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A Friend of the Earth

3.62 of 5 stars 3.62 · rating details · 1,590 ratings · 153 reviews

In the tradition of The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the universal questions of human love and the survival of the species. In the year 2025 global warming is a reality, the biosphere has collapsed, and 75-year-old environmentalist Ty Tierwater is eking out a living as care-taker of a pop star's private zoo when his seco...more

Paperback, 368 pages

Published September 1st 2001 by Penguin Books (first published 1990)

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Mar 05, 2012 Jeffrey Keeten rated it 4 of 5 stars

When I lived in Arizona in the late 1980s there was an environmental group called Earth First! that was creating a lot of excitement on campus. Edward Abbey was teaching at the University of Arizona and everyone was reading his book called The Monkey Wrench Gang. Earth First! advocated using some of the tactics that Abbey described in his book. All was fun and good until the FBI busted down Dave Foreman's (the most vocal leader of Earth First!)door in the middle of the night, with black helicopt...more When I lived in Arizona in the late 1980s there was an environmental group called Earth First! that was creating a lot of excitement on campus. Edward Abbey was teaching at the University of Arizona and everyone was reading his book called The Monkey Wrench Gang. Earth First! advocated using some of the tactics that Abbey described in his book. All was fun and good until the FBI busted down Dave Foreman's (the most vocal leader of Earth First!)door in the middle of the night, with black helicopters circling, and hauled him away. The next few days there was many of us trying to remember who we knew that was part of the movement and determine our particular degree of separation as more and more people were arrested. The FBI effectively scared the crap out of anyone involved in the environmental movement in the Southwest.

Imagine my pleasant surprise when the group that Ty Tierwater, our hero, was associated with is Earth Forever! Okay, obviously Boyle decided to change the name and move the base of operation to California, but he can't fool me. Ty is the most radical of the Earth Forever! members he sees the political struggle over the Earth as a war and that destructive Monkey Wrenching tactics is the only way to force the large lumber companies to back off. We first meet Ty in 2025 and all the most dire predictions for the Earth have come true. The places that are dry have become more barren and the places that were traditional wet zones have become flood zones. All of his activism accomplished nothing. Tierwater is now 75 years old and taking care of a small menagerie of exotic animals for a pop star. After several stints in jail for illegal activity this is about the only job a famous felon can find. He sums up his life through the workings of his bowels.

"My guts are rumbling: gas, that's what it is. If I lie absolutely still, it'll work through all the anfractuous turns and twists down there and find its inevitable way to the point of release. And what am I thinking? That's methane gas, a natural pollutant, same as you get from landfills, feedlots and termite mounds, and it persists in the atmosphere for ten years, one more fart's worth of global warming. I'm a mess and I know it. Jewish guilt, Catholic guilt, enviroeco-capitalistico guilt. I can't even expel gas in peace. Of course, guilt itself is a luxury. In prison we didn't concern ourselves overmuch about environmental degradation or the rights of nature or anything else, for that matter. They penned us up like animals, and we shat and pissed and jerked off and blew hurricanes out our rectums, and if the world collapsed as a result, all the better, at least we'd be out."

The book flips back and forth between 1989-91 and 2025-26. We see the decisions that Ty makes trying to make a difference and the influence of his actions on the development of his daughter. Despite numerous incarcerations Ty is never rehabilitated. "Every prisoner told himself-I'll never do it again but Tierwater didn't believe it. Not for a minute. He knew now, with every yearning, hating , bitter and terminally bored fiber of his being, why prison didn't reform anybody. Penitentiary. What a joke. The only thing you were penitent for was getting caught. And the more time you did, the more you wanted to strike back at the sons of bitches and make them wince, make them hurt the way you did. That was rehabilitation for you."

