Whale skeletons are the hallmark of any natural history museum, and for good reason. It doesn’t take much imagination to be staggered by the sheer vastness of the ocean when you’re confronted with the bones of these tremendous creatures. They inspire an awe that reminds you that your experience on Earth doesn’t even begin to touch the wonders under the water.
Whales show you one of the most extreme things that’s biologically possible on this planet. In a lot of ways they are these impossible animals that seem almost magical: how can a creature of this size exist in a place we never see?
That’s the kind of wonder Richard Powers chases in his novel, Playground.
I only got into reading Powers’ lauded book, The Overstory, after the third person I knew insisted, with some aggression, that I needed to read this book about trees. With some reluctance, I found myself completely gripped. For what it’s worth, it’s very much a story about people, and how entangled with trees we realistically are.
With Playground, I have become that person, aggressively suggesting people read this book so they can meditate on their own connection with the ocean, and how our conflicting friendships, questionable career moves, and falling in love with the wrong person aren’t just connected to nature, but one with it.
It traces the lives of several central characters, primarily Todd Keane, a tech billionaire suffering from dementia with Lewy bodies. You’re then introduced to Rafi Young, a borderline genius from a poor, majority-Black neighbourhood. The two meet at school and challenge each other to strategy games. As they move into adulthood, the games get bigger: love, work, and the stolen ideas that come with both. Some time later, they meet on the remote French Polynesian island of Makatea, at a referendum on whether to let a tech consortium turn the island into a launchpad for floating cities at sea.
If you’ve read a Richard Powers book before, the structure will feel familiar: alternating chapters following characters who seem to live entirely separate lives. Each chapter swells with new detail, and your mind starts ticking away, trying to work out how these lives could possibly converge in the ocean.
Even if the rest of the novel were ocean trash, one element alone would make it worth reading. It’s a love letter to the thrill of being underwater.
Powers gets as close as language can to making you feel submerged, his words building a voice for the sea that’s vast, enchanting, and a little frightening.
We get these descriptions through the eyes of another key character, Evelyne Beaulieu, a 92-year-old scuba diver who is more at home in the water than out of it. She sees the ocean as a fantastical playground, and spends an entire, long lifetime trying to see as much of it as she can, with an innocent, child-like greed.
She sees the ocean as a fantastical playground…
It’s a messy story, and the shifting points of view are often hard to grasp. But it helps to remember, going in, that we know more about outer space than we do about our own ocean.
The topic it deals with can feel bleak too. There are shattering descriptions of how technology has wormed its way into how we love, compete against, and betray each other. And yet the whole thing is a joyful, panoramic ode to how intrinsically connected we all are despite it, a reminder that we don’t need to be smarter so much as better at playing, and at looking at the planet with deep curiosity.
The ocean covers about 70% of the Earth’s surface and holds vast, tremendous magic we haven’t come close to understanding.
As Arthur C. Clarke once put it, and as Powers’ own characters quote, “how inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.”