Recently announced on the Booker Prize longlist, Richard Powers’ 14th novel, Playground, entertains similar themes to his last two books – the transcendent The Overstory and Bewilderment. Set in a near future, the story revolves around three characters and the tiny Polynesian atoll of Makatea, ravaged by mining and threatened by climate change, yet with the offer of economic salvation by a multi-national company keen to use it as a base to build autonomous, floating cities.
However this is no tub-thumping ecological polemic, but a crafty and deep examination of the state of the world in the 21st century. Powers focuses on three characters, two childhood friends – one now a tech billionaire, the other a schoolteacher on the island – and an elderly marine biologist. He uses these players and a beautifully rendered cast of supporting characters to examine issues of ecology and AI, love and loss, human exceptionalism versus animal intelligence and much more.
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Things move slowly but steadily towards the islanders deciding on a vote about the future of their home, as Powers shifts narrators and styles, moving deftly in time and space, but always carefully taking the reader with him. There is huge depth of detail here, and thoughtful raising of issues and doubts, all done with wonderfully limpid prose, a clear and concise language that lets the profundity of the ideas shine all the brighter. Sublime stuff.
Doug Johnstone is an author and journalist.
Playground by Richard Powers is out now (Cornerstone, £20). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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