Rachel Kuschner - Creation Lake

It took me a while to revisit Creation Lake, by Rachel Kuschner. [Contains spoilers, but not many] 

In it, she describes Sadie, a jaded agent-provocateur who has been sent to embed with some eco-warriors called the Moulinards, in France. They specialise in the somewhat niche sabotage of large scale agricultural equipment. 

We join Sadie in Guyenne, south-west France, where she’s now being paid to track the founders of a radical farming co-op, Le Moulin, suspected of disrupting a government-approved scheme to turn local fields into a corn-based monoculture. I don't think we really find out who is running her, nor why she needs such a comprehensive armoury of weapons. 

I surmise that Kuschner is painting an elaborate picture of an unlikeable heroine. Sadie is smart, savvy and with a caustic sense of observation, skilled in espionage, yet has a wide blind-side related to some kinds of self-awareness. It makes her all the more fascinating as she dismantles other characters in her thoughts.

A faint plot runs alongside countless character studies of often displaced people living in a French village commune. Sadie has borrowed a convenient lodging from Lucien Dubois, a French film producer, who she seduced. He's gone away to make a film. Then she has to cosy up to Pascal Balmy, a protest leader, and then to Platon, a local state politician. And the plot is about French mega-basins, where land is flooded or rectangles dug to provision more water into parts of France (a real life thing).

There is a whole plot about Bruno Lacombe, a cave dweller (bear-who lives in a valley- geddit?) and his investigations of the Thals (Neanderthals) who were rumoured to live in the area before homo-sapiens and from whom around 2% of the gene pool survives. And he may live in caves, but he has a great wi-fi signal to send copious emails, which Sadie intercepts and which form an additional narrative, upon which she collects later in the novel.

Kuscher's humour is subtle but pervasive so that even some of her more incisive jibes have an edge of jest. It adds a light touch to the writing, although I did find some of her descriptive sections were quite lengthy. My friend who reads extensively advises to 'skip to the next dialogue'. 

And then the question of pacing. It's the last quarter of the book where things really get rolling. And it has multiple endings to tidy away some of the plot-lines (but not all). 

I'm wondering if the endings were written first and then the backstories and other scenes added into the front to provide 'thickening? The last Kuschner I read was 'The Hard Crowd', which is a set of essays and extremely engaging, about life on the west and east coasts of USA, stylistically similar to Joan Didion's 'Slouching towards Bethlehem', albeit more recent. Creation Lake embeds similar characterful stories into a novel format.

The novel blends elements of espionage and philosophical discourse, exploring themes of identity, ideology, and the ethical complexities of surveillance. Kushner’s narrative delves into the interplay between history and modernity, examining the social and environmental impacts of industrialised farming. Food (corn-based monoculture?) for thought.