In Rachel Kushner's unusual and quietly extraordinary literary spy novel Creation Lake, cynically calculating spy for hire 'Sadie Smith' infiltrates a French green anarchist group bent on returning its environs to a pre-industrial state through political violence. The novel purposefully meanders among colourful characters, its exotic anthropological digressions and fitful pacing reflecting the contingent, unpredictable and often inescapably protracted nature of an agent-in-place's mission. Unlike the tortured intelligence case officer of the iconic Cold War espionage novel, Sadie is disdainful of Europe as a whole and unencumbered by weary faith in the evolved instruments of state and traditions of society. The book is an inventive and penetrating exploration of the impulse to opt out of an increasingly fraught world order by way of new communities untethered to old, corrupt, and presumptively dysfunctional constructs.
