Jonathan Miles: “Writing is, fundamentally, a sound exercise”

The seeds of this novel were planted 20 years ago when I was in the Galapagos Islands on a reporting assignment. I was with the Ecuadorian Navy observing their efforts to combat illegal shark hunting. While I was there, I got to hear about efforts to eliminate feral goats to preserve habitat for the endangered tortoises. The moral friction of this noble ecological cause against what is essentially mass slaughter struck me immediately. The novelist in me started wondering what this friction would be like for a person.

If there was a film image, that’s when it came to mind: that of a man holding a rifle. I wondered how he would feel about this. Big questions were left behind: When is it righteous to kill? Who takes decisions? As the painter and musician, Terry Allen, once said, “The shortest distance between two questions is art.”

After reading I read some research papers on goat-eradication efforts in the Galapagos and Mediterranean islands for ecological restoration DestructionAnd I was struck by the necropolitical framework of this decision.

When talking about ecology, we must step back and realize that what we call ‘nature’ is a human construct. What we define as “forest” is also a human creation; We define it by our distance from it. In the case of the fictional Foundation in the book, it believes that goats are aggressive. That’s the word they use. By eradicating them, Santa Flora Island can be restored to its “natural state”. This is arguably a valid but frightening argument because the Foundation is believing in the idea that there is a natural, Edenic state. Then again, our ecological decisions are often shaped less by the ecosystems themselves than by the stories we tell about them.

There are parallels between returning nature to its ‘natural state’ and world leaders convincing their countries and people that they can help return their nations to their glorious past.

Absolutely. I kept seeing these parallels while writing the book, especially in the current political rhetoric framing immigration as invasion. What interests me about the term “invasive” as applied to species is how much ideological weight it carries. It sounds scientific, but it is not neutral. It draws its influence from the language of conflict, borders, and the idea of ​​intrusion and hostile intent. But most of the species we label this way did not come about with any such intention. They were, whether intentionally or accidentally, taken by us.

So, when we describe them as invaders, we are not just describing ecological disruption, we are importing a whole ethical vocabulary that doesn’t really relate to the situation. Ecosystems are not becoming grounds for wars. They are constantly changing their life arrangements. Santa Flora’s goats didn’t attack anything. They were deposited there. As, in one way or another, most of us have been.

I asked Paul Lynch about Melville’s influences across the seaAnd he said there were sentence-level effects, but he also said moby dick The first two-thirds seem to be about ‘whaling’ and ‘obsession’, but in the last one realizes it is about ‘wholeness’. Melville is mentioned at the beginning DestructionAnd in the end, at least it seemed to me that the book was really about absolutism. How does art force – or pull – you to confront such absolutes as Adi does when he realizes that all that is, is simply that?

I like the way you expressed it: that art draws you to these questions. Cormac McCarthy once said, “The ugly fact is that books are made of books.” So, as a writer, everything I read somehow seeps into – or floods – everything I write. interesting thing DestructionI’ve seen reviewers callback Hemingway the old Man and the SeaAnd also to Golding Lord of the Flies, Which I don’t even remember reading; Probably when I was a middle-school student. But fair enough, since every book inevitably interacts with other books.

When you start writing a novel, I think you have a rough sense of what it’s about. As you go through several drafts that keep changing and distorting, in the end, you realize that it is not at all what you thought the book was about. To me, this is part of the magic of the writing process: it is the constant and ongoing interrogation of your own imagination and the world.

“The problem is that history leaves a trail of mud like a snail.” The recruiter at the Foundation tells Adi this, but what he sees on the island, all the garbage, helps him realize the anthropogenic impacts. Later, his personal history is revealed – his son dies; His wife leaves him – this also makes readers feel as if the sentence was made relevant in order to centralize the role of memory and history in the novel.

I hadn’t really thought about this connection – between Scar and Adi’s memories and trash, but they line up beautifully; Thank you. One of the reasons I wrote the trash scene – I think, anyway; These decisions are almost always too intuitive to track – the fantasy of Earth remaining untouched by mankind was meant to be broken. Even in this incredibly isolated, uninhabited island in the Pacific, Adi finds footprints of mankind, its waste.

As for Adi’s memories, just as Santa Flora Island cannot escape its history, so Adi – and by extension, we – cannot escape either. Man is the sum of his experiences. According to McCarthy, books are made of other books, but we humans are made of other humans and their memories. That is our emotional source code.

What kinds of questions did you ask your cowboy friends?

I knew from the beginning that Adi needed to see this world as a fresh perspective. So, I left him, like most of us: unfamiliar with the act of voluntarily taking a life. He is an urbanite, apartment dweller, addicted to jazz clubs and classes. The non-human world is completely alien to him. He is a stranger in a strange land.

