This is a novel filled with love for the ocean and everything in it, plus all its unknowns and mysteries and magic. It is, like so many of other Powers novels, also a clarion call to conservation.
The novel is very well written, as any Richard Powers reader would expect. Although it oscillates between at least 3 different time frames and different locations, it does not lose the thread or confuse the reader. One small caveat however: I would say I wish the author paid just a bit more attention to characterisation than to issues. Not that he does not, and Powers is a master with creating sublimely heart-tugging characters, but especially in the first third or so of the novel, he needed to make the reader care a little more, right from the outset. Eventually however, the characters do shine through, the narratives fall into place, and the novel does captivate.
Evie Beaulieu is probably the chief protagonist, 82 in the current day and just 12 in another time frame. As a child of 12, she is tossed into water by her father with an experimental aqualung, to teach her confidence. She comes out not only brimming with confidence, but with a love for diving, and then rapidly, a love for all life under water.
In the run of her long life, she had addressed the UN and pressured two Presidents into taking emergency action. She’d overthrown more than one of humanity’s cherished beliefs about the ocean and confessed her most private stories to a million strangers. […] Today she had one last task to finish. She was on this island for a single reason: To compile another book before she died. To try one more time to make the land dwellers love the wide, unfathomable God of waters. To give the smallest hint of creatures so varied and inventive and otherworldy that they might compel humility and stop human progress in its tracks with awe (p55)
Powers simply waxes lyrical in the most beautiful ways about almost anything he sets his mind to; in this novel, it is about the ocean.
Evie is the author of Clearly It Is Ocean, a book written for young adults, which charmed one Todd Keane from his own childhood. Todd and Rafi are school mates in Illinois, then college mates and roommates. As super bright kids, they bond over chess, and then over Go. Todd is a white kid who was born into wealth, but his family were plunged into debt when his father died. Rafi is a black kid who had a fairly rough childhood. Todd is mad over computers, and Rafi over literature and poetry. Both seem to reach great heights in their studies. Unfortunately, they fall out, permanently, and the tremendous friendship breaks. (The author tries to present the breaking friendship as a 2 way thing, but Rafi comes across as prickly and resentful to the point of being unreasonable and unforgiving, with chips on his shoulder (chips of poverty, race, hardship, etc.) enough to fuel a timber factory.) Todd becomes a millionaire and then a billionaire; Rafi finds the woman of his dreams, Ina, and they adopt children who have lost their biological parents and pledge to bring the children up in their birth country, the island of Makatea in Polynesia.
Makatea is also where the 82 year old Evie has come, to write her last book. But Makatea is in trouble. Its 82 residents are asked to vote in a referendum as to whether their island will become part of a seasteading experiment/activity, where a billionaire will develop their island, bring in hospitals, schools, modernization, and of course increase their occupancy – to three thousand people, as Makatea was in its heyday – or whether they will remain as they are, poor and lacking in facilities. Makatea had, in living memory, known French colonisation through mining with all its extractive destruction and health damage to its people, and then population decline; Makateans are wary of colonisation, but tempted by development. So the threads of the story end up in the referendum on Makatea, a referendum so democratic that children are allowed to vote, even visitors who have only been in/on Makatea a few weeks, like Evie, are allowed to vote.
It is actually a simple enough story when seen from the end of the novel, but the novel keeps going back and forth into Ina’s story, Rafi’s, Todd’s, Evie and her husband’s, then into the side stories of the current day population of Makatea and some of its most remarkable residents, that it deliberately avoids the linear, and makes it seem looping and involved. Charming as it is, I am not fully convinced of the enmity between Rafi and Todd; the reason for it made little sense, the depth of it, even less plausible. The most luminous passages are of Evie’s underwater encounters. Those are depicted so magically they take the breath away. They bring the marvel and magic of the ocean right into the rooms of even those who are determinedly land-dwellers and have no intention of getting their feet wet except in a daily shower. Her encounters with mantas, in particular, are so magnificent and mind-blowing that one could watch-read it endlessly. ‘Watch-read’, because reading Powers’ writing is as good as watching it on film. Powers tells us Evie has the ability to convey her awe and thrill of the ocean through her books, bout of course, it is Powers who is conveying all that wonder to his readers.
She wrote of that dive in the Coral Triangle on her first research trip, when a seahorse the size of her little fingernail clasped a few strands of her flowering hair with its prehensile tail and held on, as if hitching a tide on God. She told of the day she came across a lion’s mane jellyfish in the frigid waters of the Noeth Atlantic – a four-hundred-pound glowering creature with more than a thousand tentacles, the longest one reaching half the length of a city block. She said how it tastes to swallow seawater by accident, and with it several million phytoplankton and zooplankton, including hundreds of that titanic jellyfish’s tiny relatives. Sher did her best to depict the baroque, astonishing architectures of creatures who made up that three-fifths of the oceans biomass too small for humans to se.
She described how it felt to be scooped up on the forehead of a whale shark and taken for a lift on a creature as large as a school bus – a passenger on a giant grazer who fed on nothing by shoals of that same invisible plankton (p318).
It is worth quoting Powers at length because his wonderful descriptions are what carry the reader away into an almost fantasy world, one more real than the daily versions most of us are limited to. Powers can also write extremely tender passages, as he does for example with the relationship of Evie and her husband, at the end of it. This is another large and magnificent novel by Powers, but I do think it could have been slightly better edited – the crafting needed just a bit more curating, to make it a true masterpiece. But in all, still such a pleasure, such a delight.
Playground
Richard Powers
W.W.Norton, 2024.
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