Creation Lake is written in the guise of a spy story, but it is a peculiar book that refuses to conform to the tropes of the spy genre. It is essentially the story of Sadie Smith – not her real name (we never learn her real name) – sent to Le Moulin, a farming commune in France. She is there to infiltrate and spy on its members, to learn their intentions and ultimately, to discredit the group and its leaders. The Moulinards have been associated with protests against a new government infrastructure project, and Sadie works for those who stand to benefit from the project. She is a ‘gun’ for hire. She doesn’t know who her employers are. She rarely does. And she doesn’t really care. Sadie doesn’t seem to have any convictions to stand by except money and her personal interests. She manipulates her subjects and she does whatever she has to do to achieve her ends. She appears to us as amoral and unfeeling. After being sacked from the FBI for entrapping a former subject, she now freelances. In her current case, Sadie has a notion that her substantial wages are being paid by ‘captains of industry’ who stand to potentially lose huge profits from the land they have bought in the Guyenne region if a government plan to exploit its massive reserves of subterranean water is thwarted. The plan is to create plastic-lined mega basins to be used to irrigate monocrops grown by large corporations. Traditional farmers will be pushed out. It is Sadie’s job to frustrate any action against the plan.

Already, the novel promises much to think about: the role of governments and corporations; the sidelining of traditional means of production; the exploitation of the environment; and the moral questions surrounding clandestine investigations and the manipulation of their subjects. Kushner’s novel addresses other issues too, including the exploitation of female labour and the poor, how technology has alienated us from nature and the pervasive impact of capitalism on our humanity. Yet the story is nevertheless engrossing and compelling.

The scope of the novel is so wide that I’m interested in discussing aspects that pertain most readily to Sadie’s complex character and her struggle with her sense of purpose and morality. At times hers is a difficult character arc to map, since Sadie denies the efficacy of higher feelings or weaknesses she perceives in others. For instance, she works with idealists whom she clandestinely intends to thwart, and so attributes little to their ideals beyond personal vanity. On the matter of political activism, she sees it as no more than posturing; a means of personal branding:

They commit to some plan, whether it is to stop old-growth logging, or protest nuclear power, or block a shipping port in order to bring capitalism, or at least logistics, to its knees. But the deep motivation for their rhetoric – the values they promote, the lifestyle they have chosen, the look they present – is to shore up their own identity …

Sadie’s inner thoughts are so cynical and stridently articulated that it is easy to forget that she is undergoing a personal crisis; that she is struggling to understand herself. This is why her connection with the Moulinards and their intellectual concerns have the potential to be formative at this point in Sadie’s life.

Led by Pascal Balmy, the Moulinards have long taken inspiration from the writings of Bruno Lacombe, a recluse who sends them philosophical musings about pre-history and the evolution of the human race via email. Bruno has lost a daughter a quarter of a century earlier in a tractor accident, and his withdrawal from society can be traced to that moment. Bruno first withdrew to a dry-stone hut, and then further, underground, to live for a time in a cave on his property. Bruno’s philosophies are drawn from this experience and from his study of Neanderthals and their culture.

The Neanderthals were a human race generally said to have become extinct around forty thousand years ago. In popular parlance to be called a ‘Neanderthal’ is now an insult implying stupidity, poor manners or bad looks. Bruno Lacombe’s missives reject these popular assumptions about the Neanderthal race. The brain capacity of Neanderthals, for one thing, was greater than that of modern humans. As for their looks, Sadie makes a connection between the faces of Neanderthals as described by Bruno and the face of the actor, Joan Crawford: “that scale of face: dramatic, brutal, compelling”. A whole part of the book is named after her. Crawford had a broad face and unconventional beauty, and this is the association made with the faces of Neanderthals. And Bruno is drawn to a people he perceives as cultured and civilised. Neanderthals’ cave art was abstract and conceptual, and from what Brono Lacombe has learned, he believes Neanderthals were less prone to the worst aspects of human violence and depravity.

The vast underground caverns of the Guyenne region which inspire Lacombe’s thinking are links to humanity’s ancient past, when humans lived in caves and created their art on the rock walls. They are womb-like, dark and moist; a place of silence and solitude, seeding thought. There is a lot about caves and prehistory in the novel, and some will understand this context very differently from Bruno Lacombe. He understands human history from the point of view of the development of our species; as an atavistic need to understand the self.

