Friend Of The Earth (Paperback)

The narrative skips among three time periods. In the future (2025), global warming and mass extinctions have destabilized the entire globe: hurricane-force rainstorms saturate the California winters, the summers are fiercely hot and dry, and restaurants serve up barely edible dishes (catfish sushi, catfish enchilada, spicy catfish roll, catfish basted in salsa). In the past (late 1980s and early 1990s), Ty Tierwater, his second wife Andrea, and his teenaged daughter Sierra belong to an ecoterrorist group called Earth Forever! And, in the present (turn of the millennium), Sierra spends three years living in an old-growth redwood tree, holding an avaricious logging firm at bay.

Underpinning all three sequences is a sometimes moving, often farcical family drama. While Tierwater passes his nights surreptitiously fighting the foes of the global ecology, he spends his days fighting to keep his daughter from the court system, his second wife, and--ultimately--from the very movement to which he belongs.

As with any satire, how much you find comic or witty (as opposed to silly or "over the top") will depend on your own sense of humor. Although the book overall is uneven and its characters often little more than caricatures, some sections read like pages from a thriller--and there are some laugh-out-loud set pieces.

Yet those who see this book as a warning against ecological destruction are missing Boyle's point. Although he depicts loggers and government officials as brutal, uncaring, and greedy, the author also treats conservationists quite harshly. (In a telling commentary, Boyle has written that "the environmentalists offer us no hope.") Tierwater becomes more violent and senseless in planning his vandalism; Andrea sells out to a bureaucracy of ecologists that is more concerned with saving itself than the world; Sierra's "martyrdom" for the cause is ultimately foolish and pointless. Tierwater himself realizes late in life that, although he may have been "right" about the coming apocalypse, none of it really matters compared to the destruction wreaked on his family by his beliefs and actions. Furthermore, several of the characters die "naturally": from a bear, a lion, a bee sting, a meteor. And, finally, the book's most quoted line is certainly its most hostile: "To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people.''

The problem with this approach, as with many attempts at satire, is that Boyle himself doesn't offer the reader an alternative, or even a sense of direction. Whenever there is a political, social, or global problem, it's all to easy to carp about what we shouldn't do; the hard part is subtly suggesting a better way. I imagine that Boyle--and Tierwater--might respond that the environmentalists (or at least the extremists) need to offer us "hope" rather than simply threatening us with destruction by their own hands or extinction by natural forces. Still, in spite of its "better late than never" finale, there's not much hope to be found in this book. Even though it's not meant to be more than a darkly comic satire, the novel conveys too many mixed messages; I think that's why so many readers have misunderstood it as a cautionary tale against global warming. In the end, then, Boyle's beguiling first excursion in dystopian science fiction fails to see the forest for the trees.