Customer Reviews

A Friend of the Earth

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

While it's true that the protagonist of this book is an eco-terrorist, he is also a father and husband and this is a novel primarily concerned with reconciling family life with personal responsibility to create a life that makes some kind of sense. In this Ty Tierwater is a self professed failure and so I don't believe Boyle intended this as a "message" novel. While Boyle's research adds immeasurably to the appeal of the story interpreting it exclusively through the lens of eco-politics is a mistake that will rob one of its considerable pleasures. (And to measure it by the conventions of science fiction is beside the point entirely.)

So why should you read this book? Because the sentences burst with flavor in your mouth. Also because it's a wonderfully crafted novel. The first person narration is convincing to the point that I completely identified with Ty even as I came to realize he was in many ways a self destructive crank likely to do as much harm as good to those around him. The book's time structure -- jumping from past to present -- is an effective technique for helping the reader trace evolving relationships (especially between Ty, wife Andrea, and daughter Sierra) and understand the impact of decisions over time. And finally, Ty tells his story with passion and intelligence in spite of an enroaching emotional exhaustion that matches the degradation fo the biosphere (a terrific act of authorial slight of hand, btw.)

Ecopolitics and craft aside, when you come right down to it the reason to read "A Friend of the Earth," is because Boyle creates an unforgettable character in Ty Tierwater. Love him or hate him, you won't forget him...or this book.

Having read all of T.C. Boyle's previous novels, I knew when I picked up A Friend of the Earth that I would be treated to this author's elegant and poetic writing style. I was not disappointed. This man can truly turn a phrase: a girl has "hair the color of midnight in a cave." Wildflowers are "on fire in the fields." And that's what kept me going until the end of the novel. I didn't find the plot particularly riveting andI wasn't drawn to any of the characters. But the pure poetry of T.C. Boyle's prose carried me along as if I were floating down a clear mountain stream. If you're concerned about global-warming, the rape of the forests by the timber industry, and the struggle to save the Earth from the clutches of humanity--a species that insists on reproducing and using up every last vestige of the Earth's resources, then read this book. If not, you may enjoy it anyway, if only for the beautiful writing contained herein.

T. C. Boyle's A Friend of the Earth addresses that most difficult challenge--how to write about the near-future and the changes that may come to us all while sustaining the reader's belief and interest. In the year 2025, as Boyle imagines it, global warming and pollution have radically transformed the Earth's ecosphere, and the protagonist's past as an environmental activist and "monkeywrencher" is in ironic contrast with the world he now inhabits, where he works to protect a handful of endangered animals in the private zoo of a reclusive pop star.

Ty Tierwater is, as one might expect, a protagonist who has lost his energy and passion--an existentialist without much reason to go on. There is always something risky about writing a book which turns on the memories of such a dispirited character, and indeed the flashback scenes (to the 1980s and 1990s) have far more vitality than the sections of the book set in 2025. It's a fascinating literary choice, albeit one which takes away from the book's momentum and appeal. Those who love Boyle's characteristic humor will also be disappointed, but, as one friend remarked "there are some things that just aren't funny." At the end of the day, though, A Friend of the Earth is a truly thoughtful book and a work of great integrity.

TC Boyle writes about way-out-there characters, and *A Friend of the Earth* is no exception. Ty, the main character, used to be a member of an eco-terrorism group like Earth First! (called here, Earth Forever!) before events in his own life changed him and the environment collapsed.

One thing that I really enjoy about TC Boyle's work in general and *A Friend of the Earth* in particular is the way Boyle contemplates time. Here, the book alternates chapters between Ty's life as a young father and then eco-terrorist in the 1980s and 1990s and events in the eco-ravaged world when Ty is a young-old person in 2025. In the intervening three decades, Ty has changed dramatically as a human being (though we can see the roots of his changes) and the world changes. Only 25 years ago, Reagan had just begun his presidency, Germany was two countries with a wall between them, and the biggest threat to our lives was the Soviet Union, the Iron Curtain, and enough nukes pointed at us to destroy the world 1000 times over. In 1990, 16 years ago, Clinton was in his first term, his opinion was that our greatest challenge in America was race relations, the Soviet Union was in shambles, and Berlin Wall rubble was being sold by mail order, because there was no Ebay. Five years ago, in July, 2001, everybody was getting rich on internet stocks, housing prices were stagnant, people were still arguing about hanging and dimpled chads, and we had two blissful months of navel-gazing left before we the public started worrying about Osama bin Ladan, radical Islamists, burkas, rape rooms, WMDs, and Middle Eastern wars. Time changes things. Time changes people. Boyle understands that better than most other writers and uses it in his novels.

