Rachel Kushner on the story behind her Booker-shortlisted spy novel Creation Lake

In 2008, French police raided a commune in the department of Corrèze, claiming that "anarchists" there were plotting to sabotage the country's railway system. A decade later, the group, mainly composed of young people who had chosen a simple and collective lifestyle, were acquitted, and a secret agent who had infiltrated their ranks was exposed.

"Something about [this case] seemed inherently suited to fiction," said American author Rachel Kushner. She first came into contact with members of the commune, known as "Tarnac," about 20 years ago during a visit to France. Kushner, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for "The Mars Room," based her latest novel, "Creation Lake," on this incident.

The novel tells the story of "Saddie," a disgraced former FBI agent now working for employers as a spy. She travels to the French countryside to infiltrate the environmental activist commune "Le Moulin," while also monitoring a local politician. As Kushner told Claire Nichols of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) at Adelaide Writers' Week, the real commune was also infiltrated by an undercover British police officer. They confronted him when the commune found forged passports in his car.

"Apparently he started crying and said, 'I've come over to your side' ... Because they were all good people, they let him go instead of beating him up. A week later, he disappeared." The agent was dismissed from the police force for misconduct and eventually became a spy for an American military contractor. Kushner drew a particular lesson from his story: "For these people, there is still life after they are disgraced." She used this lesson to shape Sadie, the "vicious" narrator in her novel.

It took Kushner three years to find the right character to narrate "Creation Lake." She said, "You can have the environment, the texture, even the scenes and the characters, but it's hard to write a book if you don't have an organizing mind." She didn't want a narrator like herself—a writer who "sympathizes with social projects that leave the city and move to the countryside." For such a character, the only "twist" would be to be disappointed with the commune's political project—which she learned was a very common story when talking to people who lived in Tarnac. "People go to communes trying to be part of them, but everyone ends up leaving, feeling like, 'Oh, I was excluded,' or 'The leader is an asshole,'" she said. "There's always some reason why things don't work out. It's really hard to figure out how to labor collectively and live with other people."

Guiding the commune members' efforts to solve these problems is Bruno Lacombe. He is a teacher-turned-philosopher hermit who lives in a cave and only appears when writing lengthy emails about Neanderthal life. Kushner, who attended Adelaide Writers' Week and Sydney's "All About Women" festival in Australia this month, said Bruno is the "beating heart" of the novel. "He believes that if you treat others with dignity and tenderness, they are very likely to reflect and even generate these qualities," she said. Kushner realized that her narrator could read Bruno's emails, looking for information about Le Moulin's plans. This helped her find Sadie's voice. "She's going there to effectively destroy [the commune members'] lives," Kushner said.

This malicious intent meant that Sadie's narrative arc would not be about disillusionment. Instead, "(she could) move from experience and cynicism to something akin to innocence." Sadie gradually moves toward innocence as she is drawn to Bruno and his lofty ideals. His character is loosely inspired by a real philosopher: Jacques Camatte, who Kushner heard lived in a cave and sent lengthy emails. "I thought: 'This is a fascinating contradiction,'" Kushner said. "I immediately came up with my own version of Camatte."

She said it seemed natural that a character like Bruno would think about how to reorganize social life by looking back to the past, "to see if early humans left us any clues." This exploration leads him to live primarily in underground caves in Corrèze, and in describing his living conditions, Kushner drew on the knowledge of her teenage son, an avid caver and guide. "I don't like going deep into caves," Kushner said. "(But) I had a sense of what Bruno's underground world would be like ... (because my son) told me what he found there: he had to wade through chest-deep water and navigate narrow spaces so that you couldn't turn your head."

Bruno raises questions that Kushner often thinks about. In "Creation Lake," Bruno writes: "We are driving a shiny driverless car towards extinction, and the question is: how do we get out of this car?" Kushner said, "It's too much to ask that question on any given day ... it's painful. "We are all trained to normalize this state, in which we are always casually discarding things. It's like, 'Oh, throw that away and buy a new one,' or 'There's a new operating system,' or 'Technology will save us from this predicament.' "Or (it's like) nothing matters. Now, there's just 'right-wing accelerationism'—the whole idea is that we colonize Mars and leave this place behind." But, like Bruno, Kushner believes in the goodness of humanity—and believes that life is "sacred and blessed." Posing questions about human existence in the novel was a "strangely healing experience," she said.

By drawing on her own questions about how to live, Kushner created "Creation Lake" like most of her past works: "Write what you know (and) what you're interested in." Her first novel, 2008's "Telex from Cuba," tells the story of Americans' role in the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s; her mother grew up in Cuba in the years before the revolution, near where revolutionary leader Fidel Castro grew up. Her second novel, "The Flamethrowers" (2013), also focuses on revolution, set in the New York art scene of the 1970s and the communist Red Brigades in Rome. This was partly influenced by Kushner's life in New York, where she met artists who first moved there in the 1970s. But it was also inspired by anecdotes she heard from people who participated in radical political movements in Italy during the same period. "I thought it was crazy that no one had written a novel about this," she said. In her 2018 novel "The Mars Room," which tells the story of a recently incarcerated woman who killed her stalker, she raises questions about the failures of correctional justice. She has always been interested in "whether society can be organized better than it is now." This interest stems from her childhood, where she was raised by "unconventional people," and her younger years as a bartender and motorcycle racer in the San Francisco counterculture scene of the 1990s.

Seeing a performance by independent musician PJ Harvey—from 2 a.m. to after dawn—inspired her to finally try becoming a writer at the age of 26. She wrote in an essay collected in her 2021 book "Tough Crowd": "Being a true master of something is the highest joy ... merely witnessing greatness is a distant cousin, or even not related at all." Reading Kushner is witnessing greatness—and the highest joy.