Novel's ecoterrorist is caught between people and the planet When it comes to authors with attitude, few can match the intensity of feeling and expression of T. Coraghessan Boyle. His latest novel, about the environment and the people who love it - a love that is often too strong and not reciprocated - adds one more solid achievement to that reputation. Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater is a baby boomer whose family struck it rich in real estate and construction; he becomes an ecoterrorist using any means necessary to stop what he considers the desecration of the land by rampaging development. Take that neat bundle of contradictions, throw in a lot of irony and a heavy dose of fate - at times so heavy it seems contrived - and "A Friend of the Earth" becomes a haunting if occasionally frustrating tale. Early on, Boyle sets up the inherent contradiction at the heart of the book: "To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people." Boyle sets Tierwater's tale in the year 2025, when he is one of the generation known as "the young old, the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, of which I am a reluctant yet grateful part, considering the alternative." The world 2 1/2 decades from now is not a pleasant place. Nature has run amok. The wind and the rain have gotten out of hand. In Tierwater's northern California, the famed wine country of Napa and Sonoma valleys are no more, marked instead by rice paddies that produce "a faintly greasy sake, the best the house has to offer." Ty Tierwater is part ringmaster, part conservator of a wildlife refuge owned by a former rock star, where he oversees the last remaining specimens of once-plentiful species of mammals, named after flowers. With Lily, Petunia, Dandelion and the rest, he salvages what he can from the world he has devoted his life to protect. As frightening as his vision is of the future, Boyle's flashbacks to Tierwater's past are the core of his message. He lays bare the futile, egocentric efforts of those willing to risk their lives and the lives of the ones they love to save an environment that rarely returns such devotion. Tierwater, his second wife, Andrea, and his daughter, Sierra, are part of Earth Forever!, vigilantes whose fervent passion to save their surroundings is matched by their tactics. Boyle's imagination and writing are first-rate. Stuck in traffic, involved in a chain-reaction collision, Tierwater surveys the scene around him, a metaphor for the wider world: "The smog was like mustard gas, burning in his lungs. There was trash everywhere, scattered up and down the off-ramp like the leavings of a bombed-out civilization, cans, bottles, fast-food wrappers, yellowing diapers and rusting shopping carts, oil filters, Styrofoam cups, cigarette butts. The grass was dead, the oleanders were buried in dust." And his savage pen is at its sharpest in describing the young Tierwater's televised introduction to the beguiling charm and the slick salesmanship of the nation's 40th president, front man for GE: "And there he was, Ronald Reagan. I was nine years old and I had no idea who he was - I'd never heard of `Bedtime for. Bonzo' or 'Hellcats' or the Gipper or any of the rest of it. I just saw him there, bland and anonymous but for the amazing glistening meatloaf of hair glued to his head and the motto of the company he shilled for. Progress is our most important product. Sure. Of course it is. That makes sense, doesn't it? We move forward, conquer and foster and discover - plug it in, tune it up - and life just gets better." As "A Friend of the Earth" goes back and forth through the defining moments in the life of Tierwater and the planet he is trying to save, the movement robs Boyle's storytelling of some of its punch. Just as he gets the reader engrossed in one story, he shifts to another, losing momentum. But the grand plan becomes clear in the end, and his message does as well. Being a friend to the Earth and to the people around you may be difficult, but writing a book that works both as literature and as intellectual stimulation is possible - and the result can be powerful. |