WHEN THE KILLING'S DONE

T.C.Boyle,

Bloomsbury - NZ$39.99

This is a remarkable novel which I enjoyed enormously. Superbly developed plot with memorable characters and a story that is largely built on fact with a little law, science and history skilfully blended in to boot.

First a little geography. The Channel Islands of California are eight islands split among the jurisdictions of three separate Californian counties. This story features the northern five islands which were made into the Channel Islands National Park in 1980. They are uninhabited, frost free, and are part of one of the richest marine biospheres in the world. There are many unique species of plants and animals to be found here, including a miniature fox and many birds. The islands have been called the American Galapagos.

The two islands featured in the book are directly off the coast from Santa Barbara.

Now Santa Barbara is the home of author T.C.Boyle where he has lived for many years. Since 1980 the National Park Service has been active in ridding these islands of rats, feral pigs and other unwanted introduced pests. This has involved poison drops and the employment of hunters. Although the programme was exhaustively researched and seems to have saved endangered ecosystems it enraged some animal activist groups opposed to the killing of all animals. There have been various standoffs over the years between the two groups which has been widely reported in the press.

Along comes T.C.Boyle who by skilful use of fiction gives us a more detailed view scrutinising the activities of both groups and developing a raft of wonderful characters including two leaders, Alma Boyd Takesue, a National Park Service biologist and spokesperson, and Dave La Joy, a successful businessman and founder/leader of the organisation FPA - For the Protection of Animals. This is an organisation that is happy to act outside the law to achieve their objectives. Observing the moral differences between these two is incredibly well portrayed by the author.

Although my sympathies were immediately with the National Park Service staff the characters are so well developed and detailed - we learn about their parents and grandparents, their upbringing, schooling, university successes, and the loves, successes and failures in their lives - that one ends up understanding the motives and ambitions, the how and why people of both camps become so passionate in their causes.

So the Channels Islands and in particular Anacapa and Santa Cruz islands become a sort of battleground between the two groups although much of the action is set in Santa Barbara where the characters live and work when not out on the water or on the islands.

A wonderful piece of fiction from one of my favourite contemporary authors, this is his 13th novel, he also has nine collections of short fiction to his name. He is a winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, has been translated in 27 languages and was recently conducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters.

I should add that the book includes maps of the Northern Channel Islands as well as individual maps of the two main islands featured on the book. Oh, and there are also a couple of New Zealand characters among the hunters.

Another thought - I like the way the author challenges me occasionally with words I don't often come across and sometimes have to look up to remind myself of their exact meaning  e.g. declivity, aleatory, salvatory, extirpated.

I reviewed this book this morning on Kathryn Ryan's Nine to Noon on Radio New Zealand National.