NW Do you mean the human project?

RK I mean the idea that human life should be lived in mind of a greater harmony among humans and nature. It’s hard to talk about because the project of writing ideas into fiction means never being polemical. I have a lens by which I pay close attention to the world. I collect little details; I look at things. I guess there is something almost mystical or spiritual which varies from person to person. Bruno is somebody who is simplifying to some degree in pursuit of something high-ear-minded. He’s taking a pause to look at things. Sadie is in some deep spiritual crisis because she has decided that her own brittle confidence is the only horizon that matters. She thinks that she can identify weakness in others that they themselves cannot identify. To me, this is an impoverished ontological condition. I personally find that enlightenment is humility. It’s waking up in the morning and saying, “What can I do today to improve myself and the conditions by which I try to contribute something positive to the world?” She’s not operating under that principle. Bruno is, to some degree, but has positioned himself as something like a priest or father and not everybody is attuned to listen to somebody who positions himself thusly – we learn over the course of the book that the Moulinards have stopped listening to him. He is in competition with the character of Jean Violaine, another elder who moved to the French countryside around the same time as the collapse of confidence in a revolutionary horizon among the people of their generation who’d been moulded by what happened in May 1968 and its afterlives. Jean opts for attending dairy council meetings and arguing for a marginally better “slice of the pie”, as Bruno puts it. Bruno rejects that in favour of something more abstract and, as he conceives of it, more radical: to revolutionise consciousness by leaving this world while remaining in it. I thought of it as being Bruno’s way versus Jean’s way, which to me is like a joke about Proust – The Guermantes Way and Swann’s Way. By the end of the novel it seems pretty clear that Bruno only has one true disciple in the form of Sadie. She can recognise the features of the landscape as he has described them to her and this laminates him to her as he is giving a name and aesthetic presence to the natural features of the world for which she would not normally have any ability to appreciate or notice. In that way, I think he’s a kind of god for her. When I say a human project with dignity, one could argue that that implies then that there is a deep spiritual dimension to existence. I think the book as a whole is written by somebody who does not disregard that dimension.

NW There are a few origin myths in the novel, one being Bruno’s and Neanderthals, Sadie’s being the entrapment case. Yet at the end of the novel there’s a sense of a deferred end – there’s a feeling Sadie’s on the run.

RK I wanted to borrow some of the power, as I see it, of the noir novel. When you have a narrator who’s a detective you drag more of the framework of the genre into the book than just the profession you assign to its central voice. I partly structured the book in homage to this French crime writer I love, Jean-Patrick Manchette, who wrote a series of books in the 1970s and was himself formed by May 1968 and saw himself as in dialogue with Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Because of the way Debord was concentrating his power by purging, rejecting and insulting people, he hated Jean-Patrick Manchette and said he was like the ultimate pathetic slavish fanboy of the Situationists. Manchette himself saw these novels as undermining capitalism’s attempts to recuperate literature as another aspect of the spectacle, and thought that by writing crime novels he was somehow demonstrating the spectacle and its circuitry. He was doing anything he could to somehow pretend that he himself wasn’t an artist, when I think deep down he knew that he was. I structured the book in part as an homage to Manchette by having this full-blown fiasco toward the end of the novel in the form of the agricultural fair. Having everyone in the novel cross through the panorama of the fair and the cameos of French authors Michel Houellebecq, or Michel Thomas, and French sub-minister Paul Platon felt like a very Manchette-ian enterprise to me. When I was writing the book I thought it would have a very mean ending where Sadie gets her comeuppance. I had assumed that would have to be the case because she’s so obnoxious and a cop and a lot of her views and her lack of sympathy are sort of 180 degrees from where I stand compared to the communal form and the farmers and someone like Bruno whose point of view I’m much closer to. Then I got there and thought, “Well, that’s not the right end at all.” It’s too moralising. What’s the message – betrayal doesn’t pay? Sadie, in her perversity, instead of acknowledging that there’s a God, looks at Ecclesiastes, the most severe message in the Bible. A good person will die in the street and a bad person will be given a burial with honorifics. I may be closer to the idea that someone like that can get away with bad things; they don’t have to be punished at the end of the book. Moreover, given that she has let Bruno’s perspective into her purview little by little, it’s probably also leaked into her heart by the end of the book. It started to feel like this was the only and inevitable true ending of the novel for me. It was kind of like a hallucinogenic experience, like I was listening to a Pink Floyd record with Syd Barrett that no one had ever heard before. I was on this different wavelength and it just  felt good and right that Sadie is in this strange limbo. She’s in this place and the sea is very calm and placid and she’s not taking any more jobs for the meantime. I realised after the fact that this is in keeping with the framework of the noir genre, where the detective ends the case but continues to retain their identity as a detective. It’s almost as if seriality is built into things when you assign your narrator the professional role of detective. The book can’t be sewn up in the way some other books can. In all the other novels I’ve written, there is an eternal time inside the covers of the book. A world which, when you open the book, you enter, and when you close the book you leave, and which cannot exist or extend beyond the book. There are no ellipses, there’s no dot-dot-dot implying maybe these people will reappear. In this novel, maybe, at least the narrator herself could reappear.

