When the Killing's Done: A Novel [Hardcover]

T.C. Boyle (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 22, 2011

From the bestselling author of The Women comes an action- packed adventure about endangered animals and those who protect them.

Principally set on the wild and sparsely inhabited Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara, T.C. Boyle's powerful new novel combines pulse-pounding adventure with a socially conscious, richly humane tale regarding the dominion we attempt to exert, for better or worse, over the natural world. Alma Boyd Takesue is a National Park Service biologist who is spearheading the efforts to save the island's endangered native creatures from invasive species like rats and feral pigs, which, in her view, must be eliminated. Her antagonist, Dave LaJoy, is a dreadlocked local businessman who, along with his lover, the folksinger Anise Reed, is fiercely opposed to the killing of any species whatsoever and will go to any lengths to subvert the plans of Alma and her colleagues.

Their confrontation plays out in a series of escalating scenes in which these characters violently confront one another, and tempt the awesome destructive power of nature itself. Boyle deepens his story by going back in time to relate the harrowing tale of Alma's grandmother Beverly, who was the sole survivor of a 1946 shipwreck in the channel, as well as the tragic story of Anise's mother, Rita, who in the late 1970s lived and worked on a sheep ranch on Santa Cruz Island. In dramatizing this collision between protectors of the environment and animal rights' activists, Boyle is, in his characteristic fashion, examining one of the essential questions of our time: Who has the right of possession of the land, the waters, the very lives of all the creatures who share this planet with us? When the Killing's Done will offer no transparent answers, but like The Tortilla Curtain, Boyle's classic take on illegal immigration, it will touch you deeply and put you in a position to decide.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Boyle (The Women) spins a grand environmental and family drama revolving around the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara in his fiery latest. Alma Boyd Takesue is an unassuming National Park Service biologist and the public face of a project to eradicate invasive species, such as rats and pigs, from the islands. Antagonizing her is Dave LaJoy, a short-tempered local business owner and founder of an organization called For the Protection of Animals. What begins as the disruption of public meetings and protests outside Alma's office escalates as Dave realizes he must take matters into his own hands to stop what he considers to be an unconscionable slaughter. Dave and Alma are at the center of a web of characters—among them Alma's grandmother, who lost her husband and nearly drowned herself in the channel, and Dave's girlfriend's mother, who lived on a sheep ranch on one of the islands—who provide a perspective that man's history on the islands is a flash compared to nature's evolution there. Boyle's animating conflict is tense and nuanced, and his sleek prose yields a tale that is complex, thought-provoking, and darkly funny—everything we have come to expect from him. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Boyle’s great subject is humankind’s blundering relationship with the rest of the living world. In his thirteenth novel, he transports us to California’s Galapagos, the surprisingly wild Northern Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara. There a stormy, cliff-hanging tale of foolhardy and treacherous journeys unfolds, anchored to the tough women in two indomitable matriarchal lines. A 1946 pleasure cruise gone wrong shipwrecks Beverly on the island of Anacapa. Decades later, her ambitious biologist granddaughter, Alma, oversees the National Park Service’s hubristic efforts to rid Anacapa, and neighboring Santa Cruz Island, of invasive animal species in organized killing sprees. Dreadlocked businessman Dave LaJoy, a man of rage and aberrance, along with his lover, Anise, the last child raised on Santa Cruz, where her mother worked on a doomed sheep ranch, incites reckless protests with chain-reaction consequences. Incisive and caustically witty, Boyle is fluent in evolutionary biology and island biogeography, cognizant of the shared emotions of all sentient beings, in awe over nature’s crushing power, and, by turns, bemused and appalled by human perversity. Boyle brings all these powers and concerns to bear as he creates magnetic characters and high suspense, culminating in a piercing vision of our needy, confused, and destructive species thrashing about in the great web of life. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Famous for his avidly attended public appearances, Boyle has seen his readership multiply following the huge success of The Women (2009). --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (February 22, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670022322
• ISBN-13: 978-0670022328
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (74 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #289,122 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

