Very nearly an excellent book, but…
I’m intrigued from the start with Sadie, our kick-ass narrator. She’s a singular character, I’ll risk a bit of woke chastisement and suggest she felt masculine: decisive, job-focused, practical. Her job has no ethical element to it, she abuses trust for financial gain. A drinking driver, but she tells us she knows how much she can take, and a slovenly eater – warm beer, fast-food, the rubbish piling up around her. She’s very low on empathy, callously uses men for advantage, talks about her body like it’s a weapon. Got a breast enlargement and knows how to use it. Fantastic mercenary women agents have been turning up for a while, from Tomb Raider to Black Doves (mostly male creations I think), but these usually have an compassionate flip-side, perhaps to feed the male fantasy. Sadie is just unbalanced. This makes her interesting. Her narration is straight-forward.
“I like poplars. A straight line of them makes me think of driving, of going fast, into low Western sun, its rays illuminating their rippling leaves. Poplars remind me of Priest Valley, a beautiful non-place that I drove past with that boy who took the rap for Nancy. They are trees that remind me of a time when I felt invincible.”
A good start with some dangling questions: who are the boy and Nancy and did Sadie orchestrate the rap? Where’s she going to in her fast car across France? We learn she’s some kind of agent, both stalking a politician for one pay-master, while at the same time, for another, she is infiltrating a group of hippy protesters planning a revolt against the reallocation of water in their valley. I got a sniff of Eleanor Catton here and the build up to Birnam Wood: peaceful environmental activists taking on the big boys and it all turning out very, very badly. I was ready for it. There were hints of how it might happen: the communal food preparation suggesting “food-bourne illness”; the quick blow-job to secure loyalty; the dying man needing a blazing exit. All possibilities.
Meanwhile the fiancé Sadie has entrapped to gain access to the hippies is off on a film set somewhere and desperate to get back to her. He takes her on face and chest value. Doesn’t ask questions, but there is hanging doubt that he will be onto her, especially as she is living in his abandoned family pile and the relatives get inquisitive.
And then comes the intrigue. I mean the book is called “Creation Lake” after all. The sub-plot running alongside Sadie’s confusing and, I would suggest, unlikely story (and yes, I know it is fiction but, like Birnam Wood again, it has a pretense of reality), is of Neanderthals walking among us and a man living in a cave. Cool!
So, lots of promising things. And yet. Where is the follow through? I am left feeling there was so much excellently laid build up for so little reward. The dirty kitchen doesn’t get another mention, the entrapped men fade away. Not sure what happens to the guy in the cave, who really could be interesting but this is not his story and if you want a story about Neanderthals among us I suggest you read Seventh Son instead. Sadie’s two jobs are magically resolved with most of the action taking place off stage. I gently criticised Eleanor Catton for going so fantastically OTT at the end of Birnam Wood. I’m sorry for that now. That full on James Bond ending, of a kind that also twists the end of The Ministry of Time, is a lot more satisfying than the soft fall-out here.
Are the questions raised resolved, and does Sadie get what she wants? The problem is, I’m not really sure.
Would I recommend it? Again, not really sure.
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