Rachel Kushner - Creation Lake

I read Creation Lake while off sick from work, devouring it in a couple of days. Two parallel news events however seemed apposite. The first was the killing of US healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which seemed, at least on initial evidence, to be linked to the way that privatised healthcare denies insurance claims, leaving poor people to suffer. The second was the ongoing British inquiry into Spycops, the infiltration of leftwing and environmental groups during the 1970s, 80s and 90s by police, which often "destroyed lives".

Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake deals with just such a spy, a covert agent, sent into environmental groups to discredit them by encouraging acts of violence. It is hard not to imagine that Kushner didn't have the British Spycops in mind when she wrote it. Indeed her own spy, a freelance operative rather than a state agent, Sadie Smith, refers to similar events were cops fathered children. She herself is prepared to use sex and love to manipulate her targets, dividing her opponents and creating false ideas of loyalty.

Set in France in the recent past, Sadie is trying to undermine a group of harmless, if eccentric, communalists in the rural countryside concerned, alongside the nearby farming communities, about the draining of aquifers by multinational corporations. Sadie's infiltration is aimed at discrediting the movement by encouraging it to go further than any individual members want to go - toward violence.

Entering the movement though means Sadie has to assimilate the movement in part. Since this is France, the movement's politics are shaped by the heirs of Guy Debord, those influenced by his situationalist films and ideas. Sadie hacks the emails of one Bruno Lacombe, the ideological leader of the movement, whose abstract thoughts on human nature, evolution, geology and society's construction are highly influential. As she obsessively reads these emails, Sadie is drawn to their rarified nature - pulled into Lacombe's world, even as she despises those who follow him.

There's a lot of exposition here, and I lost some patience with Kushner's use of Lacombe's emails to tell a wider story. But Sadie is well drawn, and her descent into obsessiveness, even while she doesn't become a member of the movement is fascinating. You get a real sense of the way living secret lives messes you up. Nonetheless she remains an unpleasant, manipulative, and emotionless person. There's no love for anyone else - in the movement or indeed within the opposition. All of which leads to a rather satisying ending for the activists's side, and an ambiguous one for Sadie. Creation Lake has a lot in it for leftists looking for an unusual take on the spy novel that reminds us that spy's don't have the glamour of James Bond, but are dirty, backstabbing thugs who care little for ordinary people.