BOOKS Booker-shortlisted ‘Creation Lake’ has an eerie message

This year’s Booker Prize will be announced on Tuesday, November 12. This is the prestigious annual prize for the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. For the first time ever five of the six shortlisted are women.
Rachel Kushner is one of those five for her book entitled ‘Creation Lake’, published by Jonathan Cape. The narrator in the main is Sadie Smith, a spy sent to infiltrate a group of environmentalists (Le Moulinards) in rural France. Her real name we don’t ever find out and how reliable her voice is we are never quite sure. The book starts with a great line: “Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said.”
He is Bruno Lacombe. We get to know him through the emails he sends to Le Moulinards. Sadie listens in to those emails. While her motivations are not clear and we may feel she is completely off the wall, Bruno takes it to a whole different level. He has retreated to live in a series of caves and believes the answer to humankind’s problems is to return to “primitivism”; man was at his best in Stone Age times and has been on a steady decline since.
While bonkers, his story runs through the book, throwing ideas at the reader that are intertwined with the plot. He makes us stop in our tracks and question what we think we know. He is fascinated by the contrast between Neanderthals (Thals) and Homo sapiens (h sapiens). He believes though extinct, the Thals live in our minds and in our culture; like we carry them with us. For example they were the artists, h sapiens were not.
He has been in the caves 12 years and only emerges for food and to send these emails. He hears people in the caves, “whose voices are eternal in this underground world, which is all planes of time on a single plane. Here on earth, is another earth, a different reality, no less real. It has different rules”. His eerie words evoke an imagery I can’t quite put into words: a sense of how strong our connection with our past in reality is, and yet despite that, how easy it has been to forget it – but at what price?
The theme of all the shortlisted nominees this year is ‘home’, and Kushner has the theme of transmigration running throughout the book, starting with the story of Sadie. We don’t really know where she belongs or why she has chosen this life. Le Moulinards are a ragtag group disillusioned with the world, listening to the voice of Bruno from his cave. Also in those caves a group called the Cagots took refuge in about 1,000 CE. They were an outcast, marginalised group of people from west France and parts of Spain. Their origins are not clear, but they may have believed in Arianism, that Christ is not truly divine but a created being.
The plot moves on in the book. Sadie has married a cousin of the head of Le Moulinards so she can gain the trust of the group. She watches carefully as they plan disruptions and protests, which someone or some organisation wants to stop.
It is all part of what the author aims to do with the book – to explore the idea that maybe our ancestors hid messages from us, or for us, and that we have perhaps taken a wrong turn.

Westival talk
Author Easkey Britton recently gave a talk as part of Westport's arts festival, Westival, in the Yoga Root, down at Westport Quay. She read from her most recent book ‘Ebb & Flow; Connect with Patterns and Flow of Water’, published by Watkins Publishing.
Britton, a big-wave surfer, talked about losing herself while out on the sea. But we don’t have to be surfing a big wave to feel this feeling, she says. Water runs through us all.
In a sense, like the Thals in Kushner’s story, water is our ancestor. When we connect with it amazing things happen. The message from both books raises the hairs on the back of my neck, and in a strange way gave me hope that perhaps we are so much more than what we see or what we think we are.

• Bríd Conroy and her husband, Neil Paul, run Tertulia bookshop at The Quay, Westport.