Writing a grim future Author of eight novels and five collections of stories, Central Coast author and educator T Coraghessan Boyle has collected a cult following insatiable when it comes to his wildly imaginative, satiric books. His latest novel, "A Friend of the Earth," is a gritty, surreal and hilariously funny take on eco-sabotage, love and survival of the species. A man with a social conscious who cares deeply about the world, he voted to put Gore in the White House because Bush "has a giant fat head, is a preppie whose qualifications are he used cocaine and owned a baseball team and whose platform is he and his buddies want to get a little bit richer." Hip hunk T Coraghessan Boyle slouches back into his perfectly articulated Frank Lloyd Wright chair and crossing ankles encased in red high-top sneakers says, "I don't think there's a ray of hope. Does anyone really think anything will ever get better? It can't possibly get better. Not with six billion people. Seated before a roaring fire engulfing the hearth of his Santa Barbara home, Boyle has recently returned from a nationwide book tour promoting his futuristic eco-fable "A Friend of the Earth." "It looks very, very grim," he says. "As I sit here looking at this nice fire and having all this stuff - I'm on top of the food chain here. I'm part of the problem. I write these books as a kind of self-corrective. I'm just trying to sort things out." To discover the complexities of a world he sees doomed to an ecological Armageddon, Boyle set the book partly in the year 2025, anticipating the consequences of environmental trends already underway. "I'm just having some black fun with who we are now but projecting it a little into the future - all the habitat loss, and loss of creatures, the destruction of the forests and the denuding of the oceans," he says. Boyle's collapsed biosphere includes the ravages of global warming - horrific weather winnowing between searing drought and savage winds to rain and hail. Most of the world's forests have been harvested and its animal species killed off. The human population has mushroomed, but a "correction is underway," a flu-like plague randomly claiming lives. Out of this miasma emerges 75-yearold Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater - a one-time eco-terrorist now game warden for a faded pop stars cloning zoo. Being a Boyle book, the rocker, Maclovio Pulchris, is set on saving only the least loved animal species. His Los Olivos menagerie of hyenas, jackals, wart hogs and three lamentable lions is ever poised to eat him or his caretaker. "The last remaining animals will probably be from private reserves," Boyle muses. "The interesting thing about animals going into extinction at the end of the last century in particular, was many species were rushed into extinction by the collectors who went out to collect the last few before they were gone. It's ironic. In my version I ask, who could presume to own nature or to own natural animals. And can you denature them? No, you can't" Boyle says Ty is a baby boomer Everyman - one who may not hold responsibility for the downfall of the planet, but one who must take responsibility for sustaining the damage. "I've written a story about this too called 'Filthy With Things,"' Boyle says. "If an archeologist were to come into my house and catalog what I possess, I mean everything down to the paper clips in the drawers, what I possess and what you possess would go into the millions and millions of objects ... Everybody's got this accumulation of crap. But all these businesses making this crap are dependent on our needing it. It's infinite. I compare it to the bushmen who are happy to have an old ostrich egg shell to put water in." The plot of "Friend" is set in motion when Ty's former wife and terrorist, Andrea, shows up to enlist his help in re-establishing their former organization, Earth Forever! and the book morphs into an every-other-chapter compendium of flashbacks. The device works well as we observe Ty change from a developer to a love lorn eco-warrior to a man increasingly violent and out-of-control. Through Ty, Boyle comments on recent enviroprotests and ultimately concludes all is for naught. "I have sympathy for the people ... in organizations like Earth First that were the very radical wing of the environmental movement who felt when criminal acts are committed against the environment you can commit criminal acts too," Boyle says. "I would like to take direct action. l never have. "In the Sierra Nevada where I've been going for 23 years, I'm infuriated by the clear cutting and the mess they've made of the place. I would like to strike back in some way. The problem with it is it's a kind of vigilante justice. Yeah, I would feel no qualms about going out and destroying lumbering equipment but the same justification is used by the right wing lunatics who are against women having the right to their own bodies who feel they can go murder people in the abortion clinics because God tells them to." But Boyle believes Earth First and Greenpeace, especially with the whaling protests, were effective in focusing world attention on environmental plights. "I think change comes as much as a result of radicals as it does from the more mainstream groups," he says. Ty's radicalization lands him in jail and his teen-age "Gothic drag, nose-ringed, tree-hugging" daughter is sacrificed to the cause. Boyle's despair over the future is as excruciating as Ty's laments: People have been decapitated by roofing material, crushed, poleaxed, impaled ... And then there are the eye and lung problems associated with all the particulate matter in the air, not to mention allergies nobody had heard of 20 years ago. A lot of people - myself included - wear goggles and a gauze mask during the dry season, when the air is just another kind of dirt. But what can I say? I told you so? "I really feel no matter what we do it's over," says Boyle. "I don't think it's going to happen in 25 years. It will be a degradation of everything that makes life worth living. It's not going to be Mad Max and a bunch of dirt and people fighting tattooed gangs for gas. Fifty years from now there will be a lot fewer things left and a lot more mini malls if the whole thing doesn't collapse entirely." Boyle grew up in Peekskill, N.Y. and didn't begin writing until he was a junior at the State University of New York at Potsdam. "I didn't know creative writing existed, he says, "until I walked into a class. Which is why I continue to teach (at the University of Southern California). Because someone opened that up for me and I want to continue to open it up for others." But the university was more about a music career - he played sax in a band called The Ventilators - than writing. After graduation he worked as a teacher in a tough Peekskill neighborhood until being accepted into the University of Iowa's masters program, where he earned both a master's of fine arts and a doctorate in British literature. He began to write. He also began a heavy heroin habit. "I was a wild and crazy and degenerate kid," he recently told a writer from the Associated Press. "It was close. But I think to be a junkie, you have to want to be a junkie - that is to have no hope or faith. And I did." Boyle's awards include the PEN/Faulkner for the novel "World's End" and the Bernard Malamud Prize for Short Fiction for "TC. Boyle Stories" published last year. A new book, "After the Plague," is due out next August. "The title story is set right here in this very city of Santa Barbara in some future period after a kind of thing that Laurie Garret talks about in `The Coming Plague' actually happens," he says. "It's kind of a fun love story, actually, in which some people die at a supermarket." Some people are 99.9 percent of the population. "When I go on tour," he says, "we don't have Q & As anymore. Now we pass out hankies, cry and go home." "I use the forest," he says wistfully. "I go out. I go to the cabin. I do my work and then I walk in the woods. That's it. I'm not riding snow mobiles. I'm not killing animals. I don't want to build houses. I don't want to do anything. I just want to enjoy it." |