Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said.
He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking. – “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner

The cold-blooded narrator of Creation Lake, a literary thriller nominated for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award, is a failed government spy, now working as an industrial spy. Sadie Smith, as she calls herself, has an eerily detached personality: she deals in manipulation, subterfuge, and betrayal. Her one saving grace: she loves and respects Bruno Lacombe’s lyrical emails to the radical Pascal Balmy, her employer’s targeted enemy. Bruno, Pascal’s former mentor, has given up politics to investigate the latest findings on Neanderthals, whose DNA in very small amounts, he says, may still survive in some humans.

And it is Bruno’s musings on the superiority of Neanderthals, who had larger brains than Homo Sapiens, dreamed profusely, and created abstract multi-media art with red and black markings that save Sadie from cynicism. Bruno believes that the wrong species survived: Homo Sapiens was obsessed with killing and eating, and could only copy that reality in their art. And now they have ravaged the planet instead of dreaming.

Sadie has one standout rebellious anti-female trait: she refuses to clean and trashes the expensive house where she is staying. She goes through every cup and glass and then reuses them without washing them. When she isn’t drinking beer, and sometimes when she is, she reviews her surveillance materials. Sadie has numerous files, film clips, interviews, and email.

But nothing is straightforward: to get close to Pascal, she must first seduce his friend Lucien, a not-very-sexy film-maker who takes his work very seriously.

And here is where we glean a certain understanding of Sadie’s coldness. She is repulsed by Lucien, whom she wryly describes in terms of vanity and bad sex. Being a spy is a bit like being a sex worker. And the character of the female spy fits neither the template of James Bond nor John le Carré. We see her as a woman who has had expensive breast implants so she can play Mata Hari with powerful men. Her role must be subservient to men, even when she herself is in charge.

But who is Sadie? She never thinks about family or friends, Instead, she is obsessed with her failure at her first government spying job. It was a disaster, and she was fired. Although she is a successful freelancer, she keeps going over and over the details.

Bruno’s e-mails help her breathe. He is now literally an underground man: he learns about the Thals, as he calls them, by living in a cave and listening to the sounds they would have heard, which remind him of shortwave radio. She is above ground, attempting to incite Pascal and members of his commune to commit a violent political action, preferably a murder, in a protest against the state’s decision to siphon water from subterranean sources, i.e., the water table, to irrigate industrial farms.

Finished with Lucien, who is busy filming, she infiltrates the commune, but it doesn’t go as well as she’d hoped. Sadie’s employer blame Pascal, without evidence, for the sabotage of expensive earth-moving equipment. Can she persuade Pascal to kill Platon, a bungling, much hated state minister who will represent the government at a great celebration of the irrigation project?

Rachel Kushner’s spare writing and seamless interweaving of the musings of Sadie and Bruno’s e-mails make this a fast, taut, absorbing read. I did, however, find Sadie a disturbed and disturbing character. But she softens, in a way, as the book goes on: she decides she would rather dream with Bruno’s Neanderthals as he calls them, than mess around with men like Lucien and Pascal.

Bruno is the source of light in his dark cave. And it is Sadie’s knowledge of his presence in the dark that gives her the courage to shift her identity.