Nice old Gaia!(2007: A True Story, Waiting to Happen)(Book Review)

2007: A True Story, Waiting to Happen, by Robyn Williams; Hodder Headline, 2003, $29.95.

ROBYN WILLIAMS, head of ABC radio's Science Unit, President of the Australian Museum, Foundation Commissioner for the Future and holder of many other worthy positions, has produced a novel set in the year 2007 in which animals, weather and so forth rebel against human beings and force them to stop slaughtering animals and raping the environment and to radically cut down their greedy energy requirements and use far less of Earth's resources.

This is apparently the work of Gaia, the entity some believe is made up by the whole biology of Earth. Birds close down airports by swarming over radar screens. Pythons strangle bulldozer drivers clearing rainforest in Brazil. In Australia racehorses refuse to race, and birds peck open the locks on other animals' cages.

A group of human heroes and villains set out to respectively save or exploit the situation. Some of them give little lectures on history and philosophy: "John Stuart Mill and Edmund Burke saw men and women as more than economic units. They saw free spirits in the fullest sense ..." There are some vaguely arch sexual references: "On Forty Second Street the strippers left the clubs en masse and danced as they had never danced before, to rock 'n' roll music. Many a tot looked wistfully at their voluptuousness and thought of supper." Soon the nicer humans come to side with the animals, and go round "Singing, chanting, skipping." Children march in hundreds of thousands under such inspiring slogans as "Don't hurt pussy." (I am not making this up.)

One human character is called Fotherington-Smith, which seems appropriate even if unintentionally so. The immortal adventures of 1950s English schoolboy Nigel Molesworth foatured a dear little boy, Basil Fotherington-Thomas, known for his skipping prowess, his glad cries of "Hullo Clouds! Hullo Sky!" and for bursting into tears at the sight of a robin red-breast. In today's jargon he might be described as having a High Wimp Factor. Fotherington-Thomas, I feel, would be the natural admiring reader of this book.

It brims with a message of earnest if not particularly original goodness and niceness such as might be expected to gladden the heart of a particularly soppy junior-school teacher marking an essay on Kindness to Our Dumb Chums. However, there ...