A Friend of the Earth - Hardcover

Boyle, T. C

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 074754753X ISBN 13: 9780747547532

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2000

Synopsis

Tyrone O'Shaugnessy Tierwater, suburban drudge, is manager of an antiquated shopping centre in New York. His life is changed dramatically by his marriage to Andrea, a well-known environmental activist. Flashing forward to 2025, Tyrone is now manager of a pop star's private animal menagerie.

About this title

Review

If, as we are frequently cautioned, ecological collapse is imminent, the future might someday resemble TC Boyle's vision of Southern California, circa 2025: strafing wind, extortionate heat, vast species extinction, and a ramshackle, dispirited populace. A more bleak backdrop--part Blade Runner, part Silent Spring--for his eighth novel is difficult to imagine. But the ever-mischievous, ever-inventive Boyle is all too willing to disoblige; and so, in extended homage to early Vonnegut, his Sierra Club nightmare is rendered, well, comically. Toss in streaks of unabashed sentimentality, a scattershot satire, and several signature narrative ambushes, and A Friend of the Earth only further embellishes the already prodigious Boyle reputation.

During the 1980s and '90s, Ty Tierwater had exchanged a sedately acquisitive existence--"the slow-rolling glacier of my old life, my criminal life, the life I led before I became a friend of the earth"--for a fairly ambivalent position on the front lines of an ecoterrorist posse called Earth Forever! The only complication is his dual penchant for empathy and ineptitude, exacerbated by a frustration that swells with accumulating incitements. After his daughter is taken from him, and his second wife, Andrea, becomes more committed to the cause than to their marriage, Ty finds solace in blind destruction. He serves his almost predictable terms in jail; he endures the eventual death--and martyrdom--of his activist daughter, Sierra. At 75, and a quarter of the way into the dismal and decayed 21st century, he unaccountably finds himself tending an eccentric rock star's private mini-zoo of ragged animals and wryly lamenting the collapse of his race. And then Andrea resurfaces--along with his long-fallow faith in love.

Old Testament digression stalks Ty throughout A Friend of the Earth, from a publicity-stunt-cum-Edenic-retreat during his heady Earth Forever! days to a chaotic menagerie roundup amidst flooding rainfall. Boyle's future, however, is less apocalyptic than resigned, more drearily pragmatic than angst-ridden. It's a world Ty ultimately finds untenable: a constricted diversity, ecological or ideological, proves stultifying, a fact he only dimly recognised while awash in his earlier radicalism. "To be a friend of the earth," he avers in retrospect, "you have to be an enemy of the people". Boyle's spirited tale sustains the brashness of Ty's convictions. --Ben Guterson

Review

'A comedy with teeth from one of America's most consistently inventive novelists.' -- The Times

'Bursting with imagination and humour.' -- Daily Telegraph

'Superb...if Boyle was from this side of the pond, this is the book they'd all have to beat for the booker prize.' -- Sunday Tribune

'Surreal, daring and compassionate. easily one of the best books of the year.' -- Daily Mail

'Very sharp and funny...Boyle's prose is so good and his imagination so fertile that after a while you just sit back and are swept along regardless.' -- Sunday Telegraph

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 074754753X
• ISBN 13: 9780747547532
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288