Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner & My Friends by Hisham Matar
Two Booker 2024 Longlist Reviews by Alison Manley
There’s always one big flop on the Booker longlist, and Creation Lake is it for me.
The narrator, a former spy-turned-freelance infiltrator, is currently in France to infiltrate a collective and also get them to kill someone. Part spy novel, part thriller, part info dumping about anthropology, this follows the efforts of the narrator to carry out her mission, even as she makes mistakes, and the critical mission which got her dumped from the FBI is back in the news in the US.
I think I could have liked this if it wasn’t so overwritten. Kushner was also in a rush in certain parts, and the pacing is off. I seriously considered not finishing this, but a stubborn commitment to the Booker longlist kept me going. I wouldn’t have picked it up to begin with, otherwise. The questions Kushner asks about activists and non-mainstream movements are depressingly surface-level.
It comes out on September 3, 2024.
My Friends by Hisham Matar
After hearing a story on the radio in his family home in Benghazi, Khaled is drawn to literature, setting him on a path to the most fateful moment of his life. After earning a scholarship to the University of Edinburgh, he accompanies a friend to London for a protest against the Qaddafi regime, just because his friend asks - and they are shot. What unfolds is a life of exile in London, a delicate existence, a set of lies to keep his family too worried, and the intensity and peculiarity of shared exile and trauma in his friendships with fellow Libyans Mustafa and Hosam. Linked by multiple threads, they end up spending the better parts of their lives in contact.
My Friends is a sweeping novel, ranging from London in 1984 to Libya after Arab Spring, and ending with the death of Qaddafi. Khaled spends his life at a distance from his home, trapped between longing to go and embracing the life he has in London. It’s dense but very readable, travelling through decades of living under the shadow of one afternoon, and the political ramifications thereafter.
This is one of my favourite reads from the Booker longlist so far! I would like to see this on the shortlist.
About the Reviewer
Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.