In Boyle's book, Ty changes dramatically over the intervening years between the two time periods that the book examines. One of the major questions that Boyle explores and uses as a tension device is why Ty changed so much and what Sierra's (his daughter) fate was. By using these, Boyle has written a tightly woven, entertaining, tense book that, while it offers no pretty assurances or head-patting, does hold one's interest to the bitter end.

TK Kenyon
Author of Rabid: A Novel and Callous: A Novel

"To be a friend of the earth is to be an enemy to people" proclaims the narrator of Boyle's pointed new novel. He is Ty Tierwater, a self-proclaimed monkey-wrencher and follower of an Earth First!-inspired extreme environmental group. He relates his tragicomic life story in the year 2026; global warming has devastated the weather and led to the extinction of most of the species on earth. But Ty is only partially motivated by concern for the planet; is is also driven by savage misanthropy. Rage, born of early tragedies, fills his mind. Ty Tierwater is seduced by the environmentalist vision and then betrayed and destroyed by the people in the movement; he becomes a victim of fashionable elitists like the Japanese kid in Boyle's "East is East." His portrait of the greens is truly disturbing; he sees them as manipulative little '60's kids who never grew up and accepted adult respnsibilities. Ty's extremism costs him his teenage daughter, who is revered as a martyr to the cause but in fact died in the most meaningless way. That he and his comrades turn out to be right about the coming global catastrophes only lends a further measure of bitter humor to Boyle's mix. What did they accomplish? The devasating last line of the last chapter before the epilogue will tell you in the starkest possible terms. If this book seems a little thinner than usual, it could be that Boyle was exhausted after writing the majestic "Riven Rock." It's still very worth reading, from perhaps the most entertaining author in America.

At first look, this book reminded me of another book I read recently: Killing Time by Caleb Carr. Both were looks at near-future dystopias written by non-science fiction authors. However, while Carr's novel shows his inability to write sci-fi, Boyle has proven he can work comfortably in this genre.

Switching back and forth between the 1990s and 2020s, A Friend of the Earth is a tale of environmental horror filled with ironic humor. Although in one sense it is an ecological gloom-and-doom story, it also mocks the far edge of the environmental movement. There is a theme that even these eco-terrorists are ineffective.

By leaving a twenty-plus year gap between the two narratives, Boyle even leaves it unclear what has happened to make nature go amok; this brings into question whether the environmental disasters are even man-made. Certainly, there is an almost wrathfully intelligent version of Nature in this story; many of the characters die of strange accidents; the more the enviromentalists try to save the world, the more the world goes out of its way to make their lives miserable.

Like other environmental horror novels I've read, including such classics as John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up and Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, this story offers little hope to the modern reader. Unlike these other novels, which serve as warnings of a future that can be averted by wise acts, this story says that Nature is a force that we cannot control, for good or for ill. This hopelessness makes this a sometimes difficult novel to read, but the good writing and ironic humor makes it enjoyable nonetheless.

Boyle's boisterous, blackly comic view of the near future satirizes nearly everyone and everything in a story about love and the struggle for survival in a collapsing Eco-system.

Narrator and protagonist Ty Tierwater is 75 in 2025. An artificial kidney makes him one of the "young old" facing a long, slow decline in a California where months of violent storms alternate with months of baking heat. A former radical environmentalist, he now runs a menagerie of endangered species for a pop star, a reservoir for zoo-cloning in a world where mammals - save burgeoning populations of rats and humans, are rapidly going extinct. Into this bleak, resigned existence comes a blast from the past - his ex-wife Andrea, a former star of the environmental movement, out of his life for 20 years.

"I'm out feeding the hyena her kibble and chicken backs and doing what I can to clean up after the latest storm, when the call comes through.... there are trees down everywhere and the muck is tugging at my gum boots like a greedy sucking mouth, a mouth that's going to pull me all the way down eventually, but not yet."

They celebrate their reunion with the last can of extinct Alaskan crab. But Andrea, still sexy at 67, has an agenda. She wants Ty to help put a book together on his martyred daughter, Sierra. The memories flood back, beginning with the 1989 fiasco which introduced 13-year-old Sierra to radical environmentalism - the time he and Andrea and Sierra plunged their feet into wet cement at the top of a logging road to protest the cutting of old growth forests.

The story alternates between third person accounts of love and strife and frustration in the late 20th century and Ty's present-tense 2025 narration of shoring up against imminent collapse. This near-future narration is manic. Sentences tumble and run, the language flows vivid and tactile, the world impinges urgently and viciously on daily life.

