This is a fun espionage novel. It’s about Sadie (I can’t remember if this is her actual or assumed name), an ex-FBI agent, who becomes a private spy after getting fired so the organization can save face after an operation goes off the rails at the last minute. She embeds herself in and proceeds to less-than-subtly sabotage a group of French anarchists who built a commune in the countryside after becoming disillusioned by decades of toil in the name of leftist ideals within the capitalist order. By the end of the book, she seems to have bought into the ideology espoused by the group’s mysterious chief intellectual who lives in a cave and communicates with the group via a mailing list. The transition to the buy-in felt a bit rushed, though. Perhaps this an intentional unreliable narrator thing. Sadie is drunk or severely hungover for most of the book after-all. Throughout the story I kept thinking about two books I’ve read before: Back from the Land by Eleanor Agnew and The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development by Lewis Mumford. I was reminded of the former because of how the members of the commune were quickly disabused of any romantic notions they had of country living, just like the young people who’s lives Agnew traces through the 1970s. I was reminded of Mumford, and perhaps Ivan Illich, because of the polemical nature of the cave-dwelling intellectual’s emails.