When the Killing's Done

  • T. C. Boyle
Viking: 2011. 369 pp. $26.95 Bloomsbury: 2011. 384 pp. £18.99 9780670022328 | ISBN: 978-0-6700-2232-8

Islands are like novels. They are self-contained worlds, populated by a manageable cast of characters. And most have narratives that hinge on a series of incidents, accidents, coincidences, births and deaths.

Species arrive by flying, rafting, swimming — and by luck or by accident. The order in which they show up determines much. Early colonists can claim ecological niches and put down roots. But in limited spaces, existence is tenuous. One bad year, and every member of a species may die. Thus, on small islands, as in novels, the death of a single individual can change the trajectory of the whole.

T. C. Boyle's new novel, When the Killing's Done, centres on an archipelago off the coast of California called the Channel Islands. The plot mirrors real campaigns there to remove introduced animals in a bid to protect native species.

Eradicating some species to protect others, such as California's island fox, can stir controversy. Credit: G. H. H. HUEY/CORBIS

In 2001, rats were poisoned on Anacapa Island by the National Park Service to prevent the rodents from eating native birds' eggs. Pigs were eradicated from Santa Cruz Island a few years later to protect indigenous flora and deter golden eagles — lured to the island to gorge on pork — from enjoying a side dish of endangered island fox.

Not everyone was behind the push to restore the archipelago to its pre-human glory. In 2003, The Washington Post told of animal-rights activist Rob Puddicombe scattering “vitamin-fortified kibble” around Anacapa in a bid to help the rats there survive — vitamin K being a partial antidote to the rodenticide that was used. His act was in vain. Today Anacapa is rat-free.

Puddicombe explained his actions to the reporter. “To me, the idea of species is just an abstract concept. Species go extinct all the time,” he said. “These animals are here and alive now. Their lives have value.”

Boyle uses the conundrum of killing individuals to save species as the central conflict of his novel. He counterpoises a fictionalized version of Puddicombe, David LaJoy, with a fictional National Park Service employee in charge of eradications, Alma Boyd Takesue. Add mother–daughter relationships, shipwreck, deaths and Boyle's trademark detailed descriptions of characters deciding to have a drink, and you have the book.

The philosophical questions are not explored in the depth that some might hope for. The protagonists only briefly reflect on their opposing positions, and the reasons they came to their beliefs are not fleshed out. LaJoy and Takesue are presented as equally intransigent, equally misanthropic, equally angry and, for me, equally unlikeable.

These two remain more or less ideologically static throughout the book, but plenty happens. There's science, crime, pig-hunting, sheep-farming and accidents — lots of accidents. Boyle's characters run afoul of the forces of nature nearly as often as they decide to crack open one more cold beer. “People fall from cliffs, people drown, people get drunk and do violence to one another, bones break, hearts give out, and it's all in a day's work for the Park Service,” muses Takasue as she watches tourists clomp all over Santa Cruz.

Some accidents bring people to the islands; others end in death, just as nature's accidents and extinctions determine what species we consider “native” to particular islands. Near the novel's end, Boyle brings a new species to Santa Cruz, raising intriguing hypothetical questions. If a new creature appeared on the island, would scientists assume that humans had imported it and summarily remove it? Or would they leave it alone? And does it matter how it got there? Is there any sense in which ecologists can not meddle with the islands they take care of?

The characters in When the Killing'sDone are in mourning for a simpler past. “How much better would it be if nobody ever came out here and the islands could exist in the way they always had. Or should have,” thinks Takasue. But, as always, we showed up. Island biogeography may be a matter of accident, but humanity is the inevitable mishap.