Eradication by Jonathan Miles

A man takes on a job to try and manage his grief in Jonathan Miles short but powerful new novel Eradication. Eradication is more than this though. It is a meditation on the environment, the impact of humans on nature and what we can or are able to do in the face of environmental catastrophe.

When Eradication opens, Adi is being taken by two sailors out to a small island called Santa Flora. The sailors, one of whom is still drunk from the night before, tease him – calling him Mister Killer. This is because Adi has been employed by an environmental foundation to kill the feral goats of Santa Flora. The goats had been introduced to the island over a hundred before by whalers who wanted an easy source of food. In the years since the goats have flourished and have decimated the island’s natural habitat and species. Adi’s job is to kill all of the feral goats (there are over 2000) to help bring the island back into balance. Only it emerges very quickly that Adi has never actually fired a gun before and is not, by any definition, a killer.

Eradication is an environmental fable. Miles considers the damage wrought by human interference and, through Adi, the complexity involved in considering how to reverse this damage. On the flip side of this, Adi encounters a pair of fishermen who have no qualms about killing or environmental destruction, being involved in the illegal shark fin trade. But Miles also tunes readers into Adi’s personal pain, how his own past has both driven him to this point and shapes the way he approaches (or fails to approach) the task that he has taken on.

We live in an age where everything we do seems to contribute to the degradation of the environment and few know quite where to start in order to address all of the problems that we have caused. This tends to lead to an inertia – a feeling that the problem is too big for any one person to address. In Eradication, Miles at least gives readers a way to think about living in harmony with the world that we have created. It is not necessarily comfortable and there are no easy answers. In the case of Eradication, it is an answer that is both shocking and strangely cathartic.

Eradication by Jonathan Miles

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8.0/10