ERADICATION: A Fable, by Jonathan Miles
In the early aughts, teams of sharpshooters were dispatched in helicopters to eliminate a grave threat to the Galápagos: wild goats, hundreds of thousands of them. Introduced centuries ago by passing whalers, the goats had proliferated by eating the forests bare and wreaking havoc on the ecosystem. Extinction loomed for native wildlife, particularly the islands’ famous tortoises.
After considering nature’s inherent flux, mankind’s often misguided interventions and the likely futility of preserving some Edenic ideal, a plan to wipe out the invasive species went forward as the imperfect answer to a moral quandary succinctly described by a local conservationist, Karl Campbell: “Are we going to let tortoises go extinct? You know, there’s thousands of islands around the world that have goats on them.”
“Eradication,” Jonathan Miles’s excellent fourth novel, begins with a scenario so similar that it likely owes a debt of inspiration to the Galápagos project or some comparable program. As the story opens, Adi, a grieving, divorced schoolteacher, accepts a job from an unnamed foundation offering him a chance to save the world (or at least “a worthy knob of it”). This turns out to mean spending five weeks alone on the invented Pacific island of Santa Flora with a high-powered rifle and enough bullets to exterminate thousands of destructive nonnative goats.
Once he’s on site, Adi’s inexperience often results in injury or ecological tragedy, as when a shot fired into the air causes a stampede that accidentally crushes the wing of a supposedly extinct ground-nesting warbler. After Adi finally manages a kill, eating the goat he has shot lays bare difficult emotions ordinarily obscured by bloodless, shrink-wrapped supermarket meat. He is left “chewing and crying at the same time, licking death from his fingers while telling himself … that everything he was doing, all of it, was right.”
It’s not only wildlife that vexes Adi’s efforts. Traversing Santa Flora’s mountainous terrain, he discovers two fishermen illegally slaughtering sharks to harvest their fins. Once confronted, the lead poacher rails against Adi’s task, claiming nature doesn’t care what lives and what dies. Only humans moralize and meddle. “Somebody in the government says we need more sharks,” the poacher argues. “And somebody else says we need fewer goats. … So they pay you for what you’re doing and for what I’m doing they try to seize my boat and dump me in prison for 20 years. Even though it’s the same thing.”
Threaded throughout the novel — which Miles helpfully terms a “fable” — is a patient, skillful reveal of the cruel death of Adi’s son and the resulting dissolution of his marriage, a fable within the fable that sharpens and complicates these finely drawn moral dilemmas. Partly because of his past trauma, Adi finds it intolerable to imagine a world without meaning: “If no order was articulable, then randomness was all there could be, fate as a dice roll. But what did that make Adi himself, crouched now behind his rifle — a mere instrument of dumb chance?”
Unlike the island’s goats, “Eradication” argues, human beings possess free will and the consciousness to recognize it; we alone agonize over the responsibilities arising from our agency. “The job is removing a malignant growth that’s been steadily erasing some of the most vulnerable and least studied flora and fauna on the bloody planet,” Adi’s employer instructs, trying to wipe away any moral culpability for the killings her foundation has ordered. “You could slaughter every last goat but you couldn’t eradicate the truth,” Adi counters much later, trekking the island one last time, loaded rifle in hand.
What truth does Adi mean? Perhaps only the answer to this question: Who or what is the real cancer he should destroy in order to save Santa Flora, this island synecdoche for the world?
ERADICATION: A Fable | By Jonathan Miles | Doubleday | 159 pp. | $25
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