Unnatural Disaster
T. Coraghessan Boyle takes us to a planet plagued by people
Doug Payne
The San Diego Union-Tribune 9/10/00

We have all heard predictions of future environmental catastrophes. Global warming, depletion of resources, deforestation, extinction of species, the toxification of the earth, water and air-all call forth apocalyptic scenarios. If we don't change the way we live now, drastically, something is going to hit The Fan.

Some folks take a few steps to ward off the coming disaster. Put the papers and bottles in the recycling bin. Check the energy rating on that new appliance. Take the kids to the park for Earth Day. Try to appreciate the plants and critters we still have. Maybe send a few bucks to a worthy cause, cast a vote now and then, do some carpooling.

For most people, however, such piecemeal, conscience-salving efforts pretty much mark the end of the road. To do more would mean "converting," committing to changing everything, not just in your own life but in everyone else's as well. The true believer never rests, and incessant vigilance is tiring. Do you really want to know where every item you touch came from, and where it goes when you're done with it? Do you really want to be that person in every gathering, giving the gloomy forecasts and disturbing observations about the wastefulness of our ordinary routines?

It's a lot to stomach. Besides-I'm not that bad... What can one person do, anyway?...They'll take care of it in time. When I get the motor running, and head out on the highway, I can't see the exhaust escaping from the tailpipe.

T Coraghessan Boyle's novel, "A Friend of the Earth," brilliantly targets this familiar mentality. He gives us a vivid, grim, hilarious portrait of our world, projected a scant 25 years into the future.

All those ominous predictions have come true in spades. Southern California is buffeted by a nearly perpetual storm that makes El Nino look like a hiccup. We're told that there's also a dry season, when people don goggles and masks because "the air is just another kind of dirt," but Boyle shrewdly focuses on the more dramatic deluge, the antithesis of our cherished sunny climate. The environment, once taken for granted, now wreaks its vengeance. We hear that people are frequently decapitated or impaled by flying debris the wind has ripped off of the besieged human-built structures. Insides are damp, chilly, smelly, rat-infested: places to huddle, rather than to live.

Boyle has a marvelous gift for translating large-scale environmental scenarios into immediate, palpable terms. If small, inadequate gestures still predominate today, it may be because we can't imagine catastrophic change seriously, viscerally. The novel is packed with details that spark this sort of realization. A can of tuna is hoarded like a precious, gem (there's nothing swimming in the oceans anymore); everyone drinks sake (rice is the only crop that will grow now in the old wine districts).

The tunes that make up the novel's soundtrack are the same oldies that are, now served up by nostalgic, "Classic Rock" formats. Indeed, their listeners are the same people. It turns out that the "young-old"-aging boomers kept relatively vital by a set of artificial techniques-are the "fastest growing segment of the U.S. population." The narrator, Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, and all the other major characters in the novel's future belong to this group. Boyle lets the unsettling corollary dawn slowly; the "young-young," real children, have become another endangered species.

What gives "A Friend of the Earth's" comically dismal future its bite is how profoundly it is embedded in the present. Sure, the ecosystem has collapsed and everything outside has changed, but people have not been transformed. They're still waiting for the weather to break! Folks wear Dick Tracy-style pictaphones on their wrists, and cloning is taken for granted, but technology, for Boyle, holds no magical solutions. When Tierwater notes the roads crowded with individual vehicles and reflects on the course of development, he could be speaking of 2000 instead of 2025:

"This used to be open country... a place where you'd see bobcat, mule deer, rabbit, quail, fox, before everything was poached and encroached out of existence. ... Now it's condos. Gray wet canyons of them. And who's in those condos? Criminals. Meat-eaters. Skin-cancer patients. People who know no more about animals-or nature, or the world that used to be-than their computer screens want them to know." Thus the novel's picture of the future builds in a sustained, devastatingly effective challenge to our habits of collective inertia.

Boyle's squishy, not-so-Brave, not-so-New World alone is worth the price of the ticket but "A Friend of the Earth" has greater ambitions. The title refers to a contradiction. Tyrone Tierwater was a wealthy widower caring for his daughter and enjoying a materialistic lifestyle when, at age 39, he met the dedicated environmentalist Andrea Cotton, and convened to the movement He emphasizes the alienating nature of such a conversion: "Because to be a friend of the Earth, you have to be an enemy of the people."
This provocative formulation operates at a deep level. It's not that Tierwater becomes a nasty person (although he has his moments), but that living up to his new convictions involves rejecting a whole way of life. Interfering with the pleasures, jobs or profits of others may cause resentment Tierwater offers an intriguing angle on the dilemmas of the radical conscience because he so clearly feels the appeal of the "criminal" (Earth-harming) life. He is not a saint like his daughter Sierra or a consummate politician like his wife Andrea, but an environmentalist from the gut. He's still fond of fast driving, prone to macho combat and drawn to sensuous pleasures. To be an enemy of the people is to be self-divided as well as at war with all those who do the system's bidding.

Boyle explores this dilemma through two time lines or dimensions. In alternating chapters he addresses our present, through Tierwate's career as an "Earth Forever!" activist, and our future, after environmental destruction has passed the crisis point, when Tierwater carries on, working at saving the unlovable animals (hyenas, anteaters) in pop star Maclovio Pulchris' private menagerie.

Both storylines are gripping; Boyle's energetic prose achieves a fine balance between wacky comedy and serious reflection.
In the present plot line (roughly 1989-2000), stretching from Tierwater's anxious participation in his first act of direct resistance through run-ins with the law, increasingly desperate actions and ultimate disaster, movement politics occupy the forefront Boyle's treatment is multifaceted, examining relations with the authorities, the media and ordinary citizens, and probing tensions between familial responsibilities and the demands of the movement.

Arguably, however, the central conflict is within the movement, shown through the opposing styles of Tyrone and Andrea. Smart, strong and committed, Andrea is a disciplined operator, always attentive to public perceptions, fund-raising, the calculation of risks and benefits. Tierwater is a wild man, his anarchistic temperament somewhat repelled by his wife's relentlessly strategic thinking. He loves her but cannot trust her, fearing, with some reason, that she would subordinate even him and his daughter to the larger cause.
The future plot features the reunion of Tierwater and Andrea in 2025-26. Here Boyle emphasizes the resilient power of nature. The environmentalists have lost, but the predators preserved on the pop star's estate remain formidable, and the storm assaults friends of the earth along with everyone else. This threatening untamed force contains, Boyle hints, redemptive possibilities.

The novel may fall short of its full potential in two related areas. Boyle's talent for suspenseful, bizarre action sequences sometimes outpaces character development, so that accidents come to foreclose issues prematurely, while the underlying character conflicts remain unresolved. Andrea in particular never quite escapes the "femme fatale" type, which means the organizational side of the movement gets shortchanged. This limitation in turn affects the ending. Boyle concludes with an ironic, appealing glimpse of hope, but it is hope for a "separate peace"-collective struggle has been effectively taken off the table. The salvation of a handful of individuals seems like false comfort in view of the systematic destruction Boyle has dramatized.

However, one can't fairly ask the novelist to solve the environmental crisis. "A Friend of the Earth" succeeds admirably in bringing it home to us, making us laugh ourselves out of complacency and think again about what it would mean to arrange a peace with nature.