I wasn't sure how I felt about Ty Tierwater for most of the book, but as the novel progressed I had developed a grudging respect for him. He really did care, maybe too much to think clearly, but he was truly committed to saving the planet. Even as an old man, we still find him trying to do what he can to preserve a tiny part of the diversity of the planet. By the end of the novel he has found some solitude. "I've entered a new world. Or an old one, a world that exists only in the snapping tangle of neurons in my poor ratcheting brain...For the first time in a long time I feel something approaching optimism, or at least a decline in the gradient of pessimism." By 2026 Ty finds himself ultimately more concerned about finding peace for himself knowing the battle for the planet has been lost, yet hopeful, that a new planet will emerge with new creatures and maybe a better primary caretaker.

It has been a long time since I've read T. C. Boyle and it won't be as long before I read the next Boyle. He is a smart, crafty writer with brimming intelligence on every page. (less)

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Feb 25, 2009 Aerin marked it as abandoned

Setting this aside for now, probably for ever. I can't bring myself to continue reading it. The story is boring, and it annoys me much more than it probably should that the cover says "fiction?" Okay, I get it, I'm supposed to be scared by your alarmist global-warming dystopia, but YES. YES IT IS FICTION. Boyle is not a future-seer, and I can't stand it when authors try to make their novels more interesting by implying that they're true. Go Ask Alice. A Million Little Pieces. The Blair Witch Pro...more

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Feb 26, 2013 Katrin rated it 4 of 5 stars

You can always rely on T.C. Boyle for an entertaining read. Here, our future (the year 2025) is described in the bleakest (and at times depressing) terms: Due to our destruction of the environment, people are suffering from extreme weather conditions. At the moment, a neverending rainstorm rages for months, which makes normal living difficult. Most animals and plants are extinct, all there is to drink is sake, and the hero of the story, Ty Tierwater, has a job looking after the animals in the pr...more

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Jan 01, 2013 Aaron rated it 5 of 5 stars

The writing alone makes this book worth reading. Boyle is at his lively, colorful best here with his usual satire and highly ironic characters. The structure is interesting as half of it, written in the first person, takes place in the year 2025 and this is interwoven with the other half, third person flashbacks to 1989. It works and eventually the narratives meet in the middle and it all makes sense.

The protagonist, Ty, is/was an eco-terrorist in the early 90s and this, combined with his tempe...more

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Jan 02, 2011 Spike rated it 3 of 5 stars

In this story, TC does a good moving the story between mankind's apathy towards the environment on one extreme and mankind-hating terrorists on the other. I didn't find this as overly political as some might perceive. It is simply a story of how the environmental ravages affect Ty, his ex-wife, daughter and other minor characters. The first few chapters clearly transcend the environment itself from mere setting to major character. The reader feels the environment in a very direct and real way. I...more

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Apr 24, 2013 Nancy Oakes rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-fiction, environmental-fiction

I really, really enjoyed this novel and can easily recommend it. You can check out the long version or stay here for a shorter one.

A Friend of the Earth is quite different from many environmentally- or eco-based novels I've read. While some of the normal dystopian scenarios are in place, and the author in his own way lets his readers know that there is little to no hope for the future, it also makes you laugh as Mr. Boyle puts irony ahead of heavy-handedness or preaching -- since, as the main c...more I really, really enjoyed this novel and can easily recommend it. You can check out the long version or stay here for a shorter one.

A Friend of the Earth is quite different from many environmentally- or eco-based novels I've read. While some of the normal dystopian scenarios are in place, and the author in his own way lets his readers know that there is little to no hope for the future, it also makes you laugh as Mr. Boyle puts irony ahead of heavy-handedness or preaching -- since, as the main character notes, it's much too late for that.

