When the Killing's Done

T.C. Boyle excels at rollicking black humor, and humanity's attempt to control the environment provides him with ample fodder. Alma Boyd Takasue is a National Park Service biologist who is bent on ridding the islands off the coast of Santa Barbara of vermin to return it to a natural environment for the native birds and foxes. (Such hubris!) Opposed is the equally zealous but more unpleasant David LaJoy, who believes that killing any animal is wrong. Narrator Anthony Heald dials up the irony an extra notch. He employs a strident tone to capture LaJoy's volatility and slightly increases his pace for LaJoy's inner dialogue, though which the biologist expresses constant irritation with life's inconveniences. Heald's hippy-dippy voice for LaJoy's friend, Wilson, is marvelous fun, although Takasue's New Zealand feral pig-hunting ally is less successful. A.B. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Starred review from December 20, 2010
Boyle (The Women) spins a grand environmental and family drama revolving around the Channel Islands off Santa
Barbara in his fiery latest. Alma Boyd Takesue is an unassuming National Park Service biologist and the public face of a project to eradicate invasive species, such as rats and pigs, from the islands. Antagonizing her is Dave LaJoy, a short-tempered local business owner and founder of an organization called For the Protection of Animals. What begins as the disruption of public meetings and protests outside Alma's office escalates as Dave realizes he must take matters into his own hands to stop what he considers to be an unconscionable slaughter. Dave and Alma are at the center of a web of characters—among them Alma's grandmother, who lost her husband and nearly drowned herself in the channel, and Dave's girlfriend's mother, who lived on a sheep ranch on one of the islands—who provide a perspective that man's history on the islands is a flash compared to nature's evolution there. Boyle's animating conflict is tense and nuanced, and his sleek prose yields a tale that is complex, thought-provoking, and darkly funny—everything we have come to expect from him.

July 1, 2011

The Channel Islands off the coast of California provide the backdrop for PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author Boyle's 13th novel, following The Women (2009), also available from Blackstone Audio. The book begins with a shipwreck that tests the mental and physical strength of one of the novel's tough female characters and then moves back and forth in history, telling the story of a family and the irrevocable ways its members both affect nature and are affected by it. Awash in recurring images of violence and death, the narrative is arranged as separate stories that swirl around the family like the waters around the islands, offering up a tangled net of conflict among incompatible interests: ecological well-being, animal rights, and the human impulse toward intervention. Actor/narrator Anthony Heald's (anthonyheald.com) mellow voice helps to weave the story into a cohesive, gripping drama and provides a welcome respite from the sometimes exhausting action of the plot. Recommended. ["Whether we regard this work as environmental fiction or a philosophical treatise on land ethics, Boyle has delivered yet another quandary to ponder," read the review of the Viking hc, LJ 1/11.--Ed.]--Beth Traylor, Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libs.

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