NW Do you think she’s likely to? Is it too early to tell?

RK I think she’s likely to. It’s outside of my control. It’s within the limits and dimensions and terms and respect for the genre that I have to regard her as someone who continues to exist. She says that she’s no longer taking jobs but it’s almost built into the detective genre that they get approached for one more job.

NW I feel like the book is referred to more as a spy novel than a detective novel, but it doesn’t have the hallmarks of a spy novel. I went through a big John le Carré phase a few summers ago and the pleasure of those is that you’re not in possession of the plot at all. In Creation Lake you are.

RK It’s her plan which she believes she has completely rigged. I don’t know enough about the genre to really speak intelligently about it, but I think it’s more of a detective novel than a spy novel. She’s only a spy because she’s a disgraced detective. Coming back to what you called origin myths – I was thinking of these as primal scenes in the psychoanalytic framework. She identifies in Bruno his primal scene, which was teaching his daughter to drive a tractor and her turning it on a hillside and dying. I had watched my cousin teaching my son to drive a very old tractor, a 1958 Oliver, which doesn’t have any roll bar. My cousin said to me “If you turn this tractor on a hill and it starts to tip, it might seem like something slow is happening and the person could just jump off, but, in fact, tractors are incredibly dangerous.” The danger of the tractor is lodged there in my own unconscious as the mother of a young child. The person who gave me the original impetus for Bruno is the philosopher Jacques Camatte, who was a kind of mentor to the people in Tarnac in northern Corrèze. All I knew about Camatte was that he lived in a cave, and that friends of friends were receiving long emails from him. I was interested in the idea that Camatte was somebody who’d made his way through the long 20th century and its upheavals and utopian horizons and disappointments and had concluded that capitalism is here to stay and that it’s not going to be dismantled by organising people in cities or in rural areas. Something else has to happen. I didn’t use his biography or his philosophy – he wrote a book called This World We Must Leave in 1976 – I took only the notion of that and built Bruno. It just came about naturally that Bruno would have some trauma that would mark his retreat: first living with his animals in the barn, then living in a stone hut, and then ultimately his move into the cave. All lives have events that trigger movement and in the case of Bruno it’s the dissolution of the family and the death of his daughter. Then after writing the book a friend of mine who knows Camatte said to me, “You know he lost a child in a fire”.

NW That must have been difficult to hear.

