Booker Prize review: Rachel Kushner’s spy novel ‘Creation Lake’ shows us hurtling towards extinction

Rachel Kushner ranks among the finest novelists working today.

The recipient of several major literary awards and a former Guggenheim Fellow, Kushner, who has a background in political economy and United States foreign policy, uses her fiction to explore the historical and geopolitical pressures that bear down on and determine everyday life and patterns of social behaviour.

“What is shaping people? What are the pressures that delineate how they think, act, speak?” These are some of the questions she poses in her body of work.

Her new novel, Creation Lake, is shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize and tackles the topic of ecological terrorism. Clearly inspired by influential spy and crime writers like John le Carré and Jean-Patrick Manchette, it subverts genre conventions and playfully challenges reader expectations.

A touch more tonally measured than her previous novels, Creation Lake is by far Kushner’s most accomplished and engrossing work to date.

We get a sense of the scale and depth of Kushner’s interests in her debut novel, Telex from Cuba (2008). Set in the years leading up to the Fidel Castro helmed revolution of 1959, the novel interrogates questions of gender and the brutalities of colonialism, and sheds fresh light on what now seems, somehow, to be a long-distant, half-forgotten historical moment.

Kushner’s interest in explosions of revolutionary fervour and periods of social upheaval carries over into...

Read more