Boyle Predicts a Dark Future 'When the Killing's Done'

‘The environment’ is a loaded term. Bring it up in conversation and expect absolutism on either end of the political spectrum—or, the listener will just tune out completely. But in the past five years, the environment has surprisingly dropped out of the national conversation, a trend that quickened about contemporaneously with the 2008 recession. Environmental consciousness, it seems, is a luxury. Reflecting on the attention paid to Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” it is clear that the environmental zeitgeist has subsided. With this in mind, T.C. Boyle’s latest novel, “When the Killing’s Done,” is like a relic from days of yore. Here is an intelligent novel that not only succeeds as a work of fiction, but also aims to raise cultural awareness about the fine distinctions between environmental conservation movements.

“When the Killing’s Done” is essentially an extended love letter to the Channel Islands off the Santa Barbara coast in California. Returning to the multiple perspectives he uses in his previous works, Boyle introduces and develops an array of characters, who all have some intimate association with the islands. Boyle spans ages and generations in this portrait of the locale. But the core dramatic tension is between National Park Service biologist Alma Boyd Takesue and local businessman Dave LaJoy. Alma wants to systematically remove ’invasive’ animal species such as rats and wild pigs from the islands, while LaJoy, a self-appointed protector of all animals, will stop at nothing to save them.

The narrative structure is digressive, which allows the reader to understand the full complexity of the various characters’ relationships with the Channel Islands and with one another. As in his last novel, “The Women,” Boyle has a strong interest in the female experience, especially when his female characters come into conflict with men who are unreliable or overly confident of their knowledge and abilities. He conveys the individuality of his characters in a remarkably fluent manner by changing his intonation from character to character from the breathless exuberance of Alma’s grandmother, Beverly, to LaJoy’s ramblings, which invariably escalate into rage.

“When The Killing’s Done” has many commendable qualities. His writing exudes a passion for storytelling and nature alike. But at times the scope of the novel stretches the reader’s stamina to its limit. Boyle’s digressions into his characters’ psyches gives the novel an immense emotional depth, but sometimes punctures the narrative’s momentum. For example, when Beverly is shipwrecked at sea, Boyle embarks on an extended description of her memory of seeing a shark strung up on the pier. His descriptions, while deeply impacting, tend to become redundant.

Boyle’s heavy-handedness extends to the plot, as well: the tussle between Alma and LaJoy is transparently allegorical. Alma, representing order, is so rigid about population control that at the start of the novel she includes humans in her list of ‘parasitic’ species. The troublemaking LaJoy expresses a more liberal temperament by sporting dreadlocks, a renegade attitude, and fury: “Yes, he took his blood-pressure medication and no, he didn’t take—will never take—the Xanax.” LaJoy is clearly the more imbalanced of the two. But as any high-school chemistry class will tell you, entropy dictates that natural systems tend towards greater disorder. The conclusion is forgone: once the forces of nature have been set in motion, it is impossible to stop them. Boyle illustrates this with the counterpoint of the island of Guam, which is irrevocably overrun with snakes.

Contingent to the issue of uncontrollable nature is the degree of human prerogative in ordering the natural environment. This is expressed in Alma and LaJoy’s escalating quarrel; Alma wants to atone for humankind’s interference and destruction of nature. Her version of ecology is ‘shallow,’ focusing on concrete, achievable goals. But even her solutions are inadequate. One of the cleverest tricks of the book is that at first it seems like Alma’s only interest is eradicating the rats—but then she wants to remove pigs. It becomes clear that, despite the novel’s title, the killing will never be done. And even though she is successful in eradicating target animals, removing them from the already changed environment has unforeseen effects. LaJoy wants to leave everything as it is, which is arguably not such a bad solution, since Boyle implies that the island can never be restored to its original state anyway. Boyle’s outlook on the conflict is ambiguous and suggests that there is no right answer.

The ambivalence of the novel leaves the ultimate moral of the story up to the reader. Boyle, who indulges in gorgeous descriptions of the islands, is always quick to undercut any incipient sentimentality about them. Despite the fact that nature has been changed as a result of human intervention, Boyle shows that nature is not a passive victim. Humanity’s seemingly firm mastery over the natural world is illusory, despite the reassurances of running water, electricity, and available shelter. A lobstering cruise out to the Islands turns deadly when the weather turns; ignoring warning signs by crumbling cliffs leads to a character falling off a cliff. Although all the characters in the novel are aware of and—to varying degrees—embrace the unfriendly side of nature, they cling to the idea of wilderness as Eden. They allow natural beauty to lull them into a false sense of tranquility. But that is, in a way, Boyle’s point: removed from nature, human existence is safer and more predictable, but so antiseptic that nothing is really left: hence the constant attraction of the inviolate and remote Islands. Boyle does not browbeat the reader into environmental consciousness, but rather engages her in relevant environmental issues.

—Staff writer Catherine A. Morris can be reached at morris6@fas.harvard.edu.