Boyle was the hero of my reading back in the Naughties. Water Music, Drop City, East is East, Riven Rock - I read them and I loved them. I wasn't so keen on The Inner Circle and Talk Talk, but even so I"m amazed that I haven't posted any Boyle reviews on this blog, which means I haven't read any Boyle in the last ten years.
A Friend of the Earth dates back to the turn of the century, though this paperback was only published in 2019. It is set at the end of the Eighties and into the Nineties, and in 2025. Our hero Ty Tierwater starts off as a widower raising his daughter and tending to the dilapidated shopping mall bequeathed by his developer father. His midlife crisis comes when he meets Andrea, ecology radical and future wife, who transforms Ty and daughter Sierra into eco-warriors and, in Sierra's case, eco-martyr.
Forty years later seventy-five year-old Ty is tending endangered ugly animals on the estate of rock legend Maclovio Pulchris. His warrior days are done. His back aches. Then Andrea reappears with news that someone wants to write about Sierra. Ty's passions are roused - for Andrea, anyway. But in the post-Millennium years the climate has gone to hell in a handcart. Even California is blasted by seemingly never=ending storms. The eco-hippies were right all along, but it's surely too late to do anything about it now.
That's the premise with which Boyle works his characteristic anarchic carnage. His prose is fabulous, his exploration of his characters as extensive as the stage he has set for himself. His technique - using first person for Ty now and third person Tierwater for Ty then - is so seamlessly done that we barely notice. Nobody, but nobody does this kind of novel better. Boyle is of his time yet stands squarely in the ultimate literary tradition of cowed nobodies oppressed by greater towers who nevertheless find the strength within themselves to rise up and howl.
Absolutely magnificent - and disconcertingly prescient.
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