The past emerges in a more conventional, anecdotal style. Bringing up Sierra, making his marriage work, miring himself deeper in a movement not really his own. Ty's remembrance of his life is anything but heroic. Ty came to environmentalism through his sexual attraction to Andrea. Lonely, his beloved first wife dead of a bee sting (all his loved ones, it seems, are felled by nature) Ty adopted Andrea's causes as his own. But when things go wrong, anger, helplessness, and desire for revenge fuel his increasingly radical actions. Clueless Ty, trying to make his mark in the world, longs to be a strong father, a good husband, a principled man, but anger and boredom and opportunistic, scheming Andrea, goad him.

Meanwhile, Sierra has the makings of a true idealist. As a child she starved herself for days rather than eat the meat her father placed in front of her. Energized by her father's predicaments, she stops wearing make-up (animal testing), becomes a vegan and wholly embraces non-violent activism, becoming, literally, a tree hugger.

In Ty's day environmentalism was a passion for such idealists, or a fashionable avocation for dilettantes. The dangers were distant, intellectual, the demands of suburban life more urgent. But now, in 2025, floods collapse the condos and the animals' pens. Mangy lions and hyenas and warthogs are herded desperately indoors to shelter in the pop star's mansion and feed on a freezer of prized meat, the last in the world.

Boyle spares no one in this savagely hilarious portrait. Not the BMW-driving, manipulative, well-dressed environmentalists (Ty and Andrea, as a publicity stunt, shed their clothes and plunge into the woods to live naked off the land for a month - you'll fall off your chair laughing). Not the sneering, smug sheriffs and deputies or the celebrities hyped on the latest cause or the baying packs of journalists. Even gentle, serious Sierra is not spared.

But amid the hilarity and savaging, there is genuine affection for his flawed characters who never give up hope no matter how black things get. Boyle gives us an imaginative, exuberant wake-up call which will make you shiver while you laugh.

It seems to me that this is fast becoming Boyle's most misunderstood novel. People who think this is some sort of environmental screed are bound to be disappointed. So are those who think it's a merry satire a la Road to Wellville. If this has any antecedents in Boyle's past work it's The Tortilla Curtain. Like that book, Friend of the Earth has its humor and social commentary, delivered in Boyle's usual compelling narration and (nearly) flawless prose, but the book is less about the cause than the convictions that drive it. It asks the question: what are you willing to sacrifice for your beliefs? Tierwater, the hapless but sympathetic protagonist here, unfortunately asks that question AFTER he's already committed himself, and the book is about how he deals with the consequences of his actions. As a character study, this should make any reader, whether he or she is pro-environmentalism or not, squirm, not to mention think about his/her own beliefs and just what he or she will do to follow them.

I can only guess as to Mr. Boyle's intent in this book, but I came away with the feeling that it pays great homage to Ed Abbey. The Monkey Wrench Gang fortold of Earth First! and the like; and then near his death, Abbey wrote Hayduke Lives in which you can see the beginnings of his outrage at where things had gone nad his seeming displeasure with where things were going with our planet. Mr. Boyle now takes it one step further with "A Friend of the Earth."

Told in two time frames - one essentially the present with a group much like Earth First! called Earth Forever!; and the other set in the near future of 2025 where we meet Ty Tierwater retired eco-warrior at 75 when his life comes back around full circle and we learn of his daughter, who martyred herself for the trees. Ty tells of the now where Super El Nino-like weather is ravaging the planet and much of the wildlife has gone extinct. He also tells of the events of his life in the 1990s that led him to be a warrior for the environment and eventually to where he is in the here and now... struggling to save the "ugly animals," as his employer Mac - a Rich Rock Star - puts it, before they are all gone.

The story is set in motion when Ty's ex-wife resurfaces in his life seeking to start anew their efforts to save the planet - and ourselves - from man.

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A Guide to my Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.

In this offbeat novel, T.C. Boyle brings his usual blend of sharp humor and social commentary. The chapters alternate between the present and the year 2026 when humans have killed off all the animal species, destroyed the ozone layer and vacated the earth of trees. We follow the career of Tyrone O'Shaughnessy who starts out as a committed environmentalist and ends up doing time as an eco-terrorist. Although he is the protagonist, he is overshadowed by the shadow of his daughter Sierra's story - the tree-sitter. There are some hilarious bits (although they don't appear even a bit hilarious to novel's characters) like when Ty escapes from the hospital naked from the waist down or when the last lion devours the chief animal patron. As you can see, Boyle's humor is a bit dark, but it's humor nonetheless. Although I enjoyed the novel, I am much fonder of Boyle's short stories. For some reason, his novels never seem to pack the same punch that his short stories do. Maybe it's because we don't sympathize with any of the characters. It's a bit bleak in fact. Thus, I recommend this to diehard fans, but for new Boyle converts, start with a short story collection like Without a Hero.