But the perspective of this novel is primarily Sadie’s. She is drawn into Bruno Lacombe’s thinking because his writings speak to a deep need in her which she is barely aware of. Sadie, like the captains of industry who employ her, remains an anonymous figure to protect herself from reprisal. Her previous case in America has gained notoriety in the press. Sadie infiltrated an animal rights group and manipulated a young man she worked with into violent action. She is aware of efforts to identify her after she was sacked from the FBI for entrapping her subject. But we sense as we read, that Sadie’s need is beyond self-protection: that she yearns for something more fulfilling; a fundamentally more authentic self which lies beyond the scope of human appellation or definition – beyond notions of gender, for instance: something at once primal and numinous.

All this may seem a rather strange tangent for a spy novel to take, but this is not a tangent at all. Kushner begins her novel with Bruno Lacombe and his interest in Neanderthals, and it is part of our job as readers to understand how the current day story of Sadie and the mega basins has relevance in the large scale of this history. Sadie, who has access to the emails that Bruno is posting, is drawn to his ideas and the tragedy of his life. She eschews the possibility of meaning, fate or purpose, but is seduced by Bruno Lacombe’s ideas, which draw out her need for connection and understanding. Lacombe gets under Sadie’s skin in a way that men she has taken as lovers to help fulfil her mission, do not. Sadie is repelled by the thought of sex with Lucien Dubois, the man who she seduced to gain access to the commune, and while she enjoys sex with René, a worker in the commune, their affair is merely a physical transaction.

Sadie is lured by Bruno’s writings because she already has some sympathy with his thinking and his life. Bruno’s philosophy is a reaction to capitalism. Unlike his acolytes, the Moulinards, Bruno understands that capitalism cannot be defeated, and so he decides that his only option is withdrawal. Bruno’s withdrawal, functionally, might be judged to be an evasion of his principles, but within the scope of the novel it is synonymous with Sadie’s nihilistic principles – a rejection of belief in the modern world – as well as her own inner journey. Sadie is supremely individual. She has no interest in having children, nor has she any emotional connection with the people with whom she lives with undercover for long periods at a time. Functionally, she has withdrawn from a personal life, herself. As the novel begins, she has been with the Moulinards for a year and is anticipating the last six weeks with them before she disappears from their lives. When she leaves it will be sudden and without sentiment:

This is what agents do – slip away, disappear, move on to their next assignment. Afterward, those they infiltrated come to believe that this person who showed up out of nowhere and later melted back into nowhere with: (1) fell in love and ran away, (2) had a mental breakdown, or (3) was a cop all along.

Even so, it seems hard to reconcile Sadie’s attraction to Bruno’s writings with her apparent pragmatic and transactional connection to other people and their lives. The story of the young man whom Sadie encouraged to perform a criminal act so that she might gain a conviction plays heavily on her conscience. Despite her seemingly inhuman indifference, we sense that Sadie has been personally moved by her part in the destruction of the young man’s life. The backstory she tells Pascal places her home in Priest Valley, a place in America which, in reality, has no population. The only association Sadie has with Priest Valley is that she passed it with the boy she entrapped in her former case. For Sadie, Priest Valley is a memory of that time before everything went wrong:

A valley with a sign on the side of the highway. Paradisical and empty. Soft with wild grasses. Grand with valley oaks. Its tall priest-like poplars, planted long ago, in hopes of colonizing this otherwise untouched place where a couple of outbuildings linger, their unpainted timber collapsing back into nature.

The name of the valley as well as the religious descriptions in this passage – “paradisical” and “priest-like” – suggest a kind of Prelapsarian moment before Sadie’s own fall: the betrayal of the boy and her sacking for setting him up. This “untouched place” of her imagination (“POPULATION: ZERO”) has some parallel with Bruno’s own understanding of Neanderthal culture as a kind of Prelapsarian stage of human development, from which the possible intermingling of Neanderthal and homo sapiens DNA has left a relic in our chromosomes he describes as:

… a precious keepsake, an heirloom, the remnant of a person deep inside us who knew our world before the fall, before the collapse of humanity into a cruel society of classes and domination.