It's 2025, and Tyrone (Ty) Tierwater works as the caretaker of a private collection of animals. Ty, in his 70s, has a good gig working for a millionaire pop star who's been trying to save some of the last critically-endangered animals before they're gone for good. As a result of global warming and the collapse of the biosphere, these days, floods, rain, heat and nightmarish winds are the norm. Ty lives a simple life, taking care of the animals and then going out for the occasional drink of sake, but that all changes when one day, without warning, his ex-wife Andrea shows up with news that a writer is interested in penning the story of their daughter Sierra. But it's not the only reason she's there -- she has plans to restart Earth Forever!, the environmental-activism group they were part of in the past, "for the survivors." Andrea's return is what prompts the story of Ty's former days as a monkeywrenching member of the group, complete with berets, raised fists and acts of ecotage, at a time when "to be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people." As the narrative goes back in time, it reveals not only the motivations behind Ty's actions (which may not be quite what you'd expect), but also how eventually he came to sacrifice much more than he bargained for in the process of doing his part in saving the planet. It's a wonderful book, much less heavy-handed than I expected from its beginning.

One of the messages to be found here is that we're all involved in a paradoxical relationship with our planet's future: progress gives us the little gadgets and gizmoes we love and demand, but at the same time our consumer habits are partially to blame for the planet's woes; we also care about what happens to the environment, but at the same time few people these days are going to go live completely off the grid in total tune with nature. It's all about compromise. These points are illustrated amply and ironically throughout this novel, which I only put down reluctantly when forced by outside circumstances to do so.

It's pleasantly way better than what I first expected after reading the cover blurb, and while it tended to receive lower star ratings from most reviewers, I recommend it highly. I think it hit me long after I'd put down the book just how cool it really is. (less)

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Apr 04, 2011 Amber rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: library

I started it not knowing what to expect. The reviews on the back of the book said things like entertaining and imaginative and verbally exuberant. And all of those things are absolutely true, yes, but they don't cover it. It was prophetic, maybe? I don't want it to be, but the way things are going, who knows?

Set in 2025, in a world ravaged by the effects of climate change, it's a convincing portrait of what our future could look like. It was impressive, how he stayed so true to popular American...more

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Jan 20, 2009 Michael rated it 3 of 5 stars

Interesting and possibly realistic view of the future. Ultimately, there are a couple things that I couldn't shake, and they prevented me from enjoying the book more than this. The setting was too near in the future (2025) for me to consider it a true attempt at portraying the future. I tried to pretend that T.C. meant 2075, but in the end, the real date undermines his credibility. And if he meant not to be overly serious, than the book could have used more humor. T.C. describes his outlook of t...more

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Dec 30, 2012 Esther rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I was raised an active ecologist and used to participate in demonstrations against extension of airports, against the building of nuclear power plants and many more good reasons when I was but a kid. I have learned very early that these actions did nothing but give the participants a good conscience – until they are turning on the electricity from the nuclear power plant or go on vacation leaving from the new runway.
This book has shattered the little of the hope for a green rebellion and turnar...more I was raised an active ecologist and used to participate in demonstrations against extension of airports, against the building of nuclear power plants and many more good reasons when I was but a kid. I have learned very early that these actions did nothing but give the participants a good conscience – until they are turning on the electricity from the nuclear power plant or go on vacation leaving from the new runway.
This book has shattered the little of the hope for a green rebellion and turnaround of the society I had left by telling you that whatever effort you put into saving this earth’s doomed fate, it will not stop the world as we know it from going down. The world Boyle pictures for us to come is depressing: meteorological instability, circumstances almost impossible for human life to endure, most of animal species all but disappeared from the earth. Being asked by one of his favorite enemies, the main character answers the following: “And what did you accomplish?” […] “Absolutely nothing” – but he would do it all again.
Ty Tierwater has believes and will go for them, whatever the odds, whatever the risk, whatever the chances of success, whatever the price. This is what made him my hero of this story despite the fact that he is mainly living a miserable life in miserable conditions, that he lost everything he ever loved and owned, that his second (out of three) wives seems to me an annoying, self-centered and egoistic bitch who keeps on coming back to destroy his life ever so much more and still he cannot let go of her and this is only one of the big character flaws he shows all through the course of the story. To me, however, he is the image of power of endurance, following his conscience without detour and doing what he deems best. I would love to have a chat with a guy like him.

Besides this, I found the way the story is built extremely interesting and was very intrigued by the different perspectives. In “now-time” around 2025 it is written by a first person narrator and becomes a narrative in the third person perspective in the parts that are related to his past. A very accomplished approach in my opinion.

