Plugs of Muscle

Joanna Kavenna

• A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle
  Bloomsbury, 275 pp, £15.99, October 2000, ISBN 0 7475 4753 X

The point at which the consequences of global warming will become inescapable is often placed around 2050. By then the world’s present population will, according to some estimates, have doubled. T.C. Boyle, in his new, provocative novel, A Friend of the Earth, brings Doomsday forward to 2025. It matters little what the oil-powered President does now, Boyle suggests: time has run out – no further preaching and petitioning can undo the devastation. The recklessness of corporations, the cowardice of governments, the myopia of the general public have ruined the planet. A Friend of the Earth skitters between the crucial ‘last chance’ decades in Boyle’s doom-teleology – the 1980s and 1990s – and 2025, when the former deserts of California have been freak-weathered into swamps, traffic inches along over-burdened freeways and the bedraggled remnants of the Earth’s wildlife have been repatriated from their now inhospitable natural habitats to the safari park of an ageing pop star millionaire, Maclovio Pulchris.