Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Before reading this novel I had heard that it was a different take on the spy genre, and it is that. The usual intricate plotting and edge-of-your-seat moments are mostly absent here. Creation Lake is more concerned with the internal state of someone who is deceiving everyone around her and consequently is extremely isolated.

The main character, who we know as Sadie and never discover her real name, is a private sector spy. Her missions generally involve infiltrating an organisation and nudging them into a situation where they can be undermined or arrested. Throughout the novel her ongoing mission involves a French communist/environmentalist group which is opposed to the government buying up farmland to build a giant reservoir. Her entry point is quite subtle - seducing Lucien, the childhood friend of Pascal who is the leader of the group. Lucien has no involvement with the group, but she spends months with him establishing a credible backstory before eventually approaching Pascal.

We are treated to flashbacks of various other missions, and the approach of entering a relationship with a target is repeated again and again. Sadie has very few honest social interactions. She is constantly studying situations to build trust and evaluating people (identifying the "salt" at their core) to identify how she can manipulate them. She has something like a friend in Vito - a member of Lucien's circle - but Kushner writes it so that their interactions are a mix of Sadie amusing herself during a months-long tedious mission, and Sadie playing the role that works well with Vito.

Her most significant connection is with Bruno, and it is entirely one-sided. Bruno is an elderly French hermit, a former communist agitator who exchanges emails with Pascal's group. Sadie has hacked into Bruno's email so she can read their correspondence. The emails, and Sadie's reading of them, are some of the most interesting parts of the book. Bruno lives in a cave system (he comes to his daughter's house to use the computer for email) and spends a lot of time thinking about Neanderthals and other human species. I could veer into spoiler territory to talk too much about the emails (not that this is a very plot-driven book), but instead I'll zoom out a little.

Sadie is the narrator and the book is infused with her cynicism. She operates in a world without good guys and bad guys - she usually doesn't know who has hired her and what their ultimate goals are. She infiltrates groups that are in principle idealistic, but which have their own corruptions. She analyses everything around her with a cold eye and lays out a convincing and grim worldview. But all of this plays out with her in almost complete isolation. She has no social bonds. She drinks to get through the day. Bruno, the cave-dwelling hermit, has rejected the world that she recognises. But there is beauty in Bruno's observations. He looks beyond tacky trappings and power struggles and muses on nature and consciousness. I think some readers would bounce off these sections, but I enjoyed them and I can imagine myself picking this book up again to re-read parts of it.

Here's a nice one:

The lessons I took as a teacher in Rodez, he wrote, have outlasted everything else, all the twists and turns through my history. The ideas that I developed are in fact one idea, he said: Children will choose love over brutality, if given the chance. Adults will do the same, if given the chance.

I would read more by Rachel Kushner.