My first but quite probably not my last T C Boyle novel. (less)

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Jul 25, 2011 Ian rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: environment, fiction

This book successfully uses fiction as social commentary on the environmental history and politics of America. The writing is smooth and the imagery evocative - the crisp and cool mountain air of the sierra nevada forests at the end of the last century in stark contrast to what the future in 2025 could very likely be: charred, dusty and yet filled with violent storms and extreme weather, a world largely bereft of wildlife, where swathes of forests lie destroyed. Indeed, Boyle portrays a bleak, s...more

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Oct 08, 2011 Andy Gibb rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

An impressive dystopic vision. How could anyone write the future otherwise? Just choose an eco-disaster from the menu, which is a long one. In this case, global warming and mass extinction in 2025 as a gross human population encroaches on the last wild places. Plus a smattering of industrial "accidents". That's for openers.

The central character, and narrator, is tending a zoo of animals close to extinction. Not cuddly animals but those that only a mother could love (I'm sure that's Boyle's phras...more An impressive dystopic vision. How could anyone write the future otherwise? Just choose an eco-disaster from the menu, which is a long one. In this case, global warming and mass extinction in 2025 as a gross human population encroaches on the last wild places. Plus a smattering of industrial "accidents". That's for openers.

The central character, and narrator, is tending a zoo of animals close to extinction. Not cuddly animals but those that only a mother could love (I'm sure that's Boyle's phrase somewhere) and many of them killers. Will they make it to whatever the other side of the environmental breakdown will be?

Another major theme is our hero's past radicalisation into an eco-terrorist. (And we could model any sort of terrorist similarly.) It's not those who recruit him to the E.F.! cause who send him off the rails. Quite the reverse: they try to rein him in. But his treatment at the hands of rednecks, police and courts set him on the path of revenge. Incidentally E.F. stands for Earth Forever (curiously a Bulgarian outfit) but I'm sure it's an alias for Earth First! Even down to the clenched-fist logo and the exclamation mark.

Boyle litters the text with some pithy lines that raise issues: "...to be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people." It's the language of war. If Bush could declare a war on terror, the environmentalists can declare their own conflict. If they need to: by most parameters people already are at war with the planet - conquest, rapine, annexation. It's all there.

"...if a baby and an anteater fell in a drainage ditch ... the baby would have to be sacrificed." To transplant this 2025 scenario to the present, replace anteater by tiger, panda or California condor. (Respectively 3200, 1600 and 384 left in the wild.) How many babies are there? Babies who will turn into 7,000,000,000+ people? Look at all those zeroes; 2 million times more humans than tigers, for instance. If 2,000,000 babies and a tiger fell in a drainage ditch...

By about half way I wasn't sure where the story was going plot-wise but as a dramatisation of the shit that's coming our way and the 99% apathy about it, the book had me. And the drama hits its moment of pathos at about the nine-tenths mark.

This is a slight plot spoiler but you can see it coming: one of the animals eventually kills, so they all have to die. And this is how we'll wipe everything out: as soon as any species conflicts with us, it won't matter that it's near-extinct. We'll kill it. The perfect example in action now? Those upper-class twerps who killed the polar bear a while back. Boyle has this part of the book spot on.

There's not much hope here. Nor should there be. We're hitting a resource crunch and the seventh cavalry of science won't rescue us this time.

