancing for shadowy types in the private sector. The case at the center of this story is in the Guyenne region of France, where “Sadie” needs to infiltrate anarchic eco-activists who are conspiring to prevent their small farming community from going corporate. Her role is to find out whether they plan on acts of terrorism.

We start in media res, where “Sadie” has already taken up residence with target-adjacent Lucien, in a big farmhouse. She cringes every time she has sex with him, but this is the price she is willing to pay for access. As a spy, she’s a natural chameleon, a smart cookie, daring, and self-contained. Her life is one of subterfuge and delusion—her second skin-- that she may not even comprehend her own motives by now. Moreover, she seems to have a growing drinking problem, which kept me on edge while reading.

Creation Lake is less an espionage story than it is an identity story---Sadie discovering things about herself (and how our ancestors stamped us) that she wasn’t anticipating, her outlook and core beliefs. The Le Moulin anarchists have a spiritual and intellectual leader, Bruno Lacombe, who lives in a cave and sends his distillation of thought and philosophy by email. Sadie has hacked into these emails from Bruno to another leader, Pascal Balmy. In this iteration--her spy costume this time--she is a translator, and Lucien intends to hook her up with Pascal and his comrades to translate a book they anonymously wrote.

During her stay, “Sadie” connects to Bruno’s ideology of the ancient past as a way to understand and approach today’s problems and foster a better future. He talks about the Thal (Neanderthal) and other human-esque species preceding the Thal. Bruno believes we can learn from them. He has a startling insight into the cave paintings at Lascaux and other illustrations in other caves. I’ll leave that for the reader to discover.

I admit that, while reading, I thought there were several siloed threads that weren’t clearly related. Sadie’s past, murky AF; the current target; and the agendas of many characters who populate this group of activists---they seemed to be floating out there, but without a precise connection. There are also a few risky moves on Sadie’s part, in furtherance of her own desires. She is sleek when she treats the subversives transactionally. We aren’t supposed to necessarily fathom the raw Sadie, her lack of morals and pronounced, consummate capitalism. There are times she appears to be tearing herself down in order to rebuild, and is often blind to her own flaws.

The book is about Sadie’s evolution; the spy identity is a vehicle for transformation and adds tension to the story. Bruno elegantly exhorts his followers to think bigger, like reading the stars the way a sailor would read the sea. Sadie is touched by the celestial matters that Bruno waxes on about.

Kushner’s gorgeous prose elevates this novel (and all her novels) to a step that’s out of Time. In talking metaphorically about technology, Bruno states, “Cave frequencies…are not three to thirty megahertz. Cave bandwidth crosses moments, eras, epochs, eons. You have to learn to go inside the monophony, to tease it apart. Eventually, you uncover an extraordinary polyphony…There’s a feeling that everyone is here.” There’s a bit of The Flamethrowers here, in that there’s an underground, radical movement in which the protagonist is involved, looking for identity and also making herself a conduit for the people she meets. In Creation Lake, she plays one person off of another.

Learning about Sadie is a novel’s worth—she’s a lot to unpack, and it is through the other figures that we learn about her character. It’s hard to parse because our own moral compass can get in the way of apprehending her. But, through her personal (and interpersonal) behaviors and actions, and the conduct of the activists, and, of course, Bruno, there’s room to grasp the indeterminate and enigmatic Sadie/not Sadie.

Thank you to Simon and Schuster for sending me a finished copy for review.