When the Killing's Done

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More About This Book

Overview

T.C. Boyle's most powerful and fully realized work yet-"terrifically exciting and unapologetically relevant" (The Washington Post).

Principally set on the wild Channel Islands off the coast of California, T.C. Boyle's new novel is a gripping adventure with a timely theme. Alma Boyd Takesue is a National Park Service biologist spearheading the efforts to save the islands' native creatures from invasive species. Her antagonist, Dave LaJoy, is a local businessman who is fiercely opposed to the killing of any animals whatsoever and will go to any lengths to subvert her plans. As their confrontation plays out in a series of scenes escalating in violence, drama, and danger, When the Killing's Done relates a richly humane tale about the dominion we attempt to exert, for better or worse, over the natural world.

  • When the Killing's Done
    When the Killing's Done  

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

Environmental struggle, sometimes by proxy, is at the core of T.C. Boyle's hauntingly relevant new novel. At first glance, the scene of When The Killing's Done appears to be peripheral: Santa Barbara's Channel Islands are relatively isolated and sparsely inhabited. However, the ferocity of the local battles between rival environmentalists and animal activists exemplifies the wars of nature itself. In this aptly titled fiction, Boyle represents their opposing views not as sterile intellectual debates, but as vital decisions in our fight for survival. Vivid characters; plausible conflict.

Publishers Weekly
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. (Feb.)
More Reviews (4) Fewer Reviews
Library Journal
Boyle is no stranger to environmental fiction. His 2000 novel, A Friend of the Earth, chronicles the exploits of Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, an ecological martyr. Here, Boyle delves deep into environmental philosophy by creating two characters passionate about saving animals but in diametrically opposed ways. The tension is centered on the population of rats on the Channel Islands off the coast of California. Alma, a biologist, is attempting to exterminate the rats to prevent further damage to the fragile ecosystem on the island. Dave, an animal rights activist, is equally passionate about all the inhabitants of the island, including the rats. Boyle's characters are challenging, to say the least, for they are complicated and often inconsistent. While the desire to preserve and protect nature does not defuse many of the conflicts between the two, their ethical similarities invite the reader to question where these two ideologies ultimately clash. Boyle uses the conflicts between his characters to explore the changing philosophy of human and animal relationships. VERDICT Whether we regard this work as environmental fiction or a philosophical treatise on land ethics, Boyle has delivered yet another quandary to ponder. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/10.]—Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH
Kirkus Reviews

A provocative premise delivers considerable literary dividends.

In one of his richest and most engaging novels, Boyle(The Women,2009, etc.) characteristically combines a dark sense of humor and a subversive streak as he illuminates the dark underbelly of all-American idealism. The focus is California environmentalism, the idealization of the natural world, which is more often dangerous, even deadly, than idyllic. The novel puts two characters on a collision course, with each discovering in the process the complexities and ambiguities of their polarized opposite positions. Dr. Alma Boyd Takesue, a native Californian of mixed American and Japanese descent, spearheads a program for the National Park Service aimed at eliminating various species that have been imported to the Channel Islands, near Santa Barbara, to preserve the ecosystem and allow indigenous species to survive. Her antagonist is Dave LaJoy, head of the PETA-like FPA (For the Protection of Animals), who is both a dreadlocked hipster and a successful businessman. He is also a dislikable loudmouth—ravaging restaurant personnel, throwing his weight around, bullying Alma, whom he once dated. But he has a point: "He believes in something, the simplest clearest primary moral principle: thou shalt not kill." And his activism has spurred plenty of press coverage that demonizes the National Park Service's initiative, accusing Alma of trying to "manipulate nature and make a theme park out of the islands." Nature being nature, it refuses to obey the dictates of either Alma or Dave, as their battles escalate over rats, feral pigs and rattlesnakes, and the plot naturally comes to encompass human death (and birth) as well. A richly detailed back story provides additional context, as Boyle nimbly plays chronological hopscotch, showing how both these islands and these people came to be how they are. The novel never reduces its narrative to polemics—there are no heroes here—while underscoring the difficult decisions that those who consider themselves on the side of the angels must face.

Narrative propulsion is laced with delicious irony in this winning novel.

