Book review: Themes crash together in sea playground

Richards Powers’ 'Playground' unfolds its themes via four principal characters and opens on the French Polynesian atoll of Makatea

Richard Powers: Over 13 sprawling novels, he’s explored humanity’s obsession with science and AI at the expense of the fragile natural wonders that surround us. Picture: Dean Dixon

• Playground 
• Richard Powers 
• Hutchinson Heinemann,  €14.99

Richard Powers has been called “the greatest American novelist you’ve never heard of”. He’s certainly among the more ambitious.

Over 13 sprawling novels, he’s explored humanity’s obsession with science and AI at the expense of the fragile natural wonders that surround us.

His Pulitzer-prize winning 2018 book The Overstory pondered the private lives of trees. In Playground, the sea takes centre stage.

Powers’ novel unfolds its themes via four principal characters and opens on the French Polynesian atoll of Makatea, where Tahitian artist Ina Aroita collects plastic on the seashore and begins to make a giant sculpture. 

She lives on the remote island with two adopted children and her partner, Rafi Young, a twitchy African-American writer haunted by his past.

In a series of recurring flashbacks, we find out how Rafi met Ina while studying in Chicago three decades before, in the company of his best friend and bosom buddy Todd Keane — a science grad and programmer.

As teenagers, Todd and Rafi had bonded over their love first of chess, then of Go, the baffling and impenetrable ancient Chinese game.

A pair of clever outsiders, the two young men were for a time inseparable, until Rafi fell in love and became a troubled poet, while Todd stumbled upon a cunning concept for directly monetising social media.

Now he’s a billionaire tech mogul, but has just discovered he’s suffering from an aggressive form of dementia. Meanwhile, back on Makatea, locals are perplexed by a plan to use the island as the base for the construction of giant floating cities.

Among the island’s current guests is Evie Beaulieu, a legendary French-Canadian marine biologist and explorer who, though now in her 90s, dives beneath the Pacific every day to commune with cuttlefish and mantas.

Evie’s bestselling children’s book, Clearly It Is Ocean, had inspired the 10-year-old Todd to embark on his own voyage of discovery and, as the book reaches its climax, all journeys will converge on the rocky shores of Makatea.

Powers is — and must be — a voracious and endlessly curious reader. Playground blends with dizzying erudition Polynesian mythology, coding slang, a brief history of phosphate mining, snatches of Rimbaud, shades of Shakespeare’s Tempest, an AI sermon, and a series of glorious descriptions of teeming coral reefs.

These offer perhaps the book’s finest pieces of writing, particularly when Evie tries to remove entangled netting from a manta that has apparently asked for her help.

Powers also catches perfectly in dialogue the tinny clash of egos that constitutes Todd and Rafi’s brittle teenage friendship.

Bad parents abound, from Todd’s eternally juvenile dad to Rafi’s absent one, and worst of all: Evie’s scientist father, who threw her into a pool weighed down by a prototype aqualung to see what would happen. She coped.

In one of the book’s more amusing scenes, Makatean islanders commune with Profunda, a vastly knowledgeable AI entity, and a kind of affable version of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

A brave new world is coming, but will not be able to help the old one, as Evie, who in her lifetime has witnessed the decimation of our seas, bitterly reflects. “The largest part of the planet exhausted,” she concludes, “before it was ever explored.”

The tone of Playground is sombre, but it has its playful moments, and is constructed on a grand scale. I enjoyed but did not love it, and it took me a while to figure out why.

Decently enough drawn though they are, Evie, Ina, Todd, and Rafi don’t feel like organic characters leading us through the story. They seem more like constructs in the service of a lofty, predetermined theme.