SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Adi is a man who's suffered a great loss - the death of his young son, and then the breakup of his marriage. And so he finds appeal in a short-term job that calls for someone who is interested in saving the world. A foundation hires him to go to the remote island of Santa Flora, where native plants and birds are endangered by a multiplying population of goats left by 19th century whalers. And here's what the interviewer tells him.
JONATHAN MILES: (Reading) The problem is that history leaves a slime trail like a snail. Whaling eventually ended, more or less, but the goats didn't. No one thought about them except a few sealers and fishermen stopping off at Santa Flora. The goats ate. They made more of each other. The new ones ate alongside the old. The airplane was invented. The goats looked up, chewing. The atomic bomb got dropped. The goats glanced over, chewing. Humans walked on the moon. The goats kept chewing. Birds stopped landing on Santa Flora because there were no more trees for them. But without any other islands in range, entire species fell from the sky and disappeared. Birdsong was no longer the predominant sound on Santa Flora. The grinding of teeth was.
SIMON: Adi's mission is to shoot every last one of those goats.
"Eradication" is a new short, urgent and lyrical novel by Jonathan Miles. He joins us from the studios of WBEZ in Chicago. Thank you so much for being with us.
MILES: It's a pleasure.
SIMON: The interviewer can never quite bring herself to say kill, can she?
MILES: Well, she uses the - she says, you have to remove the goats. The non-native feral goats have so decimated the ecosystem of the island that they have endangered this slew of bird, plant and reptile species. The idea is that if you remove the goats, you can restore this island to its once-Edenic state. And I should note that this isn't a product of imagination. There are - have been and continue to be goat-eradication efforts across multiple islands in the Pacific and Caribbean.
SIMON: What makes Adi willing to do the work? He's not a hunter by training or even instinct.
MILES: He's not. I think what Adi is searching for is what used to be called respair. It's a forgotten archaic term for the recovery from despair or resumption of hope. When he sees the job listing advertising this opportunity to save the world, he was not able to save his son, and I think he sees it as a chance to save something.
SIMON: The goats, though, make their impression on him, don't they? I mean, they reveal themselves as personalities as he gets to know them.
MILES: Yes.
SIMON: Want you to read another section, if we can, too, when seven nanny goats show up at his doorstep.
MILES: (Reading) He was beginning to tell them apart now - not just Harmony, the singer, but the other six. Their horns varied, for starters - some blunt, some long. One pair curled at the ends, and another pair twisted like helices. Five of them had thick, wavy coats. Two had short hair as though fresh from the salon, one with big procumbent teeth Adi started calling Booska after a cartoon character Hiro (ph) had been fond of. Another pawed constantly in the sand as though futilely searching for something, and Adi called this one Contact Lens. Still another displayed the alarming ability to rotate her head nearly 180 degrees in order to rake her hind legs. This one, Adi named Linda Blair.
SIMON: Maybe we should explain this, being NPR - after the film in "The Exorcist." That doesn't seem like a way to work up the kind of hardness in your soul to actually shoot goat after goat, is it, giving them all kind of winsome names?
MILES: Adi is entirely incompetent for this position. Like most of us, he has never voluntarily taken another life. He's an urbanite. He's an apartment dweller. He's a habitue of jazz clubs and classrooms. So Adi is alone on this island, and the goats very quickly become his companions. He starts to see the differences in them. He starts to see them as individuals. He starts to see the commonality of our desires. You know, he sees them raising their kids. He sees them eating. He sees them not making the choice to invade this island, as has been alleged, but simply to keep on living. And of course, that makes it much, much harder to eradicate them.
SIMON: Without giving too much away, he decides to alter his orders, doesn't he?
MILES: Yeah. After he shoots his first goat, which is a harrowing experience for him, he finds himself unable to leave the carcass. It just feels sinful to him, an absolute desecration. And so he tries carrying the carcass back to his camp because he feels that if he eats the goat, he will somehow square the natural cycle to make it right. Of course, carrying an entire goat across an island becomes very difficult for him, and little by little, he must cut off parts of it. And at one point, he, you know, takes two of its legs out, wades out into the ocean as if to unburden himself of the weight of what he's done - to unburden humanity of what it has done, perhaps.
SIMON: I closed the book and felt stirrings of "Lord Of The Flies" and "The Old Man And The Sea," which - obviously, high compliments.
MILES: Thank you.
SIMON: Is that intended?
MILES: Intended is a funny word for a novelist, right? I think that everything that a novelist or really any artist reads or hears somehow gets metabolized into what we make. So were they conscious influences? I'm not sure. But were they there? Definitely.
SIMON: "Eradication" is the new novel from Jonathan Miles. Thank you so much for being with us.
MILES: Thank you, Scott. It's an honor and a privilege. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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