The Disputed Barricade

This is with my agent. Anyone interested, drop me a line.

We have the distinction of living in a time in which our collective acts will decide the fate of all nature on Earth. Many of Earth’s billions are justifiably worried and embittered by the state of the environment and the results of multinational summits have had disappointing results, bringing further outcry and demands that those in power exercise that power for the good of the Earth and its people. The notion that we are at the mercy of big business and governments has been reinforced by each failure to make positive progress. But there is a movement gathering strength and the people feel betrayed, and that can be dangerous for those who fail in their duties.

Virgil Conlan, the protagonist of “THE DISPUTED BARRICADE” embodies that frustration as he leads the way through thought, beliefs and actions that will validate the feelings of those who read this novel.

“THE DISPUTED BARRICADE” is a novel in tune with the world pulse, and will strike a sympathetic cord in that like so many flawed heroes he is to some extent out of sync with society’s norms.

After half a lifetime as a mining engineer in many parts of the world, I have seen both sides of the environmental fence, seen the appalling destruction uncontrolled industry can wreak, and played a part in achieving positive results. This had placed me in a unique position of having had real experience when it came to writing this novel.

There may have been other novels about the environment, but none have the angle of a biography, none have the combined elements of decline, redemption, violence, tenderness, love and loss, and as powerfully as “THE DISPUTED BARRICADE”.

“THE DISPUTED BARRICADE” is the story of a man with a mission, driven to mount a one-man crusade to save the last great wild places from the depredation of industry. He has talked to those in power, tried reason, and having come against a stone wall of vested interests, political obstruction and industry whose god is money, decided to get their attention the hard way and hit them where it hurts: the balance sheet.

The story is a biographer’s exploration of the man, which takes place at an old beach house on Tasmania’s wild West Coast, inter-spaced with four chapters in which he successfully sabotages an off-shore mining dredge in the Chilean islands, a mining operation in the United States’ Rocky Mountains, and a logging project in British Columbia, Canada.

Conlan’s background, from a young man of Anglo-Irish descent in London’s post-war slums, through independence, a failed marriage, a disastrous affair, alcoholism and despair, to his final awakening and new found sense of purpose on a sheep station in New South Wales’ Blue Mountains, is explored over a spring and summer of wild days and calm, in which the biographer and narrator uncovers his curious semi-religious beliefs about the earth, and comes to understand the roots of his near fanatical love for it.

It is also a love story, and culminates violently in a contracted attempt on Conlan’s life, and his return to Chile to finish the uncompleted job: his rendezvous with death at the disputed barricade.