Just finished this book about a secret US agent who infiltrates an ecowarrior group in Southern France who are planning a mass protest against industrial farming,
Sadie Smith is an awful character who uses people but there are a couple of things that redeem the book. One is that she hacks into the emails of the philosophical mentor of the group – Bruno Lacombe – who lives apart from them and unravels his deep meditation on the nature of Homo Sapien’s life. He lives in a cave some of the time and muses about the superior nature of the Neanderthals to Sapiens. His emails even mention NZ at one point such is his admiration for early Polynesians ability to navigate by the stars.
The other thing I like is the way Kushner paints Southern France, not as a rural idyll but with all the ugliness that a commerical society imposes on the land.
In the end Sadie is still an isolated figure but I think she has learned to live in more harmony with the world after imbibing Bruno’s writings and shunning violence.
It reminded me of Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood. Neither of them paint either Ecowarriors or their capitalist overlords very well!
A hard book to read on a Kindle but yeah, it gripped me in the end.