FICTION
Creation Lake
Rachel Kushner
Jonathan Cape, $34.95

All of Rachel Kushner’s heroines have a past. In her first novel, Telex from Cuba, she is a dancer linked to the underground during the Cuban revolution. In The Flamethrowers, the protagonist races motorcycles at death-defying speeds before getting swept up in the counterculture protests of Italy’s hot autumn. In The Mars Room, she hurts a man to stop him from hurting a child, and pays the price with her freedom.

In her latest novel, the Booker prize-shortlisted Creation Lake, the protagonist spies on a group of eco-terrorists on behalf of a corporation, only to get caught up in their web. It’s in the zeitgeist for protest movements to compare themselves to the protest movements of the 1960s, and Kushner is keenly alive to that. Her intellectuals are deeply rooted in the intellectual history of her chosen setting, which in this case is the limestone mega-basins of rural France, where a government-subsidised corn crop becomes the target of unlikely idealists who hold the ideals of civilised society in their crosshairs.

Creation Lake is a philosophical spy caper, less a whodunit than a whydoit, and it is alive in its thorough imagination for all the reasons a group of French radicals might have to position themselves against the government, and against civilisation itself. The most finely drawn portrait is that of the group leader, Pascal Balmy, who is closely modelled on a real-life doppelganger, the Situationist and inciter of the Paris 1968 riots, Guy Debord.

Pascal’s radical underground is populated by a host of colourful characters, but the most compelling is the ersatz French philosopher who in opposing civilisation itself, is only a stone’s throw away from the real philosophers who critique it. With these tools, Kushner builds a spy novel that is also an intellectual thriller, asking us to question whether human life costs the earth.

The novel’s protagonist is also a woman with a past. Before she goes freelance and spies for a corporation, she is caught entrapping a young terrorist, convincing him to buy fertiliser for a bomb with the promise of a love that she keeps hanging in the balance. When she turns from spying for the public to spying for a private corporation, she doesn’t have to hold herself back. A denouement involving a series of logs and a government official shows that when an agent goes rogue they do it for a price.

The novelist Brandon Taylor, writing in The New York Review of Books, accused the novel of a cynicism so absolute it totalises the story. Taylor’s novel The Late Americans was very right about the audience his novel and Kushner’s have in common: students, and students who are disaffected about their ability to ever really know themselves.

But Taylor might be wrong about what a novel weary with the weight of self-knowledge can know about the world, or whether the limits of knowledge is an entertaining premise for a sleek, intellectually speedy thriller. In fact, the espionage protagonist who doesn’t believe in anything but cannot disbelieve her own desire to have a child, may just be a new way to know a noir genre so world-weary it seems it can’t be reinvented.