Lowly Creatures

Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet recounts the efforts of two retired clerks who leave the city for rural Normandy, there to master agriculture and immerse themselves in the rustic alchemy of making black gold from manure. Gaspard Koenig’s contemporary version takes these exasperating comic autodidacts of the 19th century and reimagines them for the Anthropocene era.

Lowly Creatures introduces us to Arthur and Kevin, young students who meet at AgroParisTech, France’s premier agricultural college, during a lecture by an elderly scholar on the subject of earthworms: creatures which, the lecturer claims, quoting Charles Darwin: “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world …” The pair’s friendship is born here, in their shared enthusiasm for the earthworm’s utopian promise. They bond over visions of harnessing these magnificent digesters of human-made waste and invigorators of soil destroyed by decades of industrial agricultural practice to save the world.

Arthur, well-heeled son of the bourgeoisie, ends up on the old family farm, rediscovering peasant rootedness and regenerative farming, turning his back on both advanced academic research and eventually the modern world. His handsome working-class friend Kevin drifts into the orbit of Philippine, a highborn and driven young woman who takes his modest ideas for kitchen-bench vermiculture farms and scales them relentlessly upwards, into the realms of the industrial. Their project increasingly aligns with those eco-modernist thinkers who see the cure for our technological overreach in yet more technology.

On one hand, Lowly Creatures – a surprise literary success in the author’s native France under the title Humus – is a bittersweet account of the gaps that can yawn between even the closest friends as youthful idealism meets the cold diktats of adulthood. It unfolds like a gentler, less nihilistic work by Michel Houellebecq, or a suaver version of Richard Power’s ecological epics. On the other, Koenig’s background as a philosopher and political commentator feels close to the surface. The different paths his characters take are those that he, as a classical liberal thinker with free market instincts and a progressive soul, has long tried to wrestle into new and more fruitful relation.