Book review: Todd Keane’s childhood was complicated when he was growing up in Chicago. His parents fought vociferously, and his ne’er-do-well father was too clever for his own good. Luckily for Todd, he was smart, and as a youngster, was lit up by a book titled Clearly It Is Ocean. Instead of guiding him towards a career in oceanography, however, at college Todd finds himself at the forefront of the tech revolution, of machine learning, coding and AI. This enables him to create Playground, an online juggernaut that earns him billions. Unfortunately, not even untold wealth can protect Todd from an aggressive form of dementia.
Also growing up in Chicago, but on the other side of town, Rafi Young was destined at best to drive a bus, but his broken firefighter father refuses his son to settle for anything but greatness, because he knows first-hand that to be black and poor on the mean streets of Illinois, a person has to fight for every scrap.
“I’m telling you, son. Playing field ain’t level. A black man’s got to read twice as well as any white just to get half the recognition. Four times better and you’ll beat them.” To offer Rafi an alternative destiny, the father drills his son relentlessly until eventually the gifted boy wins a scholarship to a prestigious high school where he finds solace and meaning in literature. It is also where Rafi meets Todd and the disparate pair become fast friends.
No sooner have the wonders of the marine environment been explored than they are on a fast track to extinction.
In Montreal in 1947, Evie Beaulieu’s father dunks his daughter into a pool to trial an invention he is developing in partnership with his pal Jacques Cousteau. A timid child consumed by dread, as soon as Evie can breathe underwater she knows exactly where she belongs; when she’s submerged she feels at home. Loosely based on American marine biologist Sylvia Earle, Evie must rail against sexism and society to fulfil her dream of becoming an oceanographer. In uncovering the mysteries of the oceans she also discovers her true self. Then her memoir – Clearly It Is Ocean – makes a big splash, and Evie is unwillingly thrust into the public eye.
These are just three of the vivid characters whose lives are woven together, the strands of their stories pulling them towards Makatea, a small island in the middle of the Pacific. A raised coral atoll in Tahiti’s far-flung Tuamotu islands, Maketea has already endured five decades of brutal phosphate mining all in the name of progress, and today Maketea looks set to be invaded again.
This time, it’s by wealthy seasteaders from the US, who wish to build and launch floating autonomous cities on the island and in exchange they promise infrastructure, jobs and money. Attractive as those things might be to some of the islanders, the outsiders will surely also bring disruption and possibly even destruction. Modernity and wealth versus maintaining the status quo? And the 95 residents of Makatea – led by their reluctant mayor Didier – are charged with making the biggest decision of their lives.
Playground is an ambitious, multi-narrative novel inhabited by complex characters. But it is the author’s descriptions of the sea and the creatures that call it home that pack the biggest punch. From highly evolved mammoth manta rays to the smallest organisms, from operatic acid-trip cuttlefish to the enigmatic creatures that occupy the ocean’s inky depths, Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Powers has created a world that is enchanting and heartbreaking, because no sooner have the wonders of the marine environment been explored than they are on a fast track to extinction.
Playground is about friendship, about what draws people close and what drives them apart. It’s also about the early days of underwater exploration when so much had yet to be learned, and the parallel universe of the infant internet and its own uncharted depths. Tackling issues of climate change, the perils of technology as well as the shame of our broken oceans, Playground could well do for sea life what Powers’ last book, The Overstory, did for trees.
Playground, by Richard Powers (Hutchinson Heinemann, $38), is out now.
