YOU ARE HERE: LAT HomeCollectionsRats When the Killing's Done A Novel T.C. Boyle Viking: 384 pp., $26.95 Mudslides, earthquakes, floods, fires — nothing quite gets T.C. Boyle's juices going like a natural disaster putting his characters through the wringer. His new novel, "When the Killing's Done," opens with an action set piece that is unusually fraught and tense even by the author's nearly apocalyptic standard. It's 1946, and Tilden Matthew Boyd (better known as Till), his brother Warren and Till's wife, Beverly, take a boat from Santa Monica and cruise to Anacapa, one of the Channel Islands off Oxnard and Santa Barbara. The first day on the ocean passes smoothly, happily, but Beverly — who doesn't know she's two months pregnant — wakes in her bunk the next morning and finds everything changed: A "great angry fist seemed to be slamming at the hull with a booming repetitive shock that concussed the thin mattress and the plank beneath it and worked its way through her till she could feel it in the hollow of her chest

, in her head, in her teeth." The weather has "gone crazy all of a sudden," and they face mountainous seas with "black volcanoes of water." made to measure curtains wokinghamThe boat founders, and they launch the skiff, which is soon capsized. curtain tie back hooks b&qBoth men are lost, drowned, but Beverly survives, clinging first to wreckage, and, when the ocean decides to give her something back, to the buoyancy provided by a Sears, Roebuck ice-chest. villula curtainsShe's adrift, still far from any land; othello grommet curtainsshe's bleeding and she knows sharks may come. studio cable curtain rod system jcpenney

Burned by the sun, parched with thirst, Beverly is washed ashore, only to be trapped by jagged rocks and sheer cliffs. harcourt tab top curtainsAt last she swims to a safer haven, makes land, climbs away from the ocean, finds a shack. blackout curtains for darkroomIs her ordeal done? Of course not — she's in a T.C. Boyle story. "It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust, the shapes manifesting themselves all at once — furred, quick-footed, tails naked and indolently switching, a host of darkly shining eyes fastening on her without alarm or haste because she was the interloper here, the beggar, she was the one naked and washed up like so much trash — she let out a low exclamation. This wonderful, funny, scary, shivery plot punch line, delivered with casual panache after 35 pages or so of vivid action, sets up the rest of the novel.

Those rats, Boyle explains, infested Anacapa Island (which is indeed where Beverly was beached) after fleeing another wreck back in the Gold Rush days, and they've been multiplying and destroying the previously indigenous wildlife ever since. Beverly's granddaughter, Alma Boyd Takesue, who would never had made it into Boyle's Darwinian narrative universe had not her grandmother been such a tough and resourceful survivor, is now a biologist, heading up the efforts of the National Parks Service to eradicate the rats with poison pellets dropped by helicopter, thus restoring Anacapa's original eco-system. Alma is neat, smart, accomplished, a likable woman — but she's uptight. Her antagonist is Dave LaJoy, a Santa Barbara businessman who has made a small fortune selling sound systems and is now a nut for animal rights. The boorish and ironically named LaJoy bristles with rage, hates Alma and wants to save the rats on Anacapa and then the feral pigs on nearby Santa Cruz Island that are Alma's next target.

LaJoy hassles Alma — he heckles her at meetings, gets her car vandalized, plants a spy inside her office. And as Alma moves ahead, so LaJoy, with his folksinger girlfriend Anise, launches ever crazier, more elaborate counterplots, inveigling a journalist and mounting forays into the islands themselves. It all ends in tragedy and irony, violence springing, as so often in Boyle, from the misplaced longing to do good and the intransigent need to be right. Or, as LaJoy has it, "never crap out, never say die, never, above all else, admit you're wrong." It's a dinosaur formula that leads to extinction. This novel, his 12th, like a previous one, "The Tortilla Curtain," is based on real events and conflicts. That's to say, rats did populate Anacapa as described here, and the National Parks Service did provoke a brouhaha after dropping rat poison on the island in 2001. Boyle is, in this respect, a traditional, even old-fashioned writer, determined, as Dickens was, to entertain and bring the news.

His jazzy, slangy, iridescent style could scarcely be more of the moment, however: "He watches with real interest, the fringe of her skirt thrust up in back and her breasts gone heavy with gravity … and how long has it been since they've had sex? Was it last weekend? Seizure Led to FloJo's DeathHis 104 scores make his caseRestaurant review: South Beverly GrillBrutal Murder by Teen-Age Girls Adds to Britons' ShockComaneci Confirms Suicide Attempt, Magazine SaysWhen T.C. Boyle swaggered onto the literary scene in the 1980s, brandishing flamboyantly bizarre short stories in one hand and wildly satirical novels like Water Music and Budding Prospects in the other, the exuberance of his sentences was often more impressive than the depth of his characterizations. He took a moralist's aim at big targets—imperialism, class oppression, racial prejudice—but his stingingly funny dissections of human selfishness, self-delusion, greed, and misdirected ambition were rarely complicated by such awkward sentiments as compassion or complicity.

Unlike plenty of his characters, however, Boyle has grown up a lot. Watching empathy infiltrate his pages has been one of the pleasures of following his prodigious career, which includes nine story collections and now a 13th novel. Beginning with The Tortilla Curtain, a novel about illegal immigration published in 1995, Boyle has made a sustained effort to move beyond flat-out satire, disciplining his excesses, enlarging his sympathies, and honing his central preoccupation: the gap between our utopian dreams and the world's messy reality. The dreams can be social—Alfred Kinsey's mission to report honestly on human sexuality in The Inner Circle, Frank Lloyd Wright's desire to create new spaces for living and working in The Women—or they can be radically antisocial: the ecoterrorists in A Friend of the Earth proudly declaring themselves enemies of the people. Always they fall short, as when members of a 1970s California hippie commune in Drop City confront their own materialism and nature's brute force in the Alaskan wilderness.