Barbara Kingsolver
Character, science and history co-evolve marvelously here in a tale of fanaticism gone literally overboard. Boyle's devotees will find everything they expect in the way of manic plotlines, flamboyant obsessions and cool comeuppance outlandishly delivered…This is a smart and rollicking novel, with suspense and shipwrecks galore, in which no character ever quite understands the stakes and no challenge is perfectly answered.
—The New York Times
Ron Charles
…Boyle's terrifically exciting and unapologetically relevant When the Killing's Done…demonstrates that it's possible to write an environmental novel that provokes discussion instead of merely thumping away on conventional wisdom…When the Killing's Done presents a smarter, sharper vision of our environmental challenges than [Boyle's] doomsday novel, A Friend of the Earth. By corralling all these pigs, rats, dwarf foxes, golden eagles and human beings into one stormy tale, he's created a raucous exploration of the clumsy role that even the best-intentioned people play in these fragile environs.
—The Washington Post

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780670022328
  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
  • Publication date: 2/22/2011
  • Pages: 369
  • Sales rank: 93,035
  • Product dimensions: 9.10 (w) x 6.22 (h) x 1.30 (d)

Meet the Author

T. Coraghessan Boyle
T. Coraghessan Boyle

T. C. Boyle is the author of eleven novels, including World's End (winner of the PEN/FaulknerAward), Drop City (a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award), and The Inner Circle. His most recent story collections are Tooth and Claw and The Human Fly and Other Stories.

Biography

In the interest of time and space, it might be easier to note the writers that T. C. Boyle isn't compared to. But let's give the reverse a try: Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Evelyn Waugh, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis, Thomas Berger, Robert Coover, Lorrie Moore, Stanley Elkin, Tom Robbins, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Don DeLillo, Flannery O'Connor.

Oh, let's not forget F. Lee Bailey. And Dr. Seuss.

Boyle, widely admired for his acrobatic verbal skill, wild narratives and quirky characters (in one short story, he imagines a love affair between Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev's wife), has dazzled critics since his first novel in 1981.

Consider this example, from Larry McCaffery in a 1985 article for The New York Times: "Beneath its surface play, erudition and sheer storytelling power, his fiction also presents a disturbing and convincing critique of an American society so jaded with sensationalized images and plasticized excess that nothing stirs its spirit anymore.... It is into this world that Mr. Boyle projects his heroes, who are typically lusty, exuberant dreamers whose wildly inflated ambitions lead them into a series of hilarious, often disastrous adventures."

But as much as critics will bow at his linguistic gifts, some also knock him for resting on them a bit too heavily, hinting that the impressive showmanship attempts to hide a shortage of depth and substance.

Craig Seligman, writing in The New Republic in 1993, pointed out that "Boyle loves a mess. He loves chaos. He loves marshes and jungles, and he loves the jungle of language: luxuriant sentences overgrown with lianas of lists, sesquipedalian words hanging down like rare fruits. For all its exoticism, though, his prose is lucid to the point of transparency. It doesn't require much deeper concentration than a good newspaper (though it does require a dictionary)."

Reviewing The Tortilla Curtain in 1995, New York Times critic Scott Spencer scratched his head over why Boyle had invited readers along for this particular ride: "Mr. Boyle's fictional strategy is puzzling. Why are we being asked to follow the fates of characters for whom he clearly feels such contempt? Not surprisingly, this is ultimately off-putting. Perhaps Mr. Boyle has received too much praise for his zany sense of humor; in this book, that wit often seems merely a maddening volley of cheap shots. It's like living next door to a gun nut who spends all day and half the night shooting at beer bottles."

Growing up, Boyle had no aspirations to be a writer. It wasn't until his studies at State University of New York, where he as a music student, that he bumped into his muse. "I went there to be a music major but found I really couldn't hack that at the age of 17," he told The Writer in 1999. "I just started to read outside my classes -- literature and history. I wound up being a history and English major; when I wandered into a creative writing class as a junior, I realized that writing was what I could do."

He then started teaching, in part to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam War, and later applied to the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop.

After a collection of short stories in 1979, he released his first novel, Water Music, called "pitiless and brilliant" by The New Republic, and has shuttled back and forth between novels and short stories, all known for their explosions of character imagination. Mr. Boyle's literary sensibility ... thrives on excess, profusion, pushing past the limits of good taste to comic extremes," McCaffery wrote in his 1985 New York Times piece. "He is a master of rendering the grotesque details of the rot, decay and sleaze of a society up to its ears in K Mart oil cans, Kitty Litter and the rusted skeletons of abandoned cars and refrigerators."

