Perspective: Aftermath of a ravaged world

As novelist T.C. Boyle imagines it, California in the year 2025 is rain-sodden, filthy, overpopulated and disease-plagued. There is no wildlife, no forest and the most exotic meal to be had at a restaurant is farm-raised catfish washed down with greasy sake.

Depending on your opinion of Californians, this may sound like the start of a promising book. Except for one thing. The rest of the planet isn't any better off.

"People thought the collapse of the biosphere would be the end of everything, but that's not it at all," Boyle says in A Friend of the Earth. "It's just the opposite -- more of everything, more sun, water, wind, dust, mud."

Boyle understands there is only one thing scarier than the end of the world: having to live in a ravaged world that doesn't end.

The "friend" of Boyle's title is Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, a strip-mall developer turned eco-terrorist, who at the beginning of the novel is 75 years old (a member of the "young-old" segment of society) and managing an unusual menagerie of endangered species for a very unusual employer.

His boss is Maclovio Pulchris, a Michael Jackson-inspired rock star right down to the cosmetically altered tip of his nose. Pulchris wants to save what's left of the world's animals (and there aren't many). He has assembled lions, brown hyenas, warthogs, peccaries and a nasty beast called a Patagonian fox so that he can breed them at his sprawling compound.

"I want to save all the animals nobody wants," Pulchris says, explaining why he got rid of his peacocks and pot-bellied pigs.

Pulchris sounds like a crazy anti-Noah as an unending rain steadily obliterates all things man-made and natural. When the weather turns really bad, he and Tierwater bring the animals inside where they live in the themed rooms of his mansion.

You just know the lions are never going to be completely happy holed up in the Curt Cobain Grunge Room.

Salvation, if there can be any, must come from a restoration of the natural order. Enter Tierwater's ex-wife, Andrea Cotton. Twenty-five years earlier, when the earth still seemed as if it could be saved, the two of them had been the leaders of Earth Forever! They once stood side by side, cemented up to their ankles, to protest logging in Oregon.

Andrea's return occasions Tierwater's remembrance of his years spent monkey-wrenching logging equipment. Principled as the protest might have been, all was not Edenic in the ranks of EF! The reader discovers quickly the only thing messier than the environment are the lives of the environmentalists. Political infighting, sexual jealousy, prison time and the death of Tierwater's daughter, a martyr to the environmental cause, ultimately sunders EF!

It all sounds believable enough, even handled with Boyle's manically overdescriptive writing style. How many other authors have achieved such popularity despite lines such as "the smell of her plumbs some deep inversion layer in the unstirred lake of my memory?"

But Boyle oversteps when he archly labels his book "fiction?" At best, it's a cute and harmless contrivance. At worst, it's a setup for a comparison to the truth that Boyle cannot satisfy.

Boyle has made adventurous and humorous use of history in his novels before -- the Scottish explorer Mungo Park and the bowel-obsessed health guru Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. The only difference here is that he is forecasting rather than recasting. But when the subject is one as highly politicized as the environment, close readers are likely to be less forgiving of Boyle's liberties.

Even if you are inclined to believe that the world collapses in the next 25 years, it would have been helpful if Boyle had filled in just how this cataclysm came to pass in such a short period of time. There is a nostalgic treatment of the world in the 1990s and the hellacious vision of the world in 2025 but nothing in between.

For all his environmentalist leanings, Boyle makes it clear that Tierwater's best intentions couldn't save the world. Still, he has survived, as has the planet. The sorrow comes with the realization that Tierwater must live in a world he loved but no longer recognizes.

Bill Duryea is a Times staff writer.

A Friend of the Earth

By T.C. Boyle

Viking, $24.95.

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