BookBrowse Reviews Eradication by Jonathan Miles

BookBrowse:

A man is sent to a desert island to wipe out an invasive species in this darkly comic novella.

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For access to our digital magazine, free books,and other benefits, become a member today.

When Adi answers an ad for a job that would "save the world," he doesn't expect to be packed off to a desert island with five weeks' worth of supplies and a bolt-action rifle. At the interview, the recruiter for the humanitarian foundation owns up to the hyperbole: he won't be saving the world, exactly, but rather the delicate biodiversity of Santa Flora, once "one of the Pacific Ocean's most unique and vibrant ecosystems." All he has to do is kill goats: thousands upon thousands of goats.

According to the foundation, since their arrival to the island in the 19^th century, these dim-witted invaders have munched through every consumable resource on the island, driving its indigenous species to the point of extinction. Mass sterilization isn't a feasible option, and poisoning carries too many risks. So for lack of a more sophisticated alternative, the foundation hires Adi to scope out and dispatch each and every nanny and billy one by one.

It's a deceptively simple premise, and Eradication—the fourth effort from novelist, journalist, and musician Jonathan Miles—starts out as a blackly comic treat. Unsurprisingly, Adi arrives on the island to find that he is utterly unsuited to killing goats. What drew him to the gig was the promise of a better world, not twisted humanitarian slaughter; his first attempts to meet the brief are pure slapstick, a carnival of reluctant, bungled assassinations. When the blood eventually begins to flow, however, it's not long before the absurdity trips into tragedy.

As Eradication progresses, Miles proves that he is clearly not in the business of serving up straightforward farce. Indeed, subtitled A Fable, this short novel aims to teach a moral lesson as serious as anything found in Aesop (see Beyond the Book). The problem, however, is that the most successful fables are often the simplest, but this tale is too baggy and rough around the edges to be summed up by any neat maxim. This is certainly not a bad thing for an intelligent novella that strives as much for emotional depth as it does for the easy laugh. But the simple frame in which Eradication is set rarely seems able to contain it, leaving the reader at times unsure what to make of the whole tableau. The grotesque, fairy-tale quality of Miles's set-up sits uncomfortably with the gritty realism of his execution. Adi is certainly no anonymous "boy who cried wolf"; he is revealed to be a man far from any broad-strokes archetype, someone motivated by the wreckage of his own particular past. It's a poignant characterization that belies his somewhat cartoonish circumstances.

With its growing sense of isolation and disillusionment, Eradication owes more than a passing debt to Heart of Darkness. Adi plays an idealistic, 21^st-century Marlowe, who before long comes to the realization that the destruction of the island's ecosystem has much more to do with our own voracious appetites than those of the goats. After all, whalers were the ones who deposited them on the island in the 19^th century. And the goats can hardly be blamed for the giant heap of water bottles, beer cans, and plastic bags clogging Santa Flora's shoreline—nor the drunken, rapacious fisherman poaching sharks for their fins in its secluded coves. The longer Adi spends on the island, the less he believes in the noble ideals that sent him there.

At 160 pages, Eradication's meager length masks its meaty ideas. Miles has a lot to say about our current environmental catastrophe and the weaknesses of human nature that perpetuate it; readers might only wish that he had given himself more space in which to say it. But they can nevertheless be grateful for what he's delivered: a sharp, funny novel of ideas that bristles with rage at what humanity can wreak on the world.

This review first ran in the February 11, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.