Read it and weep.(less)

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Aug 21, 2011 Kelly rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is the third TC Boyle book that I have read. The others being The Tortilla Curtain and The Women. I expected to like The Women, as I am a big Frank Lloyd Wright fan, but found that I just couldn't get into it. Something about the timing of writing it backwards. Anyway, I find that I much more enjoy TC Boyle when he is writing about an issue as he is in The Tortilla Curtain and in A Friend of the Earth. Whether I agree with his take or not, I find that he presents the issues well in the cont...more

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Aug 07, 2012 William rated it 3 of 5 stars

I gave it a low rating from my usual higher ratings, perhaps because it was a bit less serious than I might like....but I liked it.
from goodreads
In the tradition of The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the universal questions of human love and the survival of the species. In the year 2025 global warming is a reality, the biosphere has collapsed, and 75-year-old environmentalist Ty Tierwater is eking out a living as care-taker of a pop star's priv...more

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Dec 07, 2008 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Imagine a near future in which weather patterns have gone completely haywire, most animal species have gone extinct, meat is a delicacy only for the very rich, the forests are almost completely gone, the world population has exploded, and a woman you once loved has come back into your like. That is the world that T.C. Boyle envisions. The protagonist has been an evironmental activist all of his life and saw his daughter die in service to the ecological movement. He lives out his young-old years...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Mel rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

For some reason I started this book thinking it was going to have a comedic tilt to it, some humor to lessen the weight of fear it stirs up in one's mind when battling the topic of the world after climate change. But there was not any obvious comedy, not even a little bit. The book was cynical, angry, biting, and very depressing. That's not to say it was bad; it was well-written, the characters had substance, and there was enough plot to make me want to keep reading. But I felt my heart turning...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Geoffrey Benn rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is the first book by T.C. Boyle that I’ve read, and it was fantastic. The book follows Tyrone Tierwater as both a 1990s radical environmentalist/eco-terrorist, and as the keeper of a menagerie of exotic, nearly extinct animals for a movie star in 2025 – after global warming has destroyed much of the natural world through violent weather and drought. The 1990 sections follow the increasing extremism and anger of Tierwater, which leads to him being jailed, the death of his daughter, and the e...more

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Aug 03, 2009 Chip rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

TC Boyle is a fine writer, and I had no idea when I picked up this book where it would take me. The plot had me questioning my views on parenting, environmentalism, global warming and man's place in the universe before I was finished. In addition, there were two or three times the plot had me squirming uncomfortably as I realized the story was taking me places emotionally I didn't want to go, such as facing the loss of a child (I hope I never have to). To get to the end of the story I had to pus...more

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Jun 30, 2011 Tom rated it 4 of 5 stars

"To be a friend of the earth you have to be an enemy of the people " a phrase that gets reiterated throughout this novel. It is scathing look at our species current destruction of our planet as we expand our families and further deplete our natural resources so that generations to come will have less space and more heat. Of course it is just fiction like Orwells 1984, but as we look at our current escalating population numbers and see all of the strange meteorological catastrophes of 2011, one c...more

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Jul 12, 2011 tagesmann rated it 4 of 5 stars

It's 2025. Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater is eking out a bleak living in southern California, managing a pop star's private menagerie, holding some of the last surviving animals in the world. Global warming is a reality. Back in the twentieth century, Ty had been an ecoterrorist for Earth Forever! and his principles had seriously endangered the lives of both his daughter, Sierra, and his wife, Andrea. Now, when the past seems far behind him and he is just trying to survive in a world cursed by s...more

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Jan 26, 2013 Kevin rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: california, environment, ficton

A really complicated book, not in the sense of being unable to understand the plot or being confusing. It’s the motivations and character’s emotions. The collapse and ultimate futility of the environmental movement is the theme, I guess. A little sad, a little hopeless. What comes out, it seems, is that the human spirit can carry on even in the face of ungodly destruction, but to what end? Quite cynical or maybe it’s just disillusionment or hopelessness on Boyle’s part. But a really good book, n...more

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Mar 01, 2012 Brian rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have read and enjoyed much of T.C. Boyle's work, but this novel is one of his lesser accomplishments. I was nearly halfway through the book before the plot really started to take off, and the protagonist never really managed to grab me. While I do strongly believe that global climate change is real, that human activity is the cause, and that we need to take drastic action to curtail the damage, his vision of a future total environmental collapse seems rather shrill. I strongly recommend most o...more

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Mar 17, 2011 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

