Eradication by Jonathan Miles

So how do you save it? He asked.

Save?

Santa Flora, he said, and gesturing vaguely toward her paperwork he added, the world.

Oh. Right. A crisp nod. Well, the good news is that it's actually quite easy. You remove the goats.

Remove them how?

By eradicating them.

Eradicating them how?

You shoot them. Her mouth a straight line. All of them.

Who does?

Well, you, she said. If you turn out to be a fit for the operation.

That's the job? His mouth a circle. Shooting goats?

No, she said. That's not the job. She drew a long steeling breath through her nose. The job is saving one of the Pacific Ocean's most unique and vibrant ecosystems from very certain destruction. The job is removing a malignant growth that's been steadily eradicating some of the most vulnerable and least studied flora and fauna on the bloody planet. The job is rescuing one of the most devastated seabird habitats in the Pacific. The job is preventing the assured extinction of at least eight more species of birds and five more species of reptiles and an entirely unknown number of plants. That's the job. That's what it is.

Eradication by Jonathan Miles follows the story of Adi, a grieving private school teacher who takes a job for five weeks on a remote desert island in the Pacific Ocean hoping for a chance to heal. Instead he is given a top of the range hunting rifle, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and instructions to spend the next month systematically culling the island's invasive goat population.

What follows in this novella is a fairly dull exploration of mankind's impact on the natural world. Adi doesn't want to kill the goats, the goats are pretty indifferent to whether he kills them or not. During his isolation he of course begins to appreciate that humans were the bad guys all along.

It's a fairly quiet book, mostly existing in Adi's head as he explores the island. It's a brave decision to base something almost wholly on an internal thought process of a man that only has goats, shrubs and sand to look at. Had there been a more creative or abstract approach to the story it could have been quite the journey, but Eradication is largely a prosaic and dull experience. The only moments that pulled me back were his interactions with two particularly grubby fisherman, illegally poaching shark fins of the coast of the island. They made for great antagonists and at least gave the story a hook to draw an ending towards.

The premise of Eradication is fine, the writing is clean and the island is well-realised, the messaging however is fairly ham-fisted, I really liked the last 5 or so pages. Adi is just not a particularly empathetic, likable, or enjoyable character to live inside. For the majority of the book we're just stuck there as Adi decides whether he wants to shoot a goat or not. My least favourite plot development involved Adi finding the horn of a long deceased goat before fashioning a kind of clarinet from it using a microtool he had to hand, and playing jazz to a group of nearby goats that begin singing in return.

Eradication is mercifully short; 176 pages made up of about 50% white space. But even with that taken into consideration it feels like a drag to get through. I think it probably should have been a short story.

Eradication is released on February 5th and is available to pre-order from Bookshop.org Thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday for providing an advanced reading copy.