Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Beth Golay, and this is Marginalia. Eradication of Fable by Jonathan Miles tells the story of Audie, a man who accepts a job that's described as a way to save the world. More specifically, he's tasked with saving endangered flora and fauna on an island from an invasive goat population.
This is a fable, so at the very least you can expect our main character to experience a moral struggle with his new role. But this is also Jonathan Miles, so you can expect so much more.
Chapter 2: What is the premise of Jonathan Miles' novel 'Eradication'?
Here's our conversation. So I am not spoiling anything for our listeners. Would you give us a brief description of eradication? Is a spoiler-free setup possible?
Yeah, we could probably figure it out. It's the story of a one-time jazz clarinetist and fourth-grade teacher whose life has been gutted by a grievous loss, and it's After Effects. And, you know, what he's seeking when we meet him is what used to be called respare. It's an archaic term for recovery from despair or the resumption of hope.
And he notices a job listing advertising an opportunity to, quote, save the world and decides that maybe that's his path to respare. The saving the world actually turns out to be a very tiny speck of the world, a remote uninhabited island in the Pacific called Santa Flora.
And more than a century ago, whalers dumped goats on the island as a way of stashing protein for their, you know, fresh protein for their return voyages. Of course, the whalers disappeared, but the goats did not. And in the intervening years, they disappeared. nibbled the once verdant island down to scrawny shrubs, thereby endangering a host of endemic bird, plant, and reptile species.
So the job that Adi accepts is to remove the goats from the island and restore it to its Edenic state.
So where did this idea begin for you?
So this idea was seeded about 20 years ago. I was a magazine journalist for years and I was on assignment in the Galapagos Islands embedded with the Ecuadorian Navy on their patrols against illegal shark fishing in the islands. And while I was there, I happened to hear about goat eradication efforts that were happening on some of the islands there.
And as I described in my fictional island, feral goats had been left on the island and were really ripping up the habitat for the native tortoises that needed the trees for food and shelter. And so what the government was doing was sending in people with rifles to kill, shoot and kill every goat on the island. And I found myself haunted by the moral friction of that.
The friction of a righteous and defensible ecological goal meeting the mass slaughter of another species, you know, taking lives to save lives. And I guess the novelist in me started wondering what that would feel like on the individual scale.
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Chapter 3: How does the character Audie deal with his moral dilemmas?
I mean, partly, every novel tends to claim its own amount of real estate, right? Some novels take up whole city blocks, and some take up, like this one, small, narrow lots.
Chapter 4: What inspired Jonathan Miles to write 'Eradication'?
But I also found my own reading habits influencing what I wanted to write, because ultimately, I always am writing something I want to read. I mean, I'm my target audience. And I have been finding myself increasingly drawn to shorter novels. And I'm not alone in this. I don't think it's any surprise why. I mean, our attention spans are bombarded nowadays, right?
It's almost like we go through our day with somebody tapping us on the shoulder every 30 seconds saying there's a breaking news and there's 50% off on dog toys and there's, you know, and so our attention span is so absolutely assaulted. that I think it can be difficult for a writer to give the modern reader a doorstop of a book. And I say that as someone who has published doorstops.
I wanted to reward readers with maybe who would be willing to give me three hours, three or four hours of focus and to fit as much life as I could into that three or four hours for them. And early readers have mentioned to me that they've read it in one sitting, which I take as a giant compliment because every cook likes to hear there were no leftovers.
I don't know if it was because it was presented to me as a fable, but I kept thinking like the tone and the point of view sort of, you know, reinforced that fable distinction. It sounded like it was a story being told to me of, you know, this, I don't know, a story that should have some sort of meaning to my life, maybe.
Yeah, I mean, I think the one area where I deviate a little bit from the fable tradition is that fables usually have a
a a pretty explicit moral i left that to the reader and you know so you know how it ends you've read it um because and partly that's because as a novelist i start writing because i have questions but i don't write novels to answer the questions if i wanted to do that i would i would i would write essays that's what essays are for right it's more that
Novels are a way of broadening the questions, expanding the questions, multiplying them, giving them a face and a voice. Milan Kundera once wrote that novels teach us to comprehend the world as a question. The answer is the story itself. And what I want readers to take is the intensity of those questions and to have them see the face of those questions and hear the voice of them.
Well, the book is Eradication. Jonathan Miles, thank you so much for joining us again.
It's been an honor. Thank you.
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Chapter 5: How does Audie's background influence his actions on the island?
And I also really like the cover. Sometimes it's the cover that gets me. Yeah, so that's that one. And so something that I have that I was thinking a lot about as I picked the books and was thinking about launching the book club is that I didn't want it to turn into a situation where attendees of color are feeling like they have to educate other non, you know, attendees of color.
And I also didn't want the book club to be super heavy. So I was trying to find the right balance of absolutely, because we're all about amplifying Black voices and the Black experience, identifying some reads that would allow us to dig into that, but really set people up to be able to then carry on with their own research and reading beyond that, if that makes sense.
Yeah. Well, and I love the whole mix of genres you've selected as well. It's not just, you're not reading specifically for a genre.
Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Okay. The next one is Zeal by Morgan Jerkins. And this is actually another one that's checking off historical fiction and romance. So it is a love story from the post-Civil War era, and it takes you all the way to present-day Harlem. So I haven't read this one. I'm looking forward to it.
Okay.
The next one is, oh, this one I'm super excited about. So the next one is, I want to get the full title. Black Owned, The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore by Char Adams. So if anyone follows me, you may have seen a post where we posted a picture of that book and announced that we are in the book. The book released late 2025. And around the time that I was opening in November 2024,
maybe some months in, I learned about these two books that were coming out about the history of black bookstores. One was pros to the people and one was black owned. And so in my mind, I just kind of assumed that because we were just opening that there's no way that we would end up in any either of them. And I was like, man, but I was like, you know, maybe version 2.0, the next edition.
And so actually it was a customer that brought it to my attention because I had gotten the audio book And sometimes they have inserts that they'll attach. And so the insert had us up there. And I literally said, oh, that was nice of them. They like went back and did like an edited and updated version. And then a customer had reached out to me and was like, I'm so proud of you.
And it seemed so random. And I was like, well, thank you so much. And then she said, you know, I see you in the book. And that made us happy. just super, super excited to just be listed among the ranks of some super, super powerhouse. I like to say OG black owned bookstores that have really paved the way. So I'm excited to dig into this one.
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