I saw Boyle on a talk show so I ordered this off of ABDBOOKS for $1. That was one well spent buck. Set about 20 years in the future Boyle manages to spin social and environmental concerns into something that is never ham handed or preachy but just breathtaking. The writer knows and loves his characters like Tye who starts out an environmentalist and winds up an eco-terrorist. I think the reason he does not come of as smug or preachy is he really believes it is game over. Some new political party...more

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Feb 10, 2010 Rod rated it 5 of 5 stars

THIS REVIEW IS UNFINISHED

The ‘hero’ of this book is Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, a U.S. citizen born in 1950, half Irish Catholic and half Jewish. There are two narratives, that of 2025, when the environment is shot, and earlier years which explain how Tierwater is in the pass we find him now, looking after wild animals for a one-time pop star, Maclovio Pulchris, usually referred to as Mac.

‘Because to be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people.’ (page 44, Bloomsbury paper...more

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Aug 03, 2009 Melanie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Over the past few days I've been thinking about why this book didn't quite do it for me. All the great elements are there: dystopic future, animals, technical descriptions of eco-sabotage, and Boyle's excellent sentences. Yet this book lacks psychological complexity and no amount of poignant plotting and idiosyncratic voice could make up for it. I saw the complexity of the relationships and I knew what the author wanted me to feel, but in the end I couldn't tell how the characters themselves fel...more

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Dec 05, 2012 Daniel rated it 4 of 5 stars

As with most of his novels Boyle weaves a great story as experienced by a cast of unique and very colorful characters. In this novel of global warming / climate change on speed we get the story of the devastation brought about by over consumption and over population as experience by an eco-terrorist a couple of earth mothers and a very thinly disguised Michael Jackson. Scariest part of the novel is that it begins with unceasing rain on the CA coast......not unlike today's weather headlines.
Grea...more

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Oct 27, 2012 M.E. rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-and-reviewed

To read my complete review, please visit my blog http://maryellenherrera.com/2012/10/2...

A Friend of the Earth is an interesting, kind of dismal story about a man dealing with his past problems while living a routine existence – until his ex-wife comes on the scene and rocks his mundane world with the glories of yesterday and the promise to help return meaning to his uneventful life. The author sets the stage of his story in the future and gives the reader a disheartening account of how bad the...more To read my complete review, please visit my blog http://maryellenherrera.com/2012/10/2...

A Friend of the Earth is an interesting, kind of dismal story about a man dealing with his past problems while living a routine existence – until his ex-wife comes on the scene and rocks his mundane world with the glories of yesterday and the promise to help return meaning to his uneventful life. The author sets the stage of his story in the future and gives the reader a disheartening account of how bad the world has become. 2025 is a world where many animals and aquatic life are extinct, global warming is a reality, and the earth is populated with people who have a nonchalant attitude towards this grimly future. The main character, Tyrone Tierwater lives in this world and at one time fought against those who mistreated the earth. Unfortunately, because of his involvement with the a group called Earth Forever!, his life is changed and he finds himself an outcast of society and the law. Will all his endeavors really help in making Earth a better place to live?

The opening chapter of the book captured my interested, but due to the gloomy outlook on life it soon became a depressing read. That’s why I welcomed the portions of the book that told about the past; even when the circumstances were dire, these parts of the story still held hope and the characters still believed that they could change the future in a positive way. I guess that is why the present story told in 2025 was so gloomy – they were now in the future and discovered their past actions really had no positive effect on the future they were now living in.

This dismal outlook was one of the reasons I walked away from this book a little torn; not really hating the story but not really liking it either. I understand why the atmosphere of the book is drab and the mood surrounding the story of Ty and the life he lives in the future is discouraging. I believe this bleak setting is intended by the author as a way to really get the reader to think about their actions and how it affects the earth. That future world of 2025 in the book could just be our future world; if we let our unconcerned attitude about the environment go unchecked. Yes, this book is more than a story to entertain. It’s a lesson too – a good lesson but one that was smothered in the story.(less)

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Mar 16, 2011 Clint rated it 4 of 5 stars

this was a quick and fun? read. The story itself was a interesting take on an environmental fiction, with the story deeply focused on character development, letting the details of the environmental collapse that lead to the current storyline fill in the slowly, and develop itself organically. Frequently, I find books that bounce around among different time lines very distracting - having to refocus every time this occurs. I didn't find that to be the case in this story, although the time line ch...more

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Jul 28, 2010 Evan rated it 4 of 5 stars

That set him on fire, all right, that set him off like a Scud missile, all thrust and afterburners and calamitous rage.

