Enviornment and family collapse in skillful work
R.F. Sharp
Lexington Herald

There was a time when dystopian tales of environmental destruction and man's ultimate ruination of the earth were the stuff of science fiction. Who couldn't watch, say, Silent Running without cracking a little smirk at all its environmentalist earnestness? After all, we puny humans couldn't possibly cause any real long-term damage to the planet, could we? Somehow, in these days of wild temperature swings, extinction and extreme watch-er, the idea doesn't seem so futuristic or improbable anymore.

While the idea of the ultimate collapse of the biosphere is the starting point for T.C. Boyle's latest novel, A Friend of the Earth, at its core is the story of' Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, onetime ecoterrorist and one-time family man. Alternating between the future of 2025 and the past - our present, essentially - Boyle deftly describes the collapse of both the environment and Tierwater's family.

In the future, the earth is a worn, torn and unpleasant place in which the weather alternates between drought and monsoon; mass extinction has come and gone. Tier-water works as an animal keeper on the southern California estate of a rock star, and the ravages that he confronts daily come as no surprise.

The son of a developer, Tierwater has seen his first wife killed by a bee sting; his daughter made a martyr to the environmentalist movement; and his own life given to increasingly radical environmentalism, leading eventually to full-fledged ecoterrorism.
"To be a friend of the Earth," Tierwater says, "you have to be an enemy of the people." Of course, one can't remain an enemy of the people long without consequences, and Tierwater eventually winds up incarcerated in "Club Fed," a less-than-harsh prison.

The alternating chapters - a technique Boyle also used to wonderful effect in the exquisite World's End - weave the present with the future and give us the chance to learn about Tierwater and the world he worked so desperately to prevent, giving one brief flash of the idealistic, and decidedly off-kilter, young man who would eventually become the ex-ecowarrior and ex-con who slogs through the mud of 2025 to look after a motley menagerie of hyenas, warthogs and foxes (one of which appears to' have been carried off by the wind).

Boyle's enormous talent-he is the real deal, rest assured-lets him create characters and situations that, in the hands of a lesser writer, could become cartoonish. Instead, he renders them in the full three dimensions, using the extreme and mundane aspects of the characters and their actions as point and counterpoint.

With a sense of humor so black that it borders on infrared, Boyle fuses these disparate facets into a single work of surprising depth and impact. In doing so, he has managed to create a story that is personal and global at the same time.
If you get the message, so much the better. Even if you don't, you'll have met a group of characters that will stay with you long after the book is finished.

If there was ever a book that was worth the effort of hopping in your sport-utility vehicle and driving that quarter mile to the bookstore, A Friend of the Earth is it.