Richard Powers (Hutchinson Heinemann (UK); (US))
The distinguished novelist Richard Powers is best known for his novel The Overstory. This was inspired by the work of forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, and it was in effect a love letter to trees. It was shortlisted for the 2018 Booker award and won Powers the 2019 Pulitzer prize for fiction.
Playground is the author’s 14th novel. It has been longlisted for the 2024 Booker, and there are heavy echoes of The Overstory. This time, however, the book is a paean not to trees, but to our vast and still mysterious oceans. Well, that’s one strand of it, or the backdrop, perhaps. The novel is also about AI, colonialism, game-playing, exploitation, democracy and also, very strongly, about friendship. There is a lot going on, so it is too simple to call it a book about the oceans.
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At the heart of the novel is the intense friendship between a privileged white boy called Todd Keane and Rafi Young, a Black boy from a deprived and violent home. Both end up at an elite Chicago school and form a passionate, highly intellectual friendship that for a while transcends the differences in their world views and backgrounds.
As time goes by, Rafi becomes increasingly obsessed with literature, while Todd forgets his early passion for the oceans and becomes a computer mogul in the style of Mark Zuckerberg.
Then there is the young woman from Micronesia, Ina Aroita, an artist who gets caught between the two young men. Our final main character is a woman called Evie Beaulieu, an early pioneer of diving who becomes a world expert on the oceans at a time when oceanography was entirely dominated by men.
Earth is a water planet, yet we are still ignorant of its submerged regions, even as we despoil them
These four characters are fated to meet on the tiny island of Makatea in French Polynesia, which once provided the world with phosphorus. The now scarred and impoverished atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to develop AI-run cities in the ocean.
For me, the parts of the book that worked best were when Evie was underwater watching huge manta rays pass by above her. I didn’t expect to be so moved by these scenes, but now I wish the book had spent more time beneath the waves. I would have liked to learn more about the rays and other creatures she had been privileged to spend time with.
Another nitpick, while I am nitpicking: I don’t think the disparate threads worked together as well as they could have, and I felt let down by the ending. One very final nitpick: I found it hard to understand the problems in Rafi and Todd’s friendship. This might only be me, though.
But I am picking at very small nits here. Powers is a superb novelist writing at the height of his abilities. The book is magisterial, moving and thought-provoking. It made me want to read more about ocean life in all its complexity and do more to help protect our seas from the ravages of the modern world.
Powers makes the point, very well, that Earth is a water planet, the vast bulk of it covered by ocean. And yet we are still so ignorant of the submerged regions of our world, even as we carelessly despoil them.
So, yes, although this book does a lot of things, it also serves very well as a beautiful love letter to our oceans. Literature that leads us to face up to what we are doing to wild creatures and spaces is vitally important, and I am very glad to have read this.
Emily also recommends…
Leviathan
John Gordon Davis (Michael Joseph)
I haven’t read this since the early 1980s, so please excuse me if you find it hasn’t aged well. However, I remember it as both very upsetting and extraordinarily moving, with some of it narrated by the whales themselves. It is partly thanks to books like this, I think, that most whale hunting has been banned. Most but not all!
Emily H. Wilson is a former editor of 91av and the author of the Sumerians trilogy, set in ancient Mesopotamia. The second book in the series, Gilgamesh, is out now. You can find her at emilyhwilson.com, or follow her on X @emilyhwilson and Instagram @emilyhwilson1
The art and science of writing science fiction
Take your science fiction writing into a new dimension during this weekend devoted to building new worlds and new works of art
