A Friend of the Earth
By T. Coraghessan Boyle
Viking
288 pages, $24.95
It's not too late to stop global warming. All we have to do, according
to the experts, is mobilize the whole sticky mass of humanity to
swiftly deploy a vast array of solar panels, windfarms and fuel
cells so that, within the next 10 to 15 years, industrial society's
prodigious carbon emissions--all 6 billion annual tons of them--can
be reduced to near zero. This is to be done both at home and in
the impoverished developing world, all the while gently persuading
the largest, most powerful and deeply entrenched industries in human
history that their extinction is essential to stop ours.
Sound unlikely? Then welcome to T.C. Boyle's nightmare. The year
is 2025, and global warming is very much a fact. But the greenhouse
effect hasn't brought on the apocalypse--if only Boyle's characters
were so lucky. There is no bang to this future, just a pathetic
whimper--except when, in the latest punishing storm, a chunk of
somebody's roof happens to fly off and smash into your house or
decapitate your neighbor. ("Nobody's insured for weather anymore
and any and all lawsuits are automatically thrown out of court,
so don't even ask.")
Coffee has become prohibitively expensive, as has bacon, as has
newsprint--all the
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TERRY LABAN
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media are electronic now. Walk into a bar, and the only thing you
can order is a tall glass of sake--because about all that can
be grown and fermented in the new climate is rice. "People crave meat
and fish and broccoli, sweat potatoes, chard, wheat germ, the things
they can't get the way they used to, and forget the Ho-Ho's and Pop
Tarts and Doritos Extra-Spicy Meat-Flavored Tortilla Chips--that crap
they can't give away."
The metropolises of Helsinki and "Greater Nome" now dwarf New York
City. Brazil and New Zealand are desert countries. Edinburgh and
Reykjavik are playgrounds for the super-rich, dotted with "tony
eateries where they serve tuna garni or twenty-year-old monkfish
at three thousand dollars a plate." Weird killer diseases are widespread,
the worst example being something called the mucosa, a "sort
of super-flu" that suffocates its victims as you "drown in your
own secretions."
And still, nobody gives a shit about the environment. Yes,
we may be in the absurd throes of the "sixth great extinction to
hit this planet," but, come on, there's not much point in trying
to stop it. Besides, "the environment is all indoors now anyway."
There's technological marvel to be had--everybody's wristwatch is
now a Dick Tracy-style "pictaphone," and the Internet is
bigger and badder than ever. "The environment is a bore."
In the year 2000, of course, we already have unsettlingly bizarre
weather, near-total apathy and dubious faith in all things high-tech;
Boyle just takes it to the next, only slightly outlandish level.
His real creative contribution here is Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater,
the central character of A Friend of the Earth, a bitterly
funny novel about a bitterly unfunny subject. This is a novel about
futility.
Ty is part of the Baby Boom, and at age 75 belongs to the "young-old"
demographic now made possible by regrettable advances in medicine.
(The "old-old" are people in their nineties and up.) He makes his
living (for almost no one can afford to retire anymore) as an animal
keeper for a rock star named Maclovio Pulchris, who, with wrap-around
sunglasses, drum-major outfits, germ-proof facemasks and an eccentric
fondness for wildlife, resembles Michael Jackson. Ty tends to his
motley assortment of miserable, pent-up and endangered lions, hyenas,
anteaters and the very last Patagonian fox, all of which make up
"an important--scratch that, vital--reservoir for zoo-cloning and
the distribution of what's left of the major mammalian species."
It wasn't always this way. In a well-juggled and effortlessly managed
series of flashbacks, we learn of Ty's hippie origins; of his tragically
becoming a widower; of his middle-aged, somnambulant slide through
the '70s and '80s as he assumes control of his father's real-estate
fiefdom in suburban New York. At age 39, however, in the thick of
a long mid-life crisis, he meets Andrea, a firebrand activist for
a fringe enviro group called Earth Forever! (sound familiar?), and
everything starts to change. Sierra, Ty's vegetarian and eco-minded
daughter from his first marriage, is equally enchanted. Soon enough,
he cashes out, moves the troops out West--and by 1989 the three
of them are a happy, hell-raising family.
But Ty's return to social-consciousness is precisely where his
problems begin. Protesting logging on public lands in Oregon, the
Tierwaters and another comrade from Earth Forever! take direct action
to blockade a timber access road. Under the cover of night, they
dig themselves a shin-deep trench in the dirt road, into which they
will pour quick-drying cement--and then stand, for as long as it
takes. They've come prepared with hats, sandwiches, water and adult
diapers.
Upon their discovery, the local sheriff and his posse aren't having
any of it; there will be no mediagenic outside agitators in these
parts. The protesters are handcuffed, their hats and bota bags tossed
into the woods. They're made to bake in the sun for hours, waiting
for ominous "men with sledgehammers" to arrive and--none too carefully--pulverize
the dried concrete around their ankles. They're harassed, roughed-up,
dehydrated and laughed at. Then:
Yes. And here's the irony, the kicker, the sad,
deflating and piss-poor denouement. For all they went through that
morning, for all the pain and boredom and humiliation, there wasn't
a single reporter on hand to bear witness, because Sheriff Bob Hicks
had blocked the road at the highway and wouldn't let anyone in--and
so it was a joke, a big joke, the whole thing. [Ty] can remember
sitting there frying like somebody's meal with a face, no ozone
layer left to protect them from the sun, no water, no hat and no
shade and all the trees of the world under the ax, while he worked
out the conundrum in his head: if a protest falls in the woods and
there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?
When the forlorn affair finally ends, Ty and Andrea, at the mercy
of a backwoods state judge, lose custody of Sierra to a fascistic
Christian foster family. They have no choice but to kidnap her back--and
go on the lam. Angry and embittered, Ty embarks on a life of eco-tage,
becoming an ace monkey-wrencher, a fearless green avenger. He gets
bounced in and out of jail, living by the dictum, "to be a friend
of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people."
His radicalism rises an order of magnitude--as does Sierra's, who
grows up to become famous in the late '90s for refusing to leave
the canopy of a 1,000-year-old redwood. Ty and Andrea get their
own measure of notoriety after a publicity stunt--inspired by Andrea's
nudist great-grandfather, one Joseph Knowles (no relation to myself,
I'm pretty sure)--in which they spend one buck-naked month in the
mountains without any trappings of civilization whatsoever.
But the deep irony of the deep ecology in A Friend of the Earth
is that, for all Ty's wishes to efface himself and all humanity,
he can't stop worrying about his fellow humans--especially the ones
in his family. He excoriates himself endlessly for letting Sierra
come along on the Oregon action; regrets it even more when he's
stuck in jail, separated from wife and kid. Indeed, at the heart
of Boyle's story is a surprisingly poignant family drama. And, finally,
what's really at stake in the good fight is not "the planet"--which
will go on existing just fine--but whether people will still
be able to inhabit it. Like the best of literature's misanthropes,
Ty's hatred for humanity is rooted in an obtusely frustrated love
for it.
That frustration is doubled upon the reader of A Friend of the
Earth, who, from the outset, is endowed with the narrator's
hindsight from the ruined future; we know it's hopeless--"a joke,
a big joke, the whole thing." Through all the stark comedy, this
is a very angry book full of rage and protest, but not in vain:
This is the kind of anger, born of love, that carries good odds
it will be heard as it comes crashing down in the forest.
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