Revenge fantasies got you nowhere. Despair did, though. Despair got you to submit to the gravitational force and become one with the cracked leather couch in front of the eternally blipping TV in a rented house on a palm-lined street in suburbia.

Perspective hurts. Live in the present, that's what I say, one step at a time, and forget nostalgia, forget history, forget the sketchy...more

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Feb 02, 2011 Steev Hise rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Steev by: guy mcpherson

Shelves: after-the-fall, own-it, novels, fun

Once again I've encountered a book that is about issues I'm extremely interested in and concerned with, but the formal characteristics of the writing are problematic to me. I'd never considered reading any of T.C. Boyle's work, though I'd heard his name quite a bit. Then I heard about this book and its subject: a washed-up old environmental activist trying to survive in a 2025 world ravaged by the effects of the global climate change he had been trying to fight in his youth. I eagerly snapped up...more Once again I've encountered a book that is about issues I'm extremely interested in and concerned with, but the formal characteristics of the writing are problematic to me. I'd never considered reading any of T.C. Boyle's work, though I'd heard his name quite a bit. Then I heard about this book and its subject: a washed-up old environmental activist trying to survive in a 2025 world ravaged by the effects of the global climate change he had been trying to fight in his youth. I eagerly snapped up a copy.

It turns out that Boyle does a pretty decent job envisioning that future situation - although he doesn't touch the 2 other interrelated future dooms we're heading for, economic collapse and peak oil. My main problem, though, is his writing. He seems to be considered a serious literary-type author, I thought, but I couldn't help getting caught up in the various flaws of his prose. For instance, he tends to be one of those writers that employs useless, over-the-top metaphors (a metaphor, to my mind, should be used to compare one thing the reader is less familiar with to another thing that the reader is more familiar with, as a way of conveying more clearly what that first thing is. But Boyle is fond of the reverse - using something even less familiar as a metaphor, which might serve to illuminate the narrators inner monologue but doesn't work as effective description). He also seems uncertain whether he wants to use first person or third person, and whether he's writing a surreal satire or a piece of science-based realism.

I still enjoyed this book, and it really deserves more like a 3.5 star rating, but in the end it didn't satisfy, neither from an aesthetic, i'm enjoying-the-pleasure-of-reading-good-writing standpoint nor from a this-adeptly-explores-the-concepts-I-want-it-to standpoint. Maybe I was just looking for a different book. Nevertheless, the concept of "Tortilla Curtain", another of Boyle's books, intrigues me just enough to want to risk another go at his work, and I guess that's the best indicator of my opinion.(less)

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Sep 09, 2010 Geoff Wyss rated it 2 of 5 stars

All I could manage of this one was 100 pages. I wanted to like it--its premise of near-future ecological collapse feels relevant and laudable--but the prose is so lazily executed that it begins to feel like an insult. The book is full of cheap narrative gambits and inexact metaphors and faux-ominous filler of this sort: "He doesn't like this. He doesn't like it at all." Or, much worse: "Because I'm bored. Because I've got nothing to lose. Because I know I can put the brakes on if I have to. Roll...more

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About T.C. Boyle

T. Coraghessan Boyle (also known as T.C. Boyle, born Thomas John Boyle on December 2, 1948) is a U.S. novelist and short story writer. Since the late 1970s, he has published eleven novels and more than 60 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is married with three children. Boyle has been a Distinguis...more

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Quotes from A Friend of the Earth

“To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of man.” — 9 people liked it

“Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain.” — 5 people liked it

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