By James Bradley
FICTION
Playground
Richard Powers
Hutchinson Heineman, $34.99
Although the thing that sticks in most people’s memories about Richard Powers’ 2018 novel The Overstory is the trees, the book might just as easily be read as a story about computers and artificial intelligence.
That isn’t surprising: Powers worked as a computer programmer early in his career, and computing has been a recurrent theme in his fiction, woven through novels as diverse as Galatea 2.2, The Goldbug Variations, Plowing the Dark and, most recently, Bewilderment.
Powers’ bewitching new novel shares more than a little of this duality. Although outwardly a book that seeks to do the same thing for the oceans that The Overstory did for trees, Playground is also focused on the transformative possibilities of artificial intelligence.
Like most of Powers’ novels, Playground is intricately structured, interweaving the stories of a sprawling cast of seemingly unconnected characters. At the book’s centre are four people. The first three are a trio of friends: Todd Keane, Rafi Young and Ina Aroita. Todd, who narrates much of the novel, is the son of a wealthy Chicago businessman blessed with an ability to understand maths and computing. Rafi is the mixed-race child of a black fireman and a Korean bus driver with an extraordinary talent for reading and a fascination with literature.
The two meet as teenagers at a school for the gifted, where they bond over games: first chess and later, and more significantly, the extraordinary complexity of the ancient Chinese game of Go. Their friendship endures until graduate school, where they meet Ina, the artist daughter of a Hawaiian naval officer and a Tahitian flight attendant who becomes the love of both their lives.
By the time the novel begins, the two men are long-estranged. Rafi has belatedly found happiness with Ina and their two adoptive children on Makatea, in French Polynesia. Todd, on the other hand, has become one of the world’s richest people, the billionaire founder of the social platform that gives the novel its name, although all that wealth is not enough to hold off the rapid unravelling of his mind after a diagnosis of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB).
Author Richard Powers.Credit: David Levenson/Getty
The fourth character is Evie Beaulieu, a French-Canadian marine biologist and ocean adventurer more than a little reminiscent of Sylvia Earle (although the novel complicates that easy identification by giving the real Earle a brief cameo). Evie learns to scuba dive as a teenager in 1947 (her father is a friend of Jacques Cousteau), and the experience transforms her, offering a way to escape her awkward body and fuelling an obsession that will shape her entire life.
As a young woman scientist in the 1950s, she battles for recognition and advancement; by the 1960s her quick wit and a stint in an underwater habitat have made her a celebrity; in the 1970s she writes a bestselling book about the ocean that will help foster ocean love in generations of children including – not coincidentally – Todd.
Around the story of Todd and Rafi’s friendship and Evie’s long and extraordinary life, Powers weaves another thread, this one set on Makatea, which has been selected by an American company as the site for a seasteading fabrication facility – for making permanent dwellings in international waters. This plan convulses the small community. Some see it as simply a new chapter in the long history of colonial exploitation that has already scarred the island; others see it as an opportunity for economic independence.
One of the many delights of Playground is Powers’ evocation of ocean environments. Through Evie’s eyes the reader glimpses astonishing, crowding beauty of coral reefs, where “spectral sponges in crazy numbers – silver, pallid and alabaster … waved in the current” and “clouds of nacreous pearly dartfish and blue-green chromis damselfish schooled around her”.
Powers also writes rapturously about the behaviour of fish and other marine animals, drawing on the latest research into their cognitive complexity and rich social lives, something particularly evident in his joyous descriptions of the manta rays that the 92-year-old Evie has come to Makatea to study.
But around the impossible beauty and wonder of the oceans, Powers maps out two other trajectories. One is the seemingly unstoppable wave of exploitation and violence unleashed by colonialism and capitalism, a process that sees the oceans transformed across Evie’s life, “the largest part of the planet exhausted before it was ever explored”. The other is the evolution of artificial intelligence, and the systems of deep learning that have begun to comb “through continents of data on their own, finding patterns, generalising, and drawing conclusions that their trainers couldn’t see.”
As the various threads of this remarkable novel converge in its final sections, this “technological sublime” begins to merge with the oceanic sublime, the artificial intelligence Todd has created transformed into a kind of Prospero, capable of transcending death.
But the real magic of the book is not this piece of sorcery, but its insistence that the extraordinary creativity and complexity of both the world that surrounds us and the inner world of consciousness are, ultimately, the product of the same processes of chance and iteration, “every organism, terrestrial or aquatic, every path a mystery. The journey in all its immense unfolding through this ocean world: what can it mean? The author of all this richness does nothing but find the next most likely word.”
James Bradley’s most recent book is Deep Water: The World in the Ocean (Hamish Hamilton).
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