In his review of Drop City, the 2003 novel set in California commune that won Boyle a National Book Award nomination, Dwight Garner joins the chorus of critical acclaim over the years – "Boyle has always been a fiendishly talented writer" – but he also acknowledges some of the criticism that Boyle has faced in these same years.

"The rap against Boyle's work has long been that he's a sort of madcap predator drone, raining down hard nuggets of contempt, sarcasm and bitter humor on the poor men and women in his books while rarely giving us characters we're actually persuaded to feel anything about," he wrote. "This is partly a bum rap -- and I'd hate to knock contempt, sarcasm and bitter humor -- but there's enough truth in it that it's a joy to find, in Drop City that Boyle gives us a lot more than simply a line of bong-addled innocents led to slaughter."

But perhaps the neatest summary of Boyle's work would be from Lorrie Moore, one of the novelists to which he has been compared. In a 1994 New York Times review of Boyle's short story collection Without a Hero, she praised Boyle's "astonishing and characteristic verve, his unaverted gaze, his fascination with everything lunatic and queasy."

"God knows, Mr. Boyle can write like an angel," she continues later, "if at times a caustic, gum-chewing one. And in this strong, varied collection maybe we have what we'd hope to find in heaven itself (by the time we begged our way there): no lessening of brilliance, plus a couple of laughs to mitigate all that high and distant sighing over what goes on below."

Good To Know

Boyle changed his middle name from John to Coraghessan (pronounced "kuh-RAGG-issun") when he was 17.

He is known almost as much for his ego as his writing. "Each book I put out, I think, 'Goodbye, Updike and Mailer, forget it," The New Republic quoted him as saying. "I joke at Viking that I'm going to make them forget the name of Stephen King forever, I'm going to sell so many copies.

Boyle's philosophy on reading and writing, as told to The Writer: "Good literature is a living, brilliant, great thing that speaks to you on an individual and personal level. You're the reader. I think the essence of it is telling a story. It's entertainment. It's not something to be taught in a classroom, necessarily. To be alive and be good, it has to be a good story that grabs you by the nose and doesn't let you go till The End."

    1. Also Known As:
      T.C. Boyle
    2. Hometown:
      Santa Barbara California
    1. Date of Birth:
      December 2, 1948
    2. Place of Birth:
      Peekskill, New York
    1. Education:
      B.A. in music, State University of New York at Potsdam, 1970; Ph.D. in literature, Iowa University, 1977
    2. Website:
      http://www.tcboyle.com/

Customer Reviews

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See All Sort by: Showing 1 – 20 of 35 Customer Reviews

  • Posted October 12, 2011

    Current, ironic and very interesting

    The topic here is the war between PETA-like folks and Park Service folks. The focus is on a couple of little islands off the coast of California near Santa Barbara, which is the city where Boyle lives.

    Is the killing of any animal wrong, always? The vegetarian/vegan locals say yes. This puts them in direct opposition to the people in the Park Service who want to kill off an invasive rat population on one island and an invasive feral pig population on another. On the second island there is also, at one end, a sheep ranch; the sheep are also ranked as invasive. The rangers want the land returned to the foxes that were there before. (But how did *they* get there?) The cost is in the millions.

    Boyle balances the claims and the personal shortcomings of the characters on both sides. As in all his work, he is merciless in his dissection of a character's rationalizations and hypocrisies. I think he's a little harder on the ones united For the Protection of Animals, in that they are more self-righteous and also oblivious to the environment in any larger sense beyond animal protection. Their rather snotty leader owns a chain of electronics stores, for example.

    The most sympathetic character by far is Alma Boyd Takesue, a half-Japanese American whose grandmother, pregnant with her mother, survived a shipwreck off the coast of one of the islands back in 1946. The novel opens with a harrowing account of her experience. True, Alma's work with the Park Service makes her the one that pays the killers, as she sees clearly. But returning the islands to their "original" state is worth it, isn't it? Boyle lets the reader decide.

    There are a number of violent encounters in here, aside from the elimination of several species; feelings run high. Yours will be engaged, I'm sure.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted February 13, 2012

    Nice treatment of a current hot topic

    A decent read

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