Richard Powers 11th novel “Orfeo” was longlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize (the first year in which US authors were eligible). His subsequent (and most recent) two novels “The Overstory” and “Bewilderment” were shortlisted – in 2018 and 2021 respectively (with the former winning a Pulitzer Prize) and it is no surprise that this (the third of his novels I have read) has joined them by being longlisted in 2024 (and I suspect it may even go on to win) Interviewed on the Booker website on the latter book and asked the classic “What are you working on next” question, Powers pushed back on the verb answering “Another good commodity-culture question! Happily, I’ve reached the age where ‘work’ is once again the pure play that it was when I first started out on the path of writing novels. It’s the luckiest imaginable life, and right now that involves exploring what social media, deep learning, hidden algorithms, and surprisingly intelligent marine creatures have to do with one another”. And this is that book – and I was strongly reminded of the Booker quote early on in the book, when a marine explorer in her 90s and looking to write a book about her passion, says: "Years of study had convinced Evelyne that mantas were far smarter than the world suspected. She had spent too many decades of close observation to be cowed any longer by the prohibition against anthropomorphism. What began, centuries ago, as a healthy safeguard against projection had become an insidious contributor to human exceptionalism, the belief that nothing else on Earth was like us in any way. At her age, Evelyne Beaulieu had no more time for demure self-censorship. A good empiricist, she felt no qualms about giving the behavior in front of her a name. The way the Loner toyed with her air bubbles was clear enough. Call it what the evidence suggested. Call it what it looked like: the giant bird-like fish was playing." Whereas “Overstory” explored trees and fungal networks, and “Bewilderment” was about the terrestrial exploration of exo-planets, here the exploration is of a third complex, wonderous and still little understood eco-system – the Earth’s seas. Further I would observe that Powers is a writer who clearly enjoys exploration and playing – as seen across his last three novels, He is happy not just to explore and link a range of topics but also to play with narratively inhabit a wide variety of characters without concern over “own-voice” (so that for example in this novel he spends considerable time narrating the voice of “The Queen” an 80 something year old, slightly eccentric, Polynesian woman and one of his main characters is a black American much of whose life and career is overshadowed by the expectations of his father who sees his son as a way to fight back against the racial discrimination he himself suffered). And if there are three underlying ideas to the novel which link his disparate themes – then while the first is exploration and the second play, the third is storytelling and a strong belief, one which I think very much informs Powers very uncynical writing, of the power of narrative and literature to transform individuals and more importantly society. Much of the novel is set, at least in its present time setting, on the real-life French Polynesian raised coral atoll of Makatea – once the scene of intense phosphorus mining, now something of a ghost-Island where the denuded population survives on trading, coconut crab catching and fishing – but where the decline in the population and industrial activity is going hand in hand with a gradual restoration of the Island’s ecology. Almost all of the Island’s 80 or so population is listed in the book, with a strong feature on the mayor (who has taken on the role reluctantly but is now faced with navigating the Islanders through a referendum on whether to permit a group of American investors to use the Island as a base to build seasteads) and the aforementioned “Queen”; but the real heart of the novel is three outsiders who have settled on the Island (for all of whom we have significant back story). Canadian Evie Beauliue’s father was part of the team that worked with Jacques Costeau on his aqua-lung but from a young age took up marine exploration becoming something of a celebrity in a male-dominated world and producing a famous children’s book on her passion. Now ninety she is looking for one last exploration and aiming to write a second book. Rafi Young and Ina Ariota are an American couple who were working with an NGO locally but then agreed to adopt two orphaned children from the Island and bring them up there. Rafi – who was a poet – and Ina who is a installation artist (currently working on a piece based on plastics polluting the ocean) met at college. Ina was the daughter of a Polynesian mother and a US naval officer and grew up on various Pacific Islands; but we only really get her story from the time she moves to a US Midwest college (her first time on a Continent) and starts to go out with Rafi. Rafi grew up in a rough area of Chicago but is haunted by various actions of his which inadvertently had severe familial consequences – including the separation of his parents and the death of his sister. Some of Rafi and Ina’s story is told in conventional flashback but much of it is told as part of the section written in Italics – which is the story of the fourth main character (Todd Keane) who new Rafi from earlier high school days in Chicago and then is at college with the couple. He and Rafi form a deep bond undercut with a heavy layer of competition – which partly finds its outlet in games (starting with chess, going via various board games but finding its culmination in Go). Todd in the present day is suffering from a rapidly progressive Dementia (with Lewy Bodies) – and, while he still retains some mental functioning, is telling his story – which includes much of his interaction with Rafi - to someone unknown. Given Todd’s background we expect the unknown may be some form of Artificial Intelligence companion – for Todd is a tech billionaire, most famous for the invention of the eponymous application: Playground being in effect (my description) Reddit but with the dopamine hit and massive network effect user base the real world application lacks – due both to gamification of the thread format and to a decision Todd took (largely at the inspiration of Rafi at a dinner which was actually the end of their friendship) to add a form of in-game currency to give the gamification a sense of prestige/reward. Now he is on the verge of revealing a new AI application which he believes (almost knows) will transform society. And alongside this human cast a key part of the book is the astonishing variety of marine life described in the book in all of its vibrancy, complexity and strangeness – I suspect reading the book would be enhanced by alternating it with some marine wildlife documentaries as for all Powers poetic prose skills it is I think impossible to conjure a complete picture. Just as in “Overstory” and in the species extinction plotline of “Bewilderment” Powers writing unashamedly also drops into the didactic in his passion for the natural world and concern over mankind’s influences; although as with “Overstory” there is a sense also of mankind being something of a blip on geological time and on a planet which has existed long before us and will exist after us. As an aside one of the tensions that underlies Powers work is between his concern for non-human characters and ecological systems and his determination to give them narrative prominence, with his novelistic preference to sympathetically voice a wide variety of human characters. The referendum on the seasteading proposal draws in all of the Islanders – native and settlers (and even the marine life whose fate is one of the considerations of some of the voters) and it is not really a spoiler (as its narratively inevitable) to say that Todd is revealed late on as one of the investors – but it would be a spoiler to say any more about the way in which Powers draws his strands, themes and plotlines together. Overall found this an excellent novel – Powers has very much carved out a niche for himself. I don’t think its would be taking things to far to see “Overstory”, “Bewilderment” and “Playground” as an effectively a trilogy about exploration and narrative – and any fans of the first two will I think love this one.

