Drawn to the depths | Review of ‘Playground’ by Richard Powers

Life on earth is the focus of this Booker-longlisted novel, told through observations from the vast ocean

Richard Powers’s readers know they come to his novels at the risk of being haunted by the endless possibilities the stories present. It was so, for instance, with his 2022 novel, Bewilderment, about grief, neuroscience, ecological decay and the search for life beyond earth. The sense of endless possibilities also suffuses his new Booker-longlisted novel, Playground, about artificial intelligence and the oceans, about regret and hope. Here it is foregrounded in the discovery of the ancient game of Go, by two of the book’s four main characters.

It’s nearing the end of the 20th century. The two men, Rafi and Tod, young students in Chicago, are smitten from the word, well, go: Rafi, the bibliophile who will give up everything for a simpler life, tells Todd, the coding whiz who’ll become an AI pioneer: “If every atom in the universe was a little universe that itself had as many atoms as the entire universe had, the total number of atoms would still be smaller than the number of possible Go game states.” 

Into their lives comes Ina, part Tahitian and new to living on a continent. She falls in love with Rafi, who ultimately leaves the professional possibilities of Chicago for the island of Makatea in French Polynesia. She says: “What you call the ocean is nothing but the coast… your ocean is just the continental shelf, a little bit of spill over the rim of the cup… The real ocean… the deep one… the one that doesn’t end.”

Interlinked stories

Ina, whose life work is to sculpt with the odds and ends that wash up on the Makatean shore, thrives amidst the vast ocean. The book’s fourth main character, Evelyne Beaulieu, all of 92 years old to the trio’s 50s when the final acts of the novel play out circa 2027, is drawn to the depths of the ocean. She dives for a living, and once wrote a bestselling book called Clearly It Is Ocean, that had Todd riveted. Everything and everyone are connected. 

To make short a long story spread across vast geographies and narrated in 2027 and in flashbacks, all four find themselves finally in Makatea, which is experiencing a simpler, sparser phase after years of boom based on its phosphate wealth. AI is now a formidable force, and by the time “AI [comes] to the island”, the temperature is “two degrees too warm”, and the island people are being wooed to sign on to a project to build floating cities. 

In a moving debate on who can participate in the vote, a “tiny voice” asks, “If the creatures of the reef are going to be harmed, shouldn’t they get to vote?” 

This is a novel of surprise twists and creepy moments. Nobody will accept this, Rafi had told his lawyers back in the day when they showed him a user agreement for his website by which they would get access to users’ data and also plant cookies on their hard drives. “They just smiled… The one just two years out of law school explained things to me, ‘They’ll click on ACCEPT without a second glance if it means being able to use the site for free. There’s no other choice, except not to play.’”

Now, as Makatea in our near future contemplates whether to play or not, the drama plays out amidst very human emotions: friendship, betrayal, love, revenge, redemption. Like Orbital by Samantha Harvey, a favourite for the Booker Prize to be announced next week, Playground invites us to examine our lives and life choices on planet earth. Orbital offers a compelling nudge through the experiences of astronauts on a space station, Playground through the observations from the depths and expanses of the ocean. 

The reviewer is a Delhi-based journalist and critic.

Playground

Richard Powers

Hutchinson Heinemann

₹799

Published - November 08, 2024 09:44 am IST