When the Killing's Done is Boyle's finest novel yet. Depicting a fierce conflict over the best way to protect the natural environment of two islands off the California coast, he takes the long and tragic view. Of course our efforts to clean up the messes we've made are flawed, he suggests as he surveys more than a century's worth of attempts to make those wild islands serve people's economic demands. We are flinging ourselves at a natural order perennially evolving to take advantage of our missteps. If that makes it sound as though humor has been eclipsed by homiletics—well, in a way it has. There are some funny moments: Boyle is still Boyle, and he was never one for preaching, but the overall mood is rueful and somber. Alma Boyd Takesue is in charge of National Park Service programs to eradicate rats that threaten Anacapa Island's native bird population and to eliminate feral pigs that are wiping out the unique dwarf foxes on nearby Santa Cruz Island. (Both rats and pigs are non-natives introduced by human agency;

Boyle's description of their history and of the programs to exterminate them is factual.) Her nemesis is Dave LaJoy, founder of the group For the Protection of Animals. "Nazis, that's what you are," he proclaims. "Kill everything, that's your solution." Urged to be civil, he retorts, "I'll be civil when the killing's done." The killing, needless to say, is never done. Nature is as murderous as human beings, and neither is likely to change. Boyle makes this grim argument as he interweaves Alma and Dave's running battles from 2001 to 2007 with the stories of two previous generations. With a majestic opening epigraph from Genesis, God bidding Adam and Eve to "replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing," Boyle aims high with his drama of human hubris matched by nature's indifferent savagery, and it works. Dominion, we come to realize, is what both Alma and Dave want, though neither acknowledges it. Before their struggle begins, however, the novel's first chapter plunges us into the ordeal of Alma's grandmother aboard a small craft beset by a violent storm in the Santa Barbara Channel in 1946.

Washed ashore on Anacapa, Beverly finds food and water in an empty cabin, and fights off hordes of the rats her granddaughter will later eliminate. By the time a Coast Guard cutter rescues her two weeks later, Beverly has come to hate the island for "its changeless, ceaseless, ongoing and never-ending placidity and indifference and sheer brainless endurance." Against this backdrop of implacable nature, Alma's faith in benevolent stewardship of the land and Dave's aggressive insistence on the sanctity of all animal life are equally suspect. Boyle would once have been content to expose their delusions with exaggerated strokes. Now he makes sure we see that each has a point and each has in some fundamental way missed the point. Alma is the more appealing character, painfully aware of the irony inherent in killing some animals so that others may survive. She feels justified by her mission: to re-establish the natural harmony that existed on Anacapa and Santa Cruz "before humans began altering it."

But pursuing this godlike goal renders her tone-deaf to the people around her. She fails to pick up glaring clues that her secretary is feeding information to For the Protection of Animals. She's the second woman in the novel to get pregnant while faithfully employing birth control (a small but representative instance of Boyle's skillful use of incidental details to build his case for the unruly force of nature), and then proves to be an overconfident social engineer in her own life: "we're going to need to get married," she announces to a boyfriend who has dropped numerous hints that he's not particularly committed to their relationship. Alma's [ws2]  belief in her power to control is her biggest blind spot; Dave is right to sneer that she belongs to "the kind of people who think they can manipulate nature and make a theme park out of the islands." That's not the only venomously accurate remark made by Dave, who voices the novel's bitterest perceptions. He rubs our noses in the gruesome physical details of the exterminations Alma is anxious to euphemize: rats slowly bleeding to death from pesticides, hogs shot and left rotting, their eyes pecked out by ravens, their carcasses infested with maggots.

He sees human beings dealing destruction wherever they go. Here's a man who looks at cars lined up at a red light and smells "the exhaust coming out of their tailpipes in the last petrochemical gasp … the death of the earth, the death of everything." Everything enrages him, from a fat waitress to a long line at Home Depot. His surname is a nasty joke. Joy is an emotion that Dave LaJoy never feels. Dave is a classic Boyle crazy, expressing with naked honesty every repulsive emotion the rest of us labor to repress, embracing extremism no sane person would venture. What Boyle has done that he wouldn't have bothered with 30 years ago is show us how miserable Dave is, how insecure, how completely incapable of finding happiness in the natural world he's vowed to defend by any means necessary. But understanding does not equal forgiveness. Dave's bedrock selfishness is exposed when he finds two raccoons tearing up his expensive new lawn. The black humor of this protector of animals phoning Animal Control is vintage Boyle, as is Dave's impulsive decision to take the trapped raccoons and release them on Santa Cruz.

He knows the havoc invasive species wreak, and he doesn't care; it's totally credible that this solipsist can't resist the urge to save his lawn and get even with Alma. Yet every incident Boyle depicts in the story of the islands over two centuries supports Dave's assertion that humans should not tinker with nature. Alma gets gentler treatment than he does, not because her vision of the world is necessarily more accurate—she badly misreads a surprising final development on Santa Cruz—but because her partial view is spiritually healthier than his. Out on the islands, she feels "the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were breathing in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself." Alma's mistakes arise from her desire to honor that connection with nature, to undo the damage human beings have inflicted. Dave, driven by fury and incapable of empathy, ultimately thinks only of himself. Of course, that's also true of the ravens and maggots feasting on the dead hogs of Santa Cruz.