Erstellt am: 4. 5. 2012 - 17:42 Uhr

You and Me Baby Ain't Nothing But Mammals

An encounter with TC Boyle, writer, ecologist, pessimist and would-be rock star.

“It`s just amazing. It`s ridiculous. It`s as if Samuel Beckett had invented this preposterous chain of events.” Leaning forward, vigorously stirring his Assam tea, American writer TC Boyle is explaining the true life events which inspired his latest eco-themed novel When the Killing's Done. Lean and energetic despite his 65 years, Boyle looks like a rather endearing fox, with his narrow features and reddish hair. Which is appropriate because his novel is based on what might seem an arcane dilemma: is it OK to shoot a common pig to save a rare fox?

The novel follows a project to protect the delicate eco-system of the spectacular rocky Channel Islands off the coast of California. Scientists want to cull or trap relatively new arrivals from the mainland such as rats, wild pigs. Most controversially these also include golden eagles that need to be trapped and removed in order to protect indigenous species including the less aggressive bald eagles and the cute, unique dwarf foxes which Boyle describes with childish enthusiasm as “like something dreamed up by Walt Disney”.

The project might make scientific sense as the robust pigs can thrive anywhere but the foxes can only survive in their native habitat, but it faces stiff opposition from animal rights activists, including an ageing, grumpy dreadlocked activist called Dave LaJoy

It`s a compelling story on an unexpected theme. “I`m a natural story teller,“ TC Boyle tells me when I meet him in the shaded courtyard of a Viennese hotel, “I`m interested in things because they provoke a story. I suppose as a challenge I could probably write a story about anything and make it interesting.”

But he has been exploiting the rich seam of ecological stories for years. “Man’s vexed tusslings with the natural world”, as the New York Times aptly puts it, has been Boyle's literary obsession for years, most explicitly in his global warming sci-fi novel ''A Friend of the Earth.'' Boyle's central concern is the clash between our limited resources and our limitless appetites and selfishness – a clash that he holds responsible for “every war and every cataclysm”.

With seven billion people now sharing the planet, he fears we are headed for an “ecological catastrophe for our species”, rushing towards the sort of bleak future imagined by his fellow author Cormac McCarthy in his futuristic 2006 novel The Road, set in a land filled with ash and devoid of living animals and vegetation. According to TC Boyle, you don’t have to be a cynical oil-baron to be an enemy of the environment: “Just to be born in our society is to be a criminal in terms of the environment. We do tremendous damage to it with everything we do, from eating in a restaurant to driving our cars. But we have to decide where to draw the line. What are we going to do? All live like monks? It's absurd!”

If you realize that man is the enemy of the Earth do you have to hate man to love nature? In When The Killing's Done, animal rights activist Dave LaJoy rails against homeless people who he sees as parasites and treats waitresses like dirt. “He hates people but he wants to save every animal,” chuckles his creator Boyle, “including all the rats!” You can understand the scientists' frustration with this loud-mouthed, self-righteous man. And yet, in spite of his faults, LaJoy also has a valid point. As he is escorted out of a public information evening, he shouts to the scientists on the podium, “And who appointed you to play God?”

Boyle's books on ecology are full of nuances, “I like to deal with an issue by dramatizing it and broadening the debate. I'm not writing a polemic, I'm giving a lecture, I'm just trying to understand things and then I give them to you.”

This is also true of his illegal immigration drama “The Tortilla Curtain”, set in LA, which has become a standard teaching text on the US school curriculum. “When I first arrived in L.A. I was shocked by the prejudice and the fact that people had no more of a position on the subject of immigration than yes or no.” There is once again a strong ecological theme. A couple of desperate Mexican immigrants, driven into the woods for shelter and forced to forage for food, inadvertently start a forest fire and eat endangered birds.

In his books, Boyle manages to inhabit characters from both sides of the debate – although, ridiculously, he has drawn criticism for even presuming to imagine what it must feel like to be poor Mexican. It is impossible not to empathize with the Mexican immigrants Candido and America, who are driven from their jobless southern Mexican homes in search of a viable future and every day face incredible hardship, discrimination and bad luck with stoicism and resolve. But it is just as interesting to see the weakening of US citizen Delaney, a naturalist with strong intellectual ideas about the need for tolerance. Yet his liberal ideas disintegrate when he feels his own personal property and safety is threatened by the new arrivals. An environmental writer, who celebrates the glory of nature for a living, Delaney is outraged by the immigrants' role in the destruction of nature and he becomes an enraged racist – like LaJoy ultimately putting nature above humanity.

To watch the intellectual fall of an essentially good man is as troubling as following the calamities faced by the migrants.

Boyle insists there are no easy answers when it comes to the issue of immigration, but he hopes that by fleshing out the drama he can provoke people to think more deeply about the issue. He adds: “We are an animal species and we are all one. The definition of a species is that you can interbreed and have viable offspring. We had separate races and different ethnic identities because the world was big. Now it is much smaller and much more mixed. You can put up a wall 6,000 feet high and it's not going to keep people out. Like any other animal species we will go where the resources are.”

Boyle has always been obsessed with the natural world. He writes in the morning and then, like Delaney in the Tortilla curtain, he spends the afternoons hiking through the wilderness observing nature. His says he grew up running wild through nature “like Huckleberry Finn” and this love of the great outdoors has stayed with him ever since. It's been an American literary tradition since 1854 when Henry Thoreau, who is quoted in several Boyle books, turned his two years living in a hut in the woods into the classic book Walden. Hemingway's short stories rely on his ramblings in the forests and fishing in the pristine lakes of Michigan. “I'm part of that tradition,” says Boyle, “I guess I could be called a green writer from the beginning because I am fascinated with biology, ecology, island bio-ecology and all of those things because I just love being out of doors.”

Boyle says that he is addicted to writing. A prolific author, he has published 13 novels and spends the down-time between those large projects writing short stories: “Writing is my chief way of communicating with the world,” he says with a smile. I point out that he doesn't fit the cliché of the tortured artist squeezing words out like blood from his soul. “I'd like to be the tortured artist,” he laughs, “but life is torture enough!”