Thanks to my colleague Chloë for sharing this with me after we read Under Water by Tara Menon and enjoyed. It was the perfect choice for further reading! The depictions of the deep blue and its wildlife were incredibly detailed and just stunning. Once again, the mantas were the most incredible characters. I really enjoyed that this book forced me to slow down and read more closely. It challenged me but I was still never in doubt that I was enjoying the reading experience. I’d love to read Evie’s children’s book for myself.I found the pacing somewhat inconsistent, particularly in the first half of the novel, but the last segment really ramped up and the ending left me with lots to think about as I didn’t twig what was happening earlier on. An interesting and challenging novel!

'Playground' is another dazzling novel by Richard Powers which beautifully weaves together different narrative strands to offer a powerful ecological message. While 'The Overstory' focused on trees and 'Bewilderment' on animals, 'Playground' takes as its subject the unexplored vastness of the ocean. Much of the novel is set on the French Polynesia island of Makatea in the Pacific Ocean, whose 82 inhabitants must decide whether to allow 'seasteaders' to come to the island in order to build autonomous floating cities that will be launched into the ocean. The islanders include recent American arrivals Rafi and Ina, who have adopted two orphaned children from the island, and 92-year-old French-Canadian diver and marine biologist Evelynne Beaulieu who continues to explore the oceans. The novel also takes us back into these characters' pasts, in particularly Rafi's ambivalent friendship with Todd Keane who has now become the tech billionaire funding the floating cities which threaten to change Makatea forever. Like Powers's previous novels, this is a book full of wonder - particularly in the descriptions of life on the island and of Evelynne's aquatic explorations. As the title suggests, play is another major concern of the novel, explored in a variety of ways: the centrality of play in the natural world; the games of chess and Go which underpin Rafi and Todd's friendship; and the role of play in machine learning and AI which forms a key part of Todd's development as a character. The novel features some surprising twists which force us to re-evaluate what we have read, but also to consider the future of the world in which we want to live with greater seriousness. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC of this novel to review.

Written from multiple narrative perspectives and moving back and forth in time gives this novel a somewhat disorientating feel. At times, I felt a little 'at sea'. At no point did I find this an easy read but like Powers' novels 'The Overstory' and 'Bewilderment', 'Playground' is thought-provoking and leaves the reader willing to invest in it: changed. Powers is clearly a literary genius. The theme of exploration is considered through our exploration of the oceans as well as exploration of of AI as we enter the fourth industrial revolution. The theme of 'play' overlays both these ideas. This novel encapsulates what it means to be alive in 2024 - with concerns over climate change and the accelerating speed that AI is taking off and is inevitably going to change how we live and die and live. This is a remarkable read. I would be shocked not to see this make the Booker lists in 2024. Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.

Okay, I suspect we'd all expect Powers to tackle Big Ideas, and he does in this multi-narrative novel. And expectations are always high for a writer with his credentials, so here, you get what you expect: climate change, Blue-Planet-esque themes are highly appropriate today, and Powers tackles it with gusto. I like the idea of someone like him, someone influential, using fiction as a method of conveying this kind of story. For that reason, it's a novel I know I'll return to, to check what I think I might have missed. Recommended reading, definitely. My grateful thanks to NetGalley and to the publishers for the ARC.