A devastating assessment of the conservation movement

When the Killing’s Done

TC Boyle

Bloomsbury, €9.58; no kindle (Ireland)

Review: Dan MacCarthy

Having eviscerated the hippy movement in Drop City, TC Boyle turns his focus on the conservation fraternity and brings his electron microscope of an argument to bear on its well-intentioned ethos. Iconoclast of social movements, Boyle ruthlessly hones in on infinitesimal cracks in an argument to expose any inherent flaws therein.

The novel is set in the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California where a colony of rats has taken up residence on Anacapa Island after a shipwreck had disgorged hundreds of their number to go forth and multiply. Years pass and rattus rattus has practically wiped out the native bird population and all but extinguished the intricate web of life living there for millennia.

Argument and counter-argument are counterpointed ’til the essence of one seems to form part of the other. Let’s face it, virtually any argument put up to such a scrutiny will fall apart. The question posed by the novel’s agent provocateur, Dave LaJoy, and possibly the narrator, is that this too is a natural occurrence and shouldn’t nature be allowed to proceed unhindered irrespective of the catalyst that brought about a change to the prevailing conditions?

Diametrically opposed to this position is conservationist Alma Takesue who, through the enforcement capacity of the parks and wildlife service, is enabled to carry out a programme of extermination of the rats and later a wild boar population that itself threatens to destroy other animal communities. When Takesue finds herself pregnant, her hitherto rock of a boyfriend Tim, flips and demands she terminate the pregnancy. He rails on about the world’s population passing seven billion and how it is unjustifiable to add to it. Alma, obviously an avid conservationist, is also a woman who happens to want to have children.

Boyle cleverly shows Tim and Dave to be flipsides of the same argument — zealotry. Dave wants to protect animals but is willing to see others wiped out for that to happen. He risks people’s lives in defence of his ‘cause’ and is eventually exterminated himself, along with three others, when a merchant vessel crushes his boat as he was attempting to populate the island with snakes and racoons. Not exactly natives to Anacapa Island.

Tim throws in his lot with Alma in what becomes a cause célèbre to save the indigenous flora and fauna from the rats. But as soon as their own fertility rears its head Tim isn’t seen for dust. Which makes you wonder at his modus operandi. Aren’t humans supposed to breed? Aren’t we too, supposed to overpower other species to allow us to survive? It wasn’t just his girlfriend’s pregnancy that irked him, it was anyone’s.

This suggests the Malthusian argument of population control where human numbers suffer ‘nosebleeds’ through plagues, famine war. A logical argument as long as you aren’t one of those to be counted out.

As an eco-thriller this is a devastating examination of the motives behind the conservation movement and the ends to which people will go to carry out their ambitions — though plenty of them are right-headed, not all are. An argument pinned on the wall.