Creation Lake

Bruno is one of the novel’s most important characters and is, in many ways, the ideological heart of Creation Lake. He is a French leftist radical whose anti-civilization views place him at odds with contemporary, far-left activists who seek to disrupt the French state and ultimately move society beyond capitalism. Bruno, who once thought it possible to overthrow capitalism, now believes that the working classes are too sedimented within the greater capitalist machine to step outside of its influence, and he argues that the only viable course of action is to abandon society entirely. He lives on a large rural property within a massive network of caves and, other than via email, rarely communicates with or sees anyone. Sadie observes that Bruno “want[s] to be closer to a more rudimentary diurnal pattern, attuned to his animals” (108), and she is correct in asserting that he cares more for livestock and small-scale subsistence farming than he does for being part of any real social (or societal) group. Bruno is intelligent and knowledgeable but has become fixated on an idealized vision of Neanderthal history and culture. He argues that Neanderthals, not Homo sapiens, were the “best” hominid and that their skills, their ability to work together in small groups, and their mode of living in harmony with their surroundings made them especially important. He looks to Neanderthal society for inspiration and argues that humans should pattern their own values and practices on those of Neanderthals.

Although his ideological orientation is rooted deeply in his knowledge of history and paleoanthropology, he is also a wounded, haunted man who is driven away from society because of unresolved grief. As a child, he was orphaned by World War II and lived for years on the streets of Paris. It was there that he came into contact with Guy Debord and various other leftist intellectuals, but it was also there that he realized that he would prefer a career to a life of petty theft and small-scale crime. In addition to the scar that his early years left on him, Bruno is additionally mired in grief over the tragic death of his young daughter in a tractor accident. Sadie correctly asserts that his anti-civilization orientation is in part the result of having experienced so much trauma in civilization: His ill treatment by figures like Debord when he chose to seek an “honest” living, coupled with his daughter’s fatal accident with a piece of industrialized agricultural equipment, both drove him away from modernity, society, and industry. Among all the people Sadie investigates, Bruno is the only one she ultimately finds compelling and develops an affinity for. His arguments about social isolation and the dangers of contemporary society ultimately become inspirational for Sadie, and her choice to abandon espionage for a solitary existence speaks to his power as a thinker and rhetorician.

Pascal is a French leftist intellectual and activist and the leader of the Moulinard commune. He grew up in Paris, and as a young man, he was interested in film and the arts. He eventually became obsessed with Guy Debord and other left-wing French ideologues and, in his early adulthood, turned away from popular and bourgeois culture entirely, focusing instead on shifting society away from capitalism, by violent means if necessary. His fixation on Debord remains a prominent feature of his characterization. Early on, Sadie observes, “It seemed Pascal was modeling himself on Debord” (57). He indeed shares with Debord both a far-left orientation toward economics and society and an often-difficult nature and tumultuous relationship with the public eye. Although not explicitly anti-civilization like Bruno’s, Balmy’s ideology is markedly anti-capitalist, anti-industrial, and anti-government. Through his work on the commune with the Moulinards, Pascal hopes to create a small-scale, communal society built on unity and collaboration while carrying out clandestine acts of sabotage in order to disrupt state interests and the local shift to industrialized agriculture.

Although a fierce ideologue, Pascal is, like Bruno, a complex figure with both objective and subjective motivations for his actions. Despite his avowed commitment to communal social organization, Pascal thinks of the commune as his “personal fiefdom” and is clearly ego-driven in the way he conceptualizes his own role with the Moulinards. Rather than understanding himself as just one piece of a larger whole, Pascal enjoys being a leader and is often characterized by moments of arrogance and self-aggrandizement. He is further complicated by his philandering: Pascal, who has a family, engages in a series of short-lived relationships with other radicals. Nadia, the disaffected former Moulinard whom Sadie “befriends,” is one of Pascal’s former conquests, and she points out how anti-feminist and manipulative he can be in his romantic liaisons. Like Bruno and many of the other Moulinards depicted, even Nadia, Pascal becomes a portrait of the complexity of radical movements and a testament to the way that ego and personal motivations drive even the most fervent activists.

Lucien is Sadie’s fiancé. Since he is a childhood friend of Pascal Balmy, Sadie engineers a meeting and then a relationship with Lucien in order to get close to Pascal. Lucien does not play a large role within the narrative and is not fully developed in the way that Sadie, Pascal, and Bruno are, but he remains an important, if secondary part of the story. Lucien is only depicted through Sadie’s eyes, and Sadie’s opinion of Lucien is low. She finds him silly and self-important. Because he is convinced of his own greatness, Sadie postulates that he is not wary about Sadie or the speed at which their relationship has progressed. She observes, “It felt right to him that he would fall in love with a stranger” (48). Although his family is skeptical of his relationship with Sadie, Lucien believes in her “love” as evidence of his own desirability, feeding his already inflated ego. Lucien is a filmmaker and traces his love of film back to childhood. He and Pascal used to frequent Parisian cinemas together, and although Pascal now sees their shared interest as bourgeois and frivolous, Lucien retains his early interest in film. He makes a career out of his deep appreciation for the art form, but he is aware that Pascal thinks less of him because of his career choices. At the end of the novel, Lucien has found a new love interest, further showing himself to be an unserious person: As quickly as he fell in love with Sadie, he falls in love with someone else. Love, for Lucien, means very little.

The Moulinards are an organized group of anti-government, anti-capitalist, and anti-society leftist radicals who live together on a commune in the Guyenne, a rural area in France. Led by intellectual Pascal Balmy, the group seeks to both forge a self-sufficient, environmentally friendly life for its members and to disrupt the area’s planned transition to industrial, commercialized agriculture. Their legal activities include small-scale subsistence farming, the sale of their wares at area farmers’ markets, continued construction of communal buildings and projects, and everyday chores and childcare. Despite its dedication to radical ways of living, both Pascal and Sadie note the commune’s reliance on traditional gender roles and class divisions: The women perform the bulk of the cooking, housework, and child-rearing. Although their tasks are communal and they help one another, their work is not substantially different from the kind of “women’s labor” that characterizes life for women and girls in the most traditional of societies. The men also perform gendered labor, but they are additionally sub-divided by class: There are “higher status monks” who do intellectual work to generate the group’s general philosophy and pen its various written manifestos, and there are “lower status” workers who perform the commune’s manual labor tasks like building, construction, and farming (208). In addition to their work on the commune, the group is involved in clandestine acts of eco-terrorism that reflect their staunch opposition to industry, commercialized agriculture, and state control of area land and resources. These activities are secret in nature and difficult to observe even after Sadie infiltrates the group and gains the trust of many of its members.