T. C. Boyle is the author of eleven novels, including World's End (winner of the PEN/FaulknerAward), Drop City (a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award), and The Inner Circle. His most recent story collections are Tooth and Claw and The Human Fly and Other Stories.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 59 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Overwritten, under par March 25, 2011

By C. S. Junker

Format:Hardcover

I've read all of T. C. Boyle's novels, and most of his short stories, so I'm accustomed to his penchant for florid, baroque prose. However, in his previous novel, The Women, I found myself more distracted than usual by his Rube Goldberg sentences. And in this new book, it seems that almost every sentence is interrupted by numerous paranthetical asides that clog the flow of the narrative and weigh the sentence down with massive amounts of non-essential detail.

If anyone else with a lesser gift for language attempted this sort of thing, I doubt anyone would be reading that author, but Boyle almost gets away with it. Parts of this book are beautifully told, and in places it's as engrossing as one would expect from Boyle. But everything has to be described down to the nth detail, and in places it becomes almost exhausting.

A person can't just walk into the kitchen and make a sandwich. They walk into the kitchen and before you find out what happens next, you're presented with a mini-biography including things the person's grandparents did in Poughkeepsie back in 1829. Then you get back to the making of the sandwich, but before the sandwich gets made, you get a full list of ingredients, including the character's childhood fondness for some of those ingredients based on certain formative experiences. I'm exaggerating somewhat to make my point, but not that much.

The story itself moves in fits and starts. The shipwreck of Alma's grandmother is very well told, as is the sequence of Rita's life on the sheep farm. Dave LaJoy is an interesting character, if only because he is so stupid and obnoxious. His opponent, Alma, is less well delineated; LaJoy is a self-absorbed fanatic while Alma seems almost like the voice of reason.

Boyle's best novels manage to blend his flair for wildly inventive and ornate prose with a strong narrative pace, but in The Women, and now in this new book, his narrative gifts have fallen off and the elaborate spaghetti-code sentences seem to be taking over like kudzu, strangling the story and burying it beneath mountains of unnecessary detail.

Still, it has fine moments, and most Boyle fans will find it enjoyable. Reading it is certainly not a waste of time; it just requires more effort than it should.

77 of 90 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An escalating conundrum of man and nature February 22, 2011

By switterbug TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Never one to shy away from sacred cow territory or the ruthless ways in which humans stampede it, T.C. Boyle's latest wise epic puts ecologists on a restless collision course with agitated animal rights activists. In his vintage style of tackling issues with snarling drama and incendiary humor, Boyle plots a political novel without sending the reader a preachy message, although he comes right up under it.

Boyle turns eco controversy on its head, turning back to the theme that man's desire to keep a clean footprint on the earth is a messy and dirty job, often with dire consequences. This is Boyle; bully pulpits are bent with irony, and righteousness is fraught with disobedience. Endangerment of the species brings on reckless endangerment of lives. Who has the right to dominate, to possess this planet? Humans, creatures, natural inhabitants, invasive species--several are examined, many left wanting--especially humans.

Restoration ecologist/ biologist and PhD Alma Boyd Takesue spearheads a program with the National Parks Service to exterminate invasive species on the Channel Islands of California. She argues that the infestation of rats and feral pigs are killing off the endemic Channel Island Foxes and disrupting the natural ecosystem.

Her dreadlocked nemesis, businessman Dave LaJoy, knows all about disruption. He protests every one of Alma's presentations to declare war on her efforts, and is opposed to the idea that extirpation leads to preservation. No public presentation by Alma is without LaJoy's outcry.

" `How can you talk about being civil when innocent animals are being tortured to death? Civil? I'll be civil when the killing's done and not a minute before.' "

LaJoy is the contentious head of FPA (For the Protection of Animals), a small organization viewed by ecologists as fanatical. His folksinger girlfriend, Anise Reed, is at his side on this issue, contrary to--or a result of--her childhood on a sheep farm on one of the Northern Channel Islands, Santa Cruz, which ended with a bloodlust tragedy.