RK It was chilling. It still gives me chills to hear that. That’s someone’s private life that I have no insight into nor need or right to examine. Sometimes being a novelist means that you have invisible antennae and they touch things that you don’t necessarily have a right to touch but maybe an ethical duty not to pull back from once you have. There is a way in which you’re probing hurt and receiving information and putting it into the round. I openly took some other trauma and assigned it to him in the form of the loss of his family in the Second World War. I borrowed some biographical details from Jean-Michel Mension who had been an associate of Guy Debord in the 1950s and 1960s and has a memoir called The Tribe which is the outcome of a set of interviews with him that were then published as a sort of testimony. It’s a simple and short book that’s very mysterious and which I’ve read several times. Mension talks about his early childhood: he was half-Jewish, his parents both worked for the Communist Party and he was sent to the countryside. He makes this casual comment about his brother breaking his arm and having a pin put in it before the medical establishment had figured out how to set a broken arm correctly, so that his arm becomes deformed. Mension says that this proves useful after the war so that they could identify the body of his brother in Dachau. It’s such a chilling way of presenting this material. I borrowed some of these details from Mension for that primal scene of the brother breaking his arm and what that leads to, which is him telling us that he lost his family. But then a lot of that is imagined, like him going to the countryside. I am a creature of the 20th century and a child of cinema and shaped by all these movies I’ve seen over the years like Lacombe, Lucien and that movie by Maurice Pialat about orphans. The whole idea that you go to the countryside to escape the war like Au Revoir Les Enfants – the image of the child with the grandmother who is not his grandmother is almost like an ur-text or an ur-form for me. Then this region of France that I know very well, the Germans rampaged through. They burned the whole town of Rouffignac and you see monuments here and there, like on a stone wall where people from the Resistance were executed. The idea that a child would come upon a dead German soldier is not unrealistic to me, because it’s been forced upon me by my familiarity with the way history is still casually lying about in that landscape. My son goes into these caves where there is still Resistance graffiti. It's all kind of still there.

NW The last thing I’d like to ask about is the transmission of the lice from the dead German soldier’s helmet to Bruno’s head. Is this what he calls his primal scene?

RK I think he calls it a screen memory. It comes for him with a moment of ebullient freedom. The kids, who have been cooped up during the pass-through of the Germans, are then allowed to leave the attics and run whooping through the woods where they come upon this body of a soldier. Bruno is scared of the body of this soldier – which echoes my own single experience of encountering a dead person. I was terrified to get close to that person. Some people are going to feel that and some people won’t. I saw Bruno as someone who does and so he goes for the helmet rather than rifle through the body which would have a pistol on it which is what the kids really want. In taking this helmet and seeing that the other kids are envious of the helmet it becomes a more desired possession. In discovering in fact that he’s caught lice from the helmet one could say that that’s the trauma, but the real trauma is that he doesn’t know yet that he doesn’t have a family. He doesn’t remember at all being told that his brother is dead and that his parents are dead. Bruno uses lice instead in his will to postulate and theorise and make a philosophy that’s innate to his character. Instead of just letting the lice be lice, he turns them into a lesson about a kind of transmigration from person to person that happens to take place in our DNA: that inside of me are little pieces of information and traces that have come from every single person who came before me. That’s such a bizarre notion.

NW Like John Donne’s flea, the lesson is about this mingling, that we are the site of a non-consensual mingling.

RK I love that. I should look at Donne again. I wasn’t thinking of that at all. What he says in the end is more from my own practical experience of lice, which enter your life when you have children. It was always a kind of gentle humour for me to dispense with all the treatments and the little combs and all of that and rather think that lice leave when they’re ready to go. My mother told me a story about catching lice when she was hitchhiking around Europe at the age of about 18. She had beautiful long hair and caught lice which she was told to treat with gasoline. When that didn’t work she ended up cutting her hair and was sort of denuded of her sense of herself and her femininity. I don’t remember the rest of the story, but it was sad to me. I think people used to think kerosene would work too. In any case lice are a real phenomenon but pose themselves as a departure point for thinking about other real phenomena – for which the lice then transmigrate, if you will. .