'Eradication' review: 'Hamlet' with goats, and that's a good thing

Jonathan Miles' novella "Eradication" starts in a fog of menace. A man named Adi is on a boat with two sailors for a six-hour voyage to a remote island. He’s brought along duffel bags, crates, a satellite phone and a long case secured with padlocks. "There was no mistaking the latter as anything but a rifle case," Miles notes.

"You’re not a scientist," one of the sailors says. "A sharpshooter," he surmises. "A killer."

Adi doesn’t respond.

But the nosy sailor is right and wrong, which is the rub of "Eradication."

In a series of miserly flashbacks, we learn that less than a year ago, Adi was a fourth-grade teacher and an amateur clarinet player. His new career — an environmental crusade, really — is to spend five weeks alone on Santa Flora. This Pacific island is an important sanctuary for endangered animals, but the descendants of goats abandoned there by whalers in the age of Melville threaten to eat all the native flora. The recruiter assures him he’ll be a hero: "With this, you’ll be able to take your children or grandchildren to Santa Flora and say, listen to those birds, look at those trees. I did this. Me. I brought this back from the dead."

All Adi must do to save this natural sanctuary is shoot 4,000 goats.

As a cold-blooded scientific calculation, that task sounds perfectly defensible. It’s possible, I guess, to paper over the unfathomable gore of such a massacre with happy thoughts of an island restored to its Edenic condition. But staring at the dismissive face of an actual 150-pound goat and then shooting it at point blank range is a different matter.

He knows the goats must die. And Adi is determined to kill them. But he delays. He dithers.

So, basically, "Hamlet" but with goats.

When he finally takes a shot at one of them, the rifle scope bashes him in the forehead "like a hole punch machine." He misses, of course, and — worse — the goats don’t even run.

The great genius of "Eradication" is how deftly Miles reveals the dimensions of Adi’s pain. For many pages, the calming mechanics of setting up camp and exploring the terrain keep Adi and us busy. The breadcrumbs of tragedy feel almost accidentally scattered along the way, but eventually they mark a ragged trail back to a shattering moment. In a revelation both illuminating and blinding, we begin to understand why he accepted this ghastly job and why he now finds it so difficult to carry it out. Careless summary risks spoiling your experience with this story, but it’s safe to say that it’s a brilliant melding of environmental mourning and personal grief.

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There’s something almost too intimate about watching this shattered man try to reclaim his purpose through an act of mass murder for which he has no capacity. Give yourself a day to take in the full effect of "Eradication." By the time you realize what could happen, there’s no getting off this island or escaping the reckoning at its very last page.