Review by Booklist Review
It's the year 2026, and Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, a 75-year-old eco-warrior who's done prison time for his assaults on lumber and power company equipment, muses, "The environment is a bore. And nobody wants to read about it." True, if he means that no one wants to be preached to, but Boyle, an ingenious and masterful storyteller, has written an eco-novel so charged with suspense, drama, and ironic humor, and so alive with compellingly complex and maddening characters, no reader, no matter how environmentally apathetic, will be able to resist it. Laced with tributes to the great eco-writer Edward Abbey and the radical group Earth First! (fictionalized as Earth Forever!), Boyle's tightly written tale explores the paradoxes inherent in environmentalism. Ty, an heir to a shopping-mall fortune, turned his back on consumerism after his first wife died on a camping trip. Left to raise their daughter, Sierra, he eventually marries Andrea, an environmentalist who gets all three of them involved in extreme forms of protest. In searing flashbacks, Ty remembers 1989, when they cut a trench in a logging road in Oregon, filled it with wet cement, and planted themselves there. Later, Sierra achieves martyrdom after living in a "grand old cathedral redwood" to keep a lumber company at bay. Ty now battles the horrific storms and skin-blistering heat born of global warming as he oversees a menagerie of all-but-extinct animals owned by an eccentric and wealthy rock star, Maclovio Pulchris, a dead ringer for Michael Jackson. But their efforts, just like all of Ty's courageous but futile acts of "ecotage," are doomed to failure. No matter how fervent their beliefs, or extravagant their tactics, Boyle suggests, environmentalists will always be David facing the Goliath of corporate entities. And nature, a force of unfathomable power, will remain a source of astonishment and humility for our marauding species as long as we live. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Mordantly funny and inventive, this take-no-prisoners novel revolves around a few of Boyle's favorite themes: obsessive hygiene, compulsive consumerism, uneasiness in the natural world and fear of technology. As the Vonnegutishly named Tyrone "Ty" O'Shaughnessy Tierwater reminds readers, "to be a friend of the earth you have to be an enemy of the people." In the year 2025, Ty is 75, by contemporary standards a young-old man, and zookeeper for a private menagerie in Santa Ynez, Calif. Most mammals are extinct, and the environment as 20th-century humans knew it is destroyed. Besieged by floods, drought and Force 8 winds, people tramp through pestilential mud, eat farm-grown catfish and drink rice wine. In flashbacks from the frenetic 21st-century sections to Ty's past as a rabid environmentalist in the late '80s and early '90s, Boyle choreographs a syncopated dance, riffing on the mores and manias of environmental crusaders. To prove a point in their early campaign, Ty and wife Andrea spend 30 days naked and unprovisioned in the wilderness, emerging triumphant. But otherwise, Ty is subjected to a lifelong series of humiliations, and his forthrightness about them makes him sympathetic, while eco-warriors in general are skewered as relentlessly as the bulldozer-driven corporations. A bad time is had by all, most notably by Ty's daughter, the tree-sitting Sierra, who, unlike Julia Butterfly Hill (the real-life tree-sitter who surely influenced Boyle), does not descend from her perch to publishing contracts and public radio interviews. Boyle (The Tortilla Curtain) allows for a hint of redemption in the end, but his depiction of the cruel fate of humankindÄthe fate of monkey wrenchers, lumber companies, the not-quite-engaged and the engaged, tooÄis as unflinching as it is satirical. Major ad/promo; first serial to Outside magazine; 8-city author tour. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The year is 2025, and global warming is a catastrophic reality; most mammalian species are extinct. Tyrone Tierwater looks back to the late 1980s, when he first predicted that disaster would happen. Although it was his activist wife, Andrea, who initially goaded him into joining the ecoterrorist group Earth Forever!, Tyrone and his daughter Sierra quickly surpassed Andrea in their commitment to monkeywrenching. Tyrone was repeatedly arrested for criminal trespass and the destruction of property and ended up spending years in prison. Meanwhile, Andrea advanced in the movement's leadership council, and when her husband's antics threatened her position, she quickly divorced him. In retrospect, Tyrone realizes that history's having proven him right offers little solace for a wasted life. In his new work, Boyle (Riven Rock) mercilessly skewers developers and environmentalists alike; clearly, developers have trashed the planet, but Boyle also shows that Tierwater's monkeywrenching is partly destruction for its own sake, and Earth Forever! is more interested in protecting its own bureaucracy than the environment. Even Mother Nature comes in for a drubbing, as when a wealthy rock star is eaten by one of the animals in his private zoo. What results is powerful satire that rethinks the basic premises of Edward Abbey's classic The Monkey Wrench Gang, arguing that there are no quick and easy solutions. This book shows Boyle maturing from a glib comedic talent to a more serious novelist. Recommended for most fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/00.]DEdward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Boyle's eighth novel reenters the risky territory of social concern and criticism that has proved a trap for his least characteristic, and weakest, fiction (East is East, 1990; The Tortilla Curtain, 1995). In skillfully juxtaposed parallel narratives, reformed radical environmentalist Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater (the rhythm and ethnicity of whose name connote an authorial connection) speaks to us from the year 2025--alternating with the omniscient narrator who describes Ty's acts of ecoterrorism (mostly against California logging companies) as a member of Earth Forever! and their disastrous impact on his life and opinions. In the late 1980s, Ty, his militant wife and co-protestor/demonstrator Andrea, and their even more committed daughter Sierra (""so imbued with the principles of Deep Ecology she insisted on the ethical treatment not only of plants and animals, but even rocks and dirt"") erected human barricades, disabled construction equipment, and embodied ""statements,"" including a kind of Adam-and-Eve month in the woods and Sierra's encampment in a giant redwood tree, oblivious to both the machinations of loggers and her own safety. In 2025, Ty, now 75 and still at heart earth-friendly, manages a private menagerie owned by megamillionaire rock star Maclovio Pulchris--in a globally warmed world where entire countries have become swamps and deserts and continual flooding requires releasing animals from their cages: with predictable comic- horrible consequences. There's a lot to like in this bold accusatory book, because (as he failed to do in The Tortilla Curtain) Boyle locates the complex issue of exploiting people to protest the exploitation of nature in the vivid character of Ty, whose irascibility, genuine decency and courage, and sobered realization of the cost of their sacrifices (""There is nothing I want, except the world the way it was"") maintain a firm grip on the reader's sympathies. The comedy and color are muted, though still unmistakably present, in a daring story that blends the contrasting extremes of Boyle's energetic sensibility in a way that bodes well for his always interesting and highly readable fiction. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.