Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner review – a thrilling novel of ideas

An American spy infiltrates a commune of eco-activists in France in this Booker-listed exploration of ideology and sensation

Bruno Lacombe, in his youth an ally of the 1960s revolutionary intellectual Guy Debord, is now self-exiled to a cave complex in the limestone regions of southern France. The caves are like a kind of political rhetoric in themselves, a message convoluted and endless. Their vanished inhabitants obsess him. Since the Neanderthal extinction, “the wedge between human beings and nature” has become “far deeper than the wedge between factory owners and factory workers that created the conditions of twentieth century life”. The left, he believes, needs to properly understand this.

Meanwhile, shadowy French authorities have decided that Lacombe and the “Moulinards” – the post-Debordian eco-commune he mentors by email – need to be steered out of their less than utopian rural domesticity and towards some act of serious terrorism, so they can be dealt with. So they hire Sadie Smith, a freelance American spy-cop, to infiltrate and provoke an outrage. The situation Sadie finds on the ground is confused and intersectional, centred on a real-life green issue: the diversion of local water supplies into vast “mega-basins” to support corporate agribusiness projects at the expense of the local farmers and the environment. Actors within and without the Moulinard commune, less in bad or good faith than in something shifting constantly between the two, all have their motives for protest or intervention.

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