Since I was like a stranger in a strange country in relation to the goats and their behavior, I constantly pestered my shepherds: for example, how would the goats react in this situation, or what would they do in another situation?

It contains a scene about gender-based self-socialization of goats. How important was it for you to share these titles?

It was important for me that the goats did not seem like shaggy symbols. That they are literal goats – sentient beings, with goat-like desires of their own – and not metaphor. The moment we turn creatures into symbols, it becomes easier to justify what we do with them. Everything and everyone is more complex than we understand.

Adi becomes mesmerized by the sight of the night sky, and thinks about how he was teaching astronomy and astronomical charts to fourth grade students, but this experience changes something in him.

This is the difference between abstraction and experience. Adi has never seen the night sky in its full, awe-inspiring glory, the way one can still see it in remote areas. And that vision subtly changes his perception of the world. That moment is when Adi is facing the complexity of the world internally.

If those who are corrupted by worldly means and those who are innocent of its actions would be at two ends of a spectrum, Adi falls somewhere in the middle due to suspicions about – perhaps – what happened to his child, Gyro. He can neither take revenge nor let things go.

I will replace the word revenge with the word blame. Because if there is a theme running through this novel, it is about blame. How we allocate it, how we order it. You can trace a line from my goats on Santa Flora to the ancient Israelites’ idea of ​​a scapegoat. Through the ritual, all the sins of the people were transferred to a goat, all guilt and moral filth were placed on an innocent goat, which was then sent into the forest. The metaphor persists. It seems that in society we have a fundamental need to blame others, to absolve ourselves of collective responsibility. Adi’s dilemma is a miniature version of that: who is to blame for the decline of Santa Flora? Goats or humans? And if it’s the latter, will the goats pay the price? How can we square this circle?

Elimination has been associated with music-related metaphors – “the skeleton of a psychedelic album cover” or the leader of a flock of orange crabs being “akin to a conductor running an orchestra”. In an interview, you mentioned something about emerging from water and playing a cello sonata in response to the development of your writing. Then, in your music career, you opened for the Rolling Stones, and toured with Jon Batiste’s band. Please tell me about your connection with writing as well as music.

Writing, at its core, is a sound practice. The words a novelist types on a page are exactly like the notes a musician writes on a score. Words represent sounds, which is the core of storytelling: a verbal exercise.

I started playing music as a teenager, and for most of my life I kept music and writing in separate mental compartments, as if they operated under different laws. I don’t think so anymore. They feel like different forms of the same impulse. Because if you go back that far, before genres or themes, you can imagine people gathering at the end of the day, trying to understand what happened to them. Some of them took the form of rhythm, some of melody, some of them took the form of narrative. But the aim was the same: to impose some kind of pattern on experience, to make it legible or at least tolerable.

So, whether you’re organizing notes or sentences, you’re working with sound as a way to shape meaning. The medium changes but not the underlying trend. Intellectually, aesthetically, emotionally or physically, you are trying to inspire people.

after finishing DestructionI made this comment: “We are all murderers. Nature survives with all or none. The moral high ground? No matter.” Actually, I don’t have any questions here, but that’s how I felt about this story.

Well, as the shark hunters say in the book, “Nature doesn’t hurt anyone.” And it’s true, it doesn’t, because nature – as we are created – has no inherent moral structure. Or does it? When I’m writing fiction I’m not trying to come to a conclusion by living within the tension of the questions. Certainty levels things out. It closes off the space where the reader might otherwise remain. I’m interested in how a question behaves when you turn it around, look at it from different angles, give it a human face. You let it expand, contradict itself, gather complications. It feels more faithful to how we actually experience the world, which rarely results in clean answers.

What were your early writing influences? Did you make up something completely imaginary to console yourself?

The book that inspired me to become a writer was a children’s book stone fox By John Reynolds Gardiner, an extremely heartbreaking story about a boy and his dog, who dies in the end. This book was given to me when I was eight or nine years old, and perhaps a month or two after I lost my beloved grandfather. I cried hard at the end of the story, but between the sobs I realized something strange: I was crying harder about these imaginary people and their dog than I had at my grandfather’s funeral. These black marks on the white page had somehow breached another layer of emotion inside me, somehow allowing me to transfer the confusing grief of my grandfather’s death into a fictional but relatable story. It felt like a magic trick to me, and a common reaction to seeing a magic trick is to try to reproduce it yourself. As you say, all my writing is a magical solace: a means of finding coherence in the inconsistency of existence. It doesn’t answer the questions but makes living with them bearable.

Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. She can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.