FICTION
Playground
Richard Powers
Hutchinson Heineman, $34.99

Although the thing that sticks in most people’s memories about Richard Powers’ 2018 novel The Overstory is the trees, the book might just as easily be read as a story about computers and artificial intelligence.

That isn’t surprising: Powers worked as a computer programmer early in his career, and computing has been a recurrent theme in his fiction, woven through novels as diverse as Galatea 2.2, The Goldbug Variations, Plowing the Dark and, most recently, Bewilderment.

Powers’ bewitching new novel shares more than a little of this duality. Although outwardly a book that seeks to do the same thing for the oceans that The Overstory did for trees, Playground is also focused on the transformative possibilities of artificial intelligence.

Like most of Powers’ novels, Playground is intricately structured, interweaving the stories of a sprawling cast of seemingly unconnected characters. At the book’s centre are four people. The first three are a trio of friends: Todd Keane, Rafi Young and Ina Aroita. Todd, who narrates much of the novel, is the son of a wealthy Chicago businessman blessed with an ability to understand maths and computing. Rafi is the mixed-race child of a black fireman and a Korean bus driver with an extraordinary talent for reading and a fascination with literature.

The two meet as teenagers at a school for the gifted, where they bond over games: first chess and later, and more significantly, the extraordinary complexity of the ancient Chinese game of Go. Their friendship endures until graduate school, where they meet Ina, the artist daughter of a Hawaiian naval officer and a Tahitian flight attendant who becomes the love of both their lives.

By the time the novel begins, the two men are long-estranged. Rafi has belatedly found happiness with Ina and their two adoptive children on Makatea, in French Polynesia. Todd, on the other hand, has become one of the world’s richest people, the billionaire founder of the social platform that gives the novel its name, although all that wealth is not enough to hold off the rapid unravelling of his mind after a diagnosis of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB).

The fourth character is Evie Beaulieu, a French-Canadian marine biologist and ocean adventurer more than a little reminiscent of Sylvia Earle (although the novel complicates that easy identification by giving the real Earle a brief cameo). Evie learns to scuba dive as a teenager in 1947 (her father is a friend of Jacques Cousteau), and the experience transforms her, offering a way to escape her awkward body and fuelling an obsession that will shape her entire life.