Playground (2024)
Why this one?
It’s Booker season! My only completed read on the longlist was Percival Everett’s excellent James. But it just so happened that I had this one, unreleased at the time of the longlist announcement, waiting for me via Netgalley, so thought I’d dive straight in (as it were). Shamefully, I’ve read none of Powers’ work, even his two recent big beasts which have been much-discussed and I’ve kept meaning to get onto. So unlike many, many others, this was my first taste of Richard Powers.
Richard Powers (1957- ; active 1985- ) was born in Evanston, Illinois, USA. Aged 11, he moved to Bangkok, Thailand when his teacher father accepted a position at the International School there. After returning to the US aged 16, he studied at the University of Illinois, initially enrolling with a major in physics before switching to English Literature, in which he also obtained a Masters but stopped short of a PhD due to aversion to strict specialisation.
This was demonstrated by the fact that he began his career as a programmer, having learned PLATO when at University. Relatively soon, though, he decided to merge his interest in the sciences and arts by writing his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), which while inspired by a painting also threaded in a technical focus on the history and practice of photography. This interest was deepened in many of his subsequent novels, from 1988's Prisoner's Dilemma to explorations of AI in 1995's short story Galatea 2.2 and virtual reality in 2000's novel Plowing the Dark.
While already a respected heavyweight of the literary world, it felt like Powers' standing received an even more substantial boost with the publication of 2018's The Overstory, which won the 2019 Pulitzer as well as being shortlisted for numerous other major awards including 2018 Booker. The latter feat was repeated with 2021's similarly feted Bewilderment.
Thoughts, etc.
Playground focuses primarily on four characters, who we know will come to share a connection. In Montreal, Evie Beaulieu is introduced in dramatic fashion, as a 12-year-old plunging to the bottom of a swimming pool, strapped to one of the first aqualungs by her father, and grows to love the ocean and everything connected to it. In Chicago, two super-smart kids with vastly differing backgrounds bond at an elite high school over their love of sophisticated board games. And finally there’s Ina Aroita, who has to my memory a far less memorable introduction, but is apparently considered to be one of the four main players also.
The narrative jumps wildly between those plots explaining the characters’ formative experiences, and a seemingly near-present-day setting on Makatea, a small Pacific island in French Polynesia, briefly a hotspot for western exploitation of phosphates, but recently with a population dwindled down to a mere 82.. Ina has roots in the region, and is now based there with her partner, a grown-up, much-matured Rafi. Evie, now in her nineties, has been there for some months on what might be her last diving expedition. Todd’s not on the island - just yet. But regardless, we have sections told from his perspective to an unnamed third party that tell - from a very one-sided perspective - some of the story of the intervening years and his increasingly fraught relationship with Rafi.
As I’ve said, I haven’t previously read Powers, but I understand that the key ingredients for his recent works are all here, most crucially the tensions and intersections between technology, the arts, and the environment. We have an island that has been ravaged by multiple waves of colonialism, and accompanying western plundering of its natural resources, impacting both the natural environment and something in its human spirit. It’s also on the verge of another, potentially decisive, western intervention, involving its usage as a suitable base to begin ‘seascaping’ the region.
Ths is represented through characters, as much Rafi and Todd, Black and white (like the pieces in the games they enjoy) are crudely positioned as opposites, but there is some decent work done to expose why that might not entirely be the case, with connections made between their upbringing (in spite of the obvious financial discrepancies) and later proof that perhaps their directions of travel (seeking eternal life through a listless pursuit of artistic enlightenment versus the same, but via AI-driven tech-preneurship) aren’t quite as divergent as one might think.
Evie’s story in the book is perhaps the most intriguing, with her growing devotion to the ocean leading to an abandonment of other aspects of her life but meaningful revelations of who she is, what the world is, and an overall perspective quite unlike anyone else’s. Her narrative carried positive echoes of the main storyline in Martin McInnes’ incredible In Ascension, and steered mercifully clear of (while occasionally rubbing dangerously close to) the rather less successful (for me) Pod by Laline Paul. The final character in the quartet, Ina, really seemed to wash over me, there as something of an instigator in the Rafi-Todd plot but without a real strong through-line of her own.
It was things like this that made me shy away from unequivocal endorsement of Playground. Ina is the one of the main characters with the closest links to the Pacific Islands, but the least memorable of the book’s characters The Islanders themselves are also generally underdeveloped, reduced to nicknames (Queen, Hermit, Mayor) rather than fullly rounded characters. There’s a sense that they’re there as (excuse the pun) something of a playground on which Powers can explore a bunch of super-interesting ideas. But really the memorable characters here are Rafi, the righteously indignant but wayward genius, and Evie, the complex mix of self and world-centred (to the exclusion of those in between,, her family) tall red-head from Montreal. The interesting action takes place predominantly away from the island.
This isn’t a perfect book. It doesn’t soar and dazzle like In Ascension. And beyond my criticisms above, I’m sure that there will be many who are pained to see Powers again tackling a Black character ‘from the rough side of the tracks’ (for what it’s worth, I thought Rafi was an engagingly complex character, beyond some of his early-life stereotyping, but I don’t know that everyone will agree.) I did race through it at quite a pace though. It’s gripping, feels like it’s reaching worthily towards something greater than the sum of its parts, and even if its conclusion doesn’t quite land that promise, it raises a whole load of interesting questions along the way.
Score
8.5
I feel like my scoring could have landed virtually anywhere with this. Ultimately I went close to my gut, as it was at once compellingly readable and seriously thought-provoking. It would be an interesting winner, but I feel its ambition is in place its undoing, occasionally exposing some hard-to-ignore flaws in what’s otherwise a brilliant piece of work.
Next up
I’m looking at the Claire Messud entry next, as the plot summary grabs me, even though I’ve read mixed reviews…