Alma has the law of the federal government, if not always nature, on her side, as well as her Park Service employee boyfriend, Tim Sickafoose. LaJoy is the underdog, dependent on citizen donations and ruled by his unbridled rage. He is primed to fight with subversive acts designed to undermine Alma's program. No ecologists will keep LaJoy from his battle to save the animals. Boyle, in his typical rogue tenor, demonstrates that both sides of the fence are imbued with truth and riddled with internal contradictions.

Boyle shifts time periods to illustrate the recent history of the islands and dramatize the inextricable links between past and present, from the introduction of non-native species, to the family connections of Alma and Anise. Alma's grandmother survived a shipwreck near Anacapa while she was pregnant with Alma's mother. Boyle's portrayal of this disaster was stunning, a pinpoint event of woman overcoming the storm of nature's catastrophes with some tragic and triumphant results.

Years later, on Santa Cruz Island, Anise's mother suffered a chilling invasion of corporate corruption and a hideous attack on the sheep farm where she lived and toiled. She had worked hard to keep the hungry ravens from the ewes, their carrion cries now reverberating through the years.

The historical segments were superbly vivid and requisite to the central story, but interspersed throughout were florid narrative ambushes and excursions that slowed the central movement to a crawl. The cadence was generally barky and rough, as choppy as the Channel Island waters, as emphatic and forceful as a winter storm. I never felt that Boyd hit a rhythmic stride; it was loud and strident, with a manic refrain. But there were jewel-cut, Boyle-cut passages within that often lifted off and flew from the turgid overflow.

Although he dodged from sermonizing, it periodically read like an almanac or lecture. His voice tapped in the background, then ceded to the ripe moments of story. It was page-turning terror until the advent of excess fluctuations, like waves crashing against the wily outcroppings of jagged rock. The symmetry was lost at sea, and the climax was drowned in the fury.

However, despite these complaints, I was mentally fastened and stimulated, although the emotional resonance faded by the last hundred pages. It's a visionary story, but it lacks visual constancy except for some eye-popping flourishes.

Also, some of the characters drift off or stagnate, or are trammeled by the themes. It was their "purpose" that overrode their other characteristics. There was something missing emotionally, and I lost interest in them as individuals. But, alas, their absolute certainties are left for the reader to ponder. I am tempted to just say: Boyle was being Boyle, only more so. He is one-of-a-kind, an island of Boyle, and who am I to cross it?

The inclusion of pigs, whether capitalist or feral; the onslaught of rats, both animal and human; a nest of snakes, poisonous or colloquial; and the carrion birds circling the sky are just a few of the metaphorical joists that furnish the narrative and add dimension to the interlocking sequences. As a conservation story, the prose isn't too thrifty, but in the end, you will be glad you read it. I hesitate to say it is significant, but there you go. Boyle is a rare species. It is topical and arch, Boyle and boiling, trenchant and tough.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Intervention March 12, 2011

By Stephen T. Hopkins VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

In all our communities, we and our neighbors usually share views that are polar opposites. In T.C. Boyle's new novel, When the Killing's Done, he presents the extremes of environmentalism: scientists working to restore ecosystems by killing invasive species versus the animal rights activists who want no animals killed. Boyle builds complexity and empathy into each character, and the conflict in the novel matches the high-decibel rhetoric that dominates our community life. Both sides of this conflict intervene in the ecology of California's Channel Islands. This may be the first Boyle novel that did not have me stop to run to my dictionary every few dozen pages. He maintains his fine style of writing without the distraction of using a vocabulary that strains a reader's patience. As with other fine novels, this is also a story about family and relationships, and each relationship contains complexity and nuance that will keep readers engaged and entertained. Boyle is one of our finest writers, and this novel respects the intelligence of readers and leaves it to us to consider the issues he raises.

Rating: Four-star (Highly Recommended)