Powers has moved into fresh, wide-ranging territory with this latest novel, which made the Booker Prize longlist. He goes beneath the waves of the world’s oceans, targets an island in the Pacific, and takes a sobering look at the power of artificial intelligence (AI).
This novel is all about ‘playing’, starting with two students of vastly different backgrounds, seemingly friends for life, who play countless games of chess and Go; to the glorious spectacle on the final pages of manta rays joyfully flinging themselves out of the water.
There’s Evie, a young French-Canadian girl whose father helped develop underwater breathing gear, setting her on a lifetime of exploring and studying the beauty of the world’s oceans. Additionally, there’s Rafi and Todd, two US students whose lives diverge into literature and computing, but Todd has never forgotten a book about oceans written by that Canadian marine biologist.
Then there is Ina Aroita, who grew up on Pacific naval bases, and finds her only home in art.
They all come together … some more alive than others in a touch of magical realism … on the island of Makatea, in French Polynesia. This is a real island that Powers has researched, once the site of phosphate mining with a population of thousands, now reduced to fewer than 100 residents.
Powers’ descriptions of the underwater world, as seen and written about by Evie, are breathtaking in their luscious detail.
In deep contrast are the conversations Todd has about his life, and his business success in developing a computer program ‘played’ by millions of people. Just to whom he is talking, and his thoughts about AI, are finally spelt out in detail.
The final irony is that Todd’s AI creation has learned the game of being human, while Todd is rapidly fading from life.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Powers is a multi-award-winning American author. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains
His fiction often explores the effects of science and technology on humanity, and he has been nominated for the Booker Prize four times, most recently for his novel Playground . He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award in 2006. The Overstory, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2018, also won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, among other honours. Powers has previously said he is partially indebted to Booker-winner Margaret Atwood for his 2021-shortlisted novel Bewilderment, which explores the anxiety of family life on a damaged planet.
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