Richard Powers divides opinion. Some would describe his novels as ambitious, sweeping works (increasingly) concerned with environmental themes that conjure awe and wonder at the natural world. Others would say that his books are characterised by a faux profundity that allows people to feel better about environmental degradation by pretending to make them feel worse. So the central question posed by his latest novel, Playground, is familiar: when does the important become the portentous?

Playground neatly fits into Powers’s oeuvre. Like his recent novels the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Overstory (2018) and Bewilderment (2021), it explores the tension between animacy and inanimacy, and the alienation of the human from the natural world. The subject this time is the ocean, and Powers offers a great deal of beautifully detailed description of marine life. Playground follows Rafi Young, a highly intelligent black boy from a deprived part of Chicago, Ina Aroita, an artist from Tahiti whom he marries, and Todd Keane, a boyhood friend of Rafi who becomes a billionaire internet entrepreneur. They all share a fascination with the ocean. The novel is concerned with showing us the tension between our desire to imagine it as a site of endless wonder and the reality: that it is a place of finite capacity where our discarded things go – a place that is filling up fast with rubbish. At one moment, Ina wonders, ‘Is a thing still garbage, once life starts using it?’

Long sections of third-person narrative are interspersed with short passages narrated by Todd. The strands converge in the story of the island of Makatea, which has been scarred economically and environmentally by phosphate mining. The island’s traumatised inhabitants are being asked to vote to allow a ‘seasteading’ development to go