“The core of my assignment and duties had been to infiltrate and to monitor Pascal Balmy and the Moulinards for proof they had committed sabotage and were planning more of it. But even before I’d pulled off the neat trick of sidling up to Balmy’s oldest friend, my contacts had me tracking, in addition to Balmy, a French bureaucrat, an obscure deputy minister. I had been encouraged to study this man’s activities and habits in Paris and elsewhere.”
The narrative voice is that of disgraced former-FBI agent Sadie Smith. She is now doing undercover work in the employ of a rather mysterious and shadowy private employer with deep pockets and little interest in environmental protection. This quote fairly well outlines what the narrative is ostensibly about on the level of genre. Pascal Balmy is the activist leader of a commune known as Le Moulin. The latest act of environmental sabotage has taken place at a construction site of a reservoir. Sadie is here outlining the essentials of her assignment but the meat of the story is less the surface activities of a well-paid worker of the mainstream infiltrating a radical group than those “additions” she references. What starts out as an essential cut-and-dried piece of espionage grows more complicated as Sadie peels back the layers and gets closer to the top of the Moulinards.
“I was aware that Bruno Lacombe was against civilization, an `anti-civver,’ in activist slang. And that the rural, southwestern department Guyenne — and this remote corner of it to which I’d just arrived — was known for caves that held evidence of early humans. But I had assumed Bruno would be guiding Pascal’s strategies for stopping the state’s industrial projects here. It had not occurred to me that this mentor of Pascal’s would have a fanatical belief in a failed species.”
That man pulling the strings behind Pascal Balmy and the Moulinards is Bruno Lacombe. As stated here, he is considered the “mentor” of Pascal but also indicated is that Bruno is a something of a zealot with a grander agenda much wider in scope and far deeper than mere environmental activism and sabotage. The reference to caves is to that of the series of French caves—the famous being the Lascaux Caves—known for being the natural canvas for some of the oldest known paintings in human history. Lacombe’s specific obsession with prehistory lies with the mysteries surrounding the Neanderthals. That is what Sadie means by a “failed species” since the Neanderthals competed and with Homo Sapiens to drive the future of humanity before disappearing from the evolutionary timeline.
“Modern people who build bomb shelters, planning to survive some version of apocalypse, also do not count, he said. Yes, they go underground, but not in mind of a human continuum, a community. They think, I’ll be the clever one, the one who survives mass death. But why would you want to survive mass death? What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists hoarding canned foods and fearing each other? In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.”
This is the passage which explains the title of the book to a certain degree. Actually, this quote is just an excerpt from a much longer paragraph in which Bruno first explains that for ninety-percent of the time in which humans have existed, they lived underground. With civilization’s move to the surface, that which remained underground became nothing more than fodder for industrial development, economic gain, and global competition. The titular metaphor is Bruno’s way of saying the human species has sacrificed everything which allowed it to evolve in the pursuit of consumer satisfaction which, because of profiteering and induced—and unnecessary—competition is dooming itself to its own extinction. It is through Sadie’s interactions with Bruno and the philosophical anthropology lessons that the book manages to push past its mainstream thriller set-up to become the kind of novel that is praised as fine literature and nominated for awards. This quote is far from the only such similar departure from the template of the genre into the sphere of environmentalist activism through a work of fiction.
