A Friend of the Earth: Pt 1

I got my hands on a short novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle (T.C. afterwards), A Friend of the Earth, published 2000. It was already overdue when I found it, so I read it in somewhat of a hurry.

A Friend of the Earth is of the genre best defined as "a cautionary tale", which would include Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984, and much of (the late) Kurt Vonnegut's book-length work. In other words, one of my very favorite genres (satire, and world-historical tragedy, being the only two toward which I'm better disposed).

T.C.'s strong suit is the short story, in which he can let his verbal pyrotechnics go, without restraint, from start to finish. So what do we see when looking at his novel-length form?

1) He's a master of the quick hook. The biggest danger with a longer work is that you'll get an hour or two into it, and it loses urgency. The most obvious strategy to address that is to grab the reader in the first fifteen minutes. People will then have a certain variation in how long they'll go to get the next strong jolt of recognition, excitement, or deep resonance, but you've given yourself (if you're an author craving acceptance) your best chance.

In this case, he puts out in his first few pages a dystopic Boomer retirement vision that will jolt those of that demographic persuasion. Our hero is left, broke and alone, to tend a doomed menagerie of soon-to-be-extinct exotic animals for a semi-retired popstar. And he's happy about his station--it's the best bargain with life he's ever had.

2) The shifting flashback style he employs here maintains short-story tautness. His style of exposition in Friend is episodic, jerking back in forth in time (like, say, Slaughterhouse-Five).

Mostly, Boyle identifies the time and place clearly in the chapter headings. The exception is our (somewhat anti-) hero's greatest loss, the accidental death of his driven, exemplary daughter, which was narrated more conventionally, as reminiscences, buried, undated, within the tale of "the present" (which was 2025, for our hero). Our hero's daughter was the one who should have been the hero, she was the one who should have lived and saved the world. Instead, she died (that occurring approximately in the present for the time Boyle wrote it, just before the turn of the century), and look at this mess that resulted!

3) As with his short stories, he maintains his ironic distance from his characters, even though he clearly loves them. His story is didactic in many ways (thank you for that!), and Tyrone Tierwater (his last name clues us that it's a sob story of a mocking variety) is the teacher. He tells us what we need to learn through the example of his faulty choices in life and through what his resulting, final days (at least, within the bounds of his story) show us about what we have done (or are about to do) wrong.

As for his daughter, she was a friend of the earth, too, only it was no friend to her: she died smacking into it at something approaching terminal velocity (certainly was terminal for her!) after falling out of a high tree that she was hugging for all she was worth, setting a new record for consecutive days living up a tree. A tree that she was saving from the loggers.

The main thrust of the novel seems to be to warn the reader about global warming's potential impact on our lives. Boyle gets the feel of what full-fledged warming, combined with progressive elimination of all wild habitat, would be like in the future. Somehow, though, the weather extremes seems more desperate, but the disruption of ordinary life less severe. How can both be true?

The secondary one is to mock the radical eco-tage (ecological sabotage) movement which popped up in the decade prior to the novel's writing. Tierwater's first eco-tage action (and his first run-in with the law) came when he, his wife and daughter sink their boots in concrete to block a logger road. It fails, but he finds himself irresistibly attracted to this type of action. Always, the forces of ecological destruction find another forest to log, another bulldozer to rape the earth, etc. The publicity--supposedly the reason for the action--goes misdirected; he and his daughter become celebrities (he a bad guy, she a good one), but the point of the actions are always missed by the public. So, it all goes downhill, as he goes to prison and she falls to her death.

All in all, a good novel, perhaps a bit too heavy on plot. In 2000, it was highly advanced in its foresight. Today, it seems right in synch--we've all gone somewhat underground for eight years, if we've tried not to contribute to the disastrous course of public events.