Jonathan Miles’s new short novel Eradication: A Fable could be described by way of any number of genres. It resides comfortably at the nexus of nature-writing, philosophical allegory, and adventure story, and there is something of the danger of The Lord of the Flies here, and the deep capacity for reflection in Walden. Miles’s novelis a brilliant meditation on the place of humanity in a violent world, and yet at times the narrative buckles under the weight of its own philosophical themes.
The novel tells the story of Adi, a man with a strange job. An environmental agency in an unnamed Caribbean government hires him to live alone on a small island named Isla Santa Flora for five weeks, during which time he must kill its entire population of goats, about 4,000 animals in total. These goats are not native to the tropical ecosystem but were left there in the 19th century by whalers to provide meat for passing ships, and in the ensuing decades, the goats have destroyed the local flora and fauna. Adi has been provided enough food and water for his stay, a small hut to live in, and a single-action rifle with a powerful mounted scope. His employers assure him that by performing this task, he will be revitalizing a dying ecosystem, “rescuing one of the most devastated seabird habitats in the Pacific.” But he finds himself sympathizing with these innocent creatures he has been tasked with killing, and at the same time questioning the value of an ecosystem that maintains its balance by way of slaughter.
As Adi reflects on his situation, competing philosophies of nature begin to emerge. Is nature whatever happens to occur in the world, or is it a reality known through human perception and constructed by human intervention, and thus susceptible to the many prejudices found therein? Adi makes no pretense at consistency in taking on this question, or coherence in the carrying out of his task. He is distinctly human in that way, and more traumatized than most. As he treks around the island, taking stock, and building up the courage to start killing goats, we learn about the death of his child, his failed marriage, and his mostly unsuccessful attempts to comes to terms with these losses. In this way, Adi himself becomes subject to the brutality of nature, and to his own distinctly unfixed theories about it.
Adi’s situation seems to reside at the unholy intersection of scientific inquiry and violence. Meanwhile Adi himself has little capacity for either. A former schoolteacher and recognizably humanist in his temperament, he has no experience with hunting, camping, or scientific research and seems to have been hired for this job mainly because no one else wanted it. He is singularly ill-equipped for the task. But Miles’s canny treatment of Adi’s dilemma creates an easy bond between reader and protagonist. The reader feels Adi’s displacement in a world whose very nature is up for grabs.
If the novel were nothing more than Adi’s reflections on killing animals, the story could have easily suffered from over-abstraction. But he quickly comes into conflict with the only other inhabitants on the island besides himself and the goats, two poachers fishing for sharks to sell on the Chinese market. These are not men from Adi’s school of thought and have no scruples about cutting the fins from sharks’ backs and leaving them to die slowly. But as much as these poachers represent humanity as an apex predator, they also present Adi, the only other human on the island, with a problem about which version of humanity should hold sway, Adi’s compassion or their brutality. A complicated dance ensues between them. The poachers seem both threatened by the fact that Adi’s killing is sanctioned by the government and friendly toward the act of killing itself. By novel’s end, their conflict culminates in a way that opens up more questions than it answers.
As already mentioned, Eradication clearly exists in the tradition of novels like The Old Man and The Sea or The Lord of the Flies – at one point in the story, Adi creates a wind instrument from the horn of a goat, recalling the latter novel’s famous conch shell. Where the conch acts as a symbol of human communication and the authority derived from such, Adi plays his flute in accompaniment with the bleating of goats. But it’s the fact that this novel draws such easy comparisons with these classics that perhaps figures as its biggest weakness. To put oneself in the company of Hemingway and Golding, Miles would have to be very self-assured in the power of his narrative; this book is, perhaps, not quite as qualified to stand among those giants as the easy discourse between them would suggest. Comparing Miles with Hemingway, if such references did not jump from the page, would probably be unfair, but given that such references do seem to stand out, it’s only appropriate. This is not entirely to Miles’s benefit.
One example of a flaw that appears by way of such comparisons is the somewhat uneasy balance between Adi’s inward musings about his situation and the allegorical power of the novel’s narrative action. (Mason, my Third Person Limited co-host, and I discuss Eradication in an upcoming episode as a possible example of “the new literalism,” a term from film criticism about overbearing metaphors). Reading a fable, one wants to work out the back and forth between object and meaning; allegory works best when the figurative connection between its vehicle and theme go mostly unstated. For example, one doesn’t want to be told in Animal Farm that Napolean the pig represents Stalin. But Miles’ novel at times edges into this sort of explication, where Adi liberally telegraphs the interplay between his surroundings and their meanings. This makes for a diminished experience, especially when compared with similar stories like those mentioned above, which do not fall into the same trap.
But there are also passages of extraordinary descriptive and lyrical power, some of the best nature writing I have read. If some of the allegorical portent of Eradication suffers under the weight of the interiority of its main character, the sheer beauty of its setting makes up for it. Not bad for a novel that clocks in under 200 pages.
