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Title: A Friend of the Earth by T. Coraghessan Boyle ISBN: 0-14-100205-0 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 28 August, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.52 (29 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The apocalypse according to Boyle
Comment: T.C. Boyle has seen the apocalypse, it's hour come 'round at last. But it's human nature to ignore bad news, says Boyle, and that's why it's easy to sit wedged inside our modular homes and forget about the fact that global warming is marching on, the population is growing like a tumor, and the end, my friend, could be closer than we think. A Friend of the Earth is set in the year 2025 as the earth belches its last gasps and there's nothing left for dinner but catfish and sake. The tale is narrated by the reformed eco-terrorist and aging Baby Boomer Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, who's spending his last days tending to a bedraggled menagerie of now-rare animals (hyenas, lions, and the like) owned by pop icon Maclovio Pulchris. But then his ex-wife Andrea appears on the scene. She wants to write a book about Ty's daughter, the legendary tree-sitting Sierra. (She'd also like a little love.) Soon, a flood strands Boyle's cast of characters (both human and animal) in Pulchris's mansion. From this vantage point the tale unfolds, and here the reader is launched into Ty's story, told through chapters that alternate between 2025 and the '80s and '90s, his first wife's accidental death, his beginnings as a renegade member of Earth Forever!, his run from the law, and so forth. The humor is wry, the outlook hilariously dire, and the personalities brilliantly constructed. A Friend of the Earth takes a daring look at humanity's hubris and our grim global future. Only a champion storyteller like T.C. Boyle could slap us silly and make us laugh all at the same time.
Rating: 4
Summary: Eco-science fiction
Comment: At first look, this book reminded me of another book I read recently: Killing Time by Caleb Carr. Both were looks at near-future dystopias written by non-science fiction authors. However, while Carr's novel shows his inability to write sci-fi, Boyle has proven he can work comfortably in this genre.
Switching back and forth between the 1990s and 2020s, A Friend of the Earth is a tale of environmental horror filled with ironic humor. Although in one sense it is an ecological gloom-and-doom story, it also mocks the far edge of the environmental movement. There is a theme that even these eco-terrorists are ineffective.
By leaving a twenty-plus year gap between the two narratives, Boyle even leaves it unclear what has happened to make nature go amok; this brings into question whether the environmental disasters are even man-made. Certainly, there is an almost wrathfully intelligent version of Nature in this story; many of the characters die of strange accidents; the more the enviromentalists try to save the world, the more the world goes out of its way to make their lives miserable.
Like other environmental horror novels I've read, including such classics as John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up and Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, this story offers little hope to the modern reader. Unlike these other novels, which serve as warnings of a future that can be averted by wise acts, this story says that Nature is a force that we cannot control, for good or for ill. This hopelessness makes this a sometimes difficult novel to read, but the good writing and ironic humor makes it enjoyable nonetheless.
Rating: 4
Summary: A darkly comic satire with mixed messages
Comment: With this work, Boyle has entered the world of what he has disparagingly called "genre fiction," although--in reality--"A Friend of the Earth" is to science fiction what "Gulliver's Travels" is to fantasy novels. His futuristic comedy is a satire on the struggle between materialism and environmentalism, each of which he skewers with equally barbed disdain.
The narrative skips among three time periods. In the future (2025), global warming and mass extinctions have destabilized the entire globe: hurricane-force rainstorms saturate the California winters, the summers are fiercely hot and dry, and restaurants serve up barely edible dishes (catfish sushi, catfish enchilada, spicy catfish roll, catfish basted in salsa). In the past (late 1980s and early 1990s), Ty Tierwater, his second wife Andrea, and his teenaged daughter Sierra belong to an ecoterrorist group called Earth Forever! And, in the present (turn of the millennium), Sierra spends three years living in an old-growth redwood tree, holding an avaricious logging firm at bay.
Underpinning all three sequences is a sometimes moving, often farcical family drama. While Tierwater passes his nights surreptitiously fighting the foes of the global ecology, he spends his days fighting to keep his daughter from the court system, his second wife, and--ultimately--from the very movement to which he belongs.
As with any satire, how much you find comic or witty (as opposed to silly or "over the top") will depend on your own sense of humor. Although the book overall is uneven and its characters often little more than caricatures, some sections read like pages from a thriller--and there are some laugh-out-loud set pieces.
Yet those who see this book as a warning against ecological destruction are missing Boyle's point. Although he depicts loggers and government officials as brutal, uncaring, and greedy, the author also treats conservationists quite harshly. (In a telling commentary, Boyle has written that "the environmentalists offer us no hope.") Tierwater becomes more violent and senseless in planning his vandalism; Andrea sells out to a bureaucracy of ecologists that is more concerned with saving itself than the world; Sierra's "martyrdom" for the cause is ultimately foolish and pointless. Tierwater himself realizes late in life that, although he may have been "right" about the coming apocalypse, none of it really matters compared to the destruction wreaked on his family by his beliefs and actions. Furthermore, several of the characters die "naturally": from a bear, a lion, a bee sting, a meteor. And, finally, the book's most quoted line is certainly its most hostile: "To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people.''
The problem with this approach, as with many attempts at satire, is that Boyle himself doesn't offer the reader an alternative, or even a sense of direction. Whenever there is a political, social, or global problem, it's all to easy to carp about what we shouldn't do; the hard part is subtly suggesting a better way. I imagine that Boyle--and Tierwater--might respond that the environmentalists (or at least the extremists) need to offer us "hope" rather than simply threatening us with destruction by their own hands or extinction by natural forces. Still, in spite of its "better late than never" finale, there's not much hope to be found in this book. Even though it's not meant to be more than a darkly comic satire, the novel conveys too many mixed messages; I think that's why so many readers have misunderstood it as a cautionary tale against global warming. In the end, then, Boyle's beguiling first excursion in dystopian science fiction fails to see the forest for the trees.
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Title: Riven Rock by T. Coraghessan Boyle, T.C. Boyle ISBN: 014027166X Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: After the Plague: And Other Stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle ISBN: B00013AX6W Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: September, 2001 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Drop City by T. Coraghessan Boyle ISBN: 0142003808 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 27 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle ISBN: 014023828X Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: East Is East (Contemporary American Fiction) by T. Coraghessan Boyle ISBN: 0140131671 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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