Book Review | Who cares for the fate of a professional saboteur?

Usually, when I finish reading a book that has gripped me from start to end, I’m dying to talk about it. For the first time in my life however, I have read a book that had me rivetted, but I have nothing to say about it. Not because I want to keep it to myself, but because it made zero impact on me. Zero. Nil, nothing, nada, shunya and all the other words for ‘blank’ that a thesaurus can provide. This is bizarre, considering I pretty much raced through the book, but it is true.

The book in question is Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, which was shortlisted for the Booker Award earlier this year. It’s about Sadie (not her real name and we never learn her real name), who is a professional saboteur of activist groups. She’s an American mercenary who can be hired by government agencies or private agencies to infiltrate activist groups and, by one foul means or another, bring about their downfall.

In Creation Lake, Sadie has been hired by a private agency to destroy a group of environmental activists in France. These people are protesting the building of a giant water reservoir that will destroy the groundwater springs of the region concerned. The agency also wants Sadie to bring down a minor French official whose role is to promote massive projects of the water reservoir type.

Cleverly — or so she thinks — Sadie plans to take down both the group and the official at the same time. But as she investigates the group, secretly monitoring its communications while easing herself into it, she falls under the spell of Bruno Lacombe, an elderly former activist who is believed to be the group’s inspiration.

Bruno was once a well-known activist in France. Now he literally lives in a cave, arguing that Neanderthals were far more creative in terms of philosophy of life than Homo sapiens, and that unless the current generations of Homo sapiens start living the way the Neanderthals did, there is no hope for the planet.

Sadie is fascinated by Bruno’s emails to the group and slowly, the ice-cold professional saboteur begins to become more human. Oh, she still intends to do the job, but she’s filled with philosophy of life-level doubts.

For many readers, this will be good stuff. I was enthralled, always wanting to know what might happen next. But somehow, when I closed Creation Lake for the final time, I found myself indifferent to what I had just read. Try as I might, I can’t figure out why. Perhaps only a Neanderthal would know.

Creation Lake

Rachel Kushner

Penguin

pp. 404; Rs 799