Kushner links the personal story of Sadie with the broader history of humanity. The focus on both pasts speak of a desire for return and renewal. Both are aspirational, especially for the most cynical and pragmatic Sadie, who can barely acknowledge her own connection with other people. When Bruno speaks about the need to try to understand our Neanderthal heritage so that we might understand ourselves, he might just as well be speaking about Sadie:

A psychoanalyst looks for clues of repression, of what a patient has hidden from others and, more importantly, hidden from himself. The deepest repression of all is the story of those who came first, before we did, long before the written-down. We must unpack what these earlier lives might mean for us, and for our future.

The past inhabits the present of this story. In the case of the planned rebellion, itself, Lacombe’s story of the Cagot Rebellion is a telling parallel. The Cagots were an outcaste race, making them a little like the Jews. The story of the Cagot’s eventual defeat appears to foreshadow the prospects faced by Pascal’s people. The Cagots, we learn, looked different from the rest of the population. Despite the accepted belief that Neanderthals are extinct, Bruno postulates that the Cagots were unpopular because they were likely a strain of earlier human with whom the main population did not wish to interbreed; possibly Neanderthals. Bruno writes about the Cagot Rebellion of 1594, sparked after a local Cagot healer ‘cured’ the Count’s wife of sterility. The Count, furious at being cuckholded, burned the healer’s home and killed his horse. The relevance, for the modern-day rebellion, is that the usually unpopular Cagots were supported by local peasantry who had been treated poorly by the nobles, themselves. But the rebellion was repressed after several peasants betrayed the Cagots to save themselves when the king’s forces arrived. It is not difficult to draw a comparison between the situation of the Moulinards and their plan to disrupt the mega basin project, or the likely part Sadie will play in thwarting them. Sadie has no convictions or stakes in the game. But the associations Bruno makes between the Neanderthals with a purer form of humanity is analogous with the Moulinards who intend to resist the destructive power of capitalism.

Yet Sadie’s cynicism is not as obdurate as she portrays it. There is a Sadie who came before the Sadie we know: one whom we barely glimpse and may only just be accessible. For the most part, we know Sadie is cynical and dismissive. While she may eschew the display of political activism as a performance, a brand for identity, she also believes in an essential self that escapes this corruption:

When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away.

The notion of a Prelapsarian state is akin to the notion of this essential self in this private moment, unfettered by pretence. It is an essence that Sadie understands, at the core of her being, as “hard, white salt”: as though unaccompanied by our pretences, we are reduced, like Lot’s wife, to an essence. Sadie may seem heartless and without moral scruple, but her present circumstances preclude change, even if it is desirable. Like many anti-heroes, there is this one last job before quitting. Yet, like the collective past that is represented by the Neanderthal heritage Bruno Lascombe studies – that draws him imaginatively towards a more ideal form of humanity – Sadie’s past piques her conscience, so that she might “unpack what these earlier lives might mean” for her future.

For me, Creation Lake implicitly explores the idea of the hold of the past upon us. Are we determined by our biology for instance? Bruno speaks of the transmigration of genes through time like lice transferring from one head to another. I can only assume that is part of the point in the connection Sadie makes between Neanderthals and the face of the actor, Joan Crawford: the possibility of this ancient past embedded in our genes.

So, is there really such a stark divide between ‘good’ Neanderthal genes and ‘bad’ homo sapiens genes? Or is it merely incumbent upon us to understand ourselves outside the social and economic paradigms that otherwise mould our sense of who we are? How can we become better people? How can we know an essential self? Is there any meaning or purpose? These are the kind of questions I feel Sadie must be struggling with as she moves toward the dramatic denouement of the novel: this Sadie who rarely allows us into her inner sanctum, her ‘salt’. And if Sadie is confronted by these questions, then we, as readers, are too.

This was a surprising novel. I expected more action. Instead, Creation Lake delivers a philosophical tour de force which offers no definitive answers, and makes the traditional action of a spy novel secondary to more interesting concerns. I imagine this will not be to everyone’s taste, but I found it fascinating.