Photo: Supplied.
BY ANNE CROWLEY
WHAT THE EXPERTS SAID
“Creation Lake is about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and clean beauty who is sent to do dirty work in France. ‘Sadie Smith’ is how the narrator introduces herself to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian she has met by ‘cold bump’ – making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone she targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her ‘contacts’ – shadowy figures in business and government – instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.” Source: Goodreads.
MY THOUGHTS
Sadie Smith’s character is unlikeable but somewhat entertaining: a spy, imposter and con artist with a dry wit and wry humour. Opinionated, judgemental and often disparaging, she narrates events through blunt inner asides such as, ‘You’re headed for portable oxygen, I didn’t say,’ and ‘Good for you, I thought at Rene, for reducing me to those who wait. But also, go to hell.’
Sadie is multilingual, resourceful and acutely observant, and occasionally philosophical: ‘the truth of a person under all the layers and guises… is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is hard white salt … the 4.00 am reality of being.’ Yet the same insight feeds her manipulativeness: ‘Nadia was hurt and angry. Her salt was bitter. I might want to see about mining it.’
She shifts between amorality and outright immorality. She treats borrowed homes with contempt – ‘My years of living lives that weren’t mine had conditioned me not to concern myself with domestic spaces that were also not mine. I never took care of other people’s things, and I didn’t see why I should.’ She steals to hone her observation skills, and lies to keep people at a distance. And she has no limiting boundaries: ‘This drive to prove that eco-activists were terrorists was so strong and so relentless that I began to feel I had no choice but to plant the idea of violence in the boy’s head, since he was doing a poor job of coming to it on his own.’
Interwoven with Sadie’s narrative is Bruno’s anthropological treatise on the evolution of Neanderthal to Homo Sapiens. Once the inspiration for the activists, and still attempting to influence them, Bruno has literally buried himself (living many years in a cave) in historical, philosophical, and mystical speculations about how we ended up in the collapse of humanity, as he sees it. The activists dream of an end to capitalism, but Bruno concludes that is impossible to achieve, so he has withdrawn – and despite their proclamations, largely so too has the small commune of activists that Sadie is trying to incite and ultimately destroy.
I hope this synopsis makes some sense, because it is really difficult to connect the disparate plot lines and characters. Most of my book club mates were less charitable than me (at least I enjoyed the dry humour) with comments like ‘ridiculous, contrived, over the top, incoherent, what’s the point?’ One determined member mined a theme that had escaped the rest of us, but it was hard work, and most of us decided that life is too short to work that hard reading, and there are plenty of other books in the library!
