Silence Is Toxic in Keller’s First Novel : Books: Laguna Niguel author hopes her new work, ‘Necessary Risks,’ will help raise awareness of chemicals’ dangers.

Nora Holing, a young veterinarian, gets more than she bargained for when she moves to a small California town near the Oregon border: an anguishing moral and legal battle with her adopted town over the use of an agricultural chemical threatening the future of humans and animals.

After treating animals with birth defects caused by exposure to toxic chemicals sprayed on forest and grazing land, the introverted and passive Holing puts her professional and personal life on the line to become a passionate environmental activist who inspires others to win a small victory for the planet.

Holing is the protagonist of Laguna Niguel author Janet Keller’s first novel, “Necessary Risks” (Turner Publishing; $19.95), a 1991 Turner Tomorrow Award winner.

The award, which is bestowed by cable TV mogul Ted Turner to encourage original works of fiction with creative solutions to global problems, earned Keller a $50,000 prize and a guarantee of publication.

Of the just-released book, Booklist says, “Keller’s believable characters and engaging plot force the reader to consider just what risks--personal and as well as environmental--are truly ‘necessary.’ ”

The 163-page novel grew out of Keller’s decade-long interest in the plight of Vietnam veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange. Her anger, Keller says, caused her to read about toxic chemicals and their manufacturers and to write a story that “weighs the economic and moral issues of exposure to toxic substances.”

“I was just enraged about Agent Orange,” recalls Keller. “It was just one of those issues that grabbed me; it’s that something can come from nowhere and totally destroy your life and you just have absolutely no say about it. I wasn’t in Vietnam and I’m not a soldier, but I felt the issue could be translated to a domestic issue and that was the genesis of the book.”

The co-author of two nonfiction books--”Trauma Center: Three Days in the Life of an Emergency Room Doctor” and “Crisis Interventions”--Keller is a longtime free-lance writer and editor who earned a master’s degree at UCLA in special education and taught disabled children in the ‘70s.

Keller said she attempted several versions of her novel in the mid-’80s, but it “didn’t start to come together” until 1990. She was nearly finished writing when she read about the Turner Tomorrow Award contest in Poets and Writers magazine.

“I thought it was a real long-shot,” said Keller, who was one of three $50,000 winners out of 2,500 entrants in 1991. The winner of the top $500,000 prize--Dan Quinn of Texas--had his novel, “Ishmael,” published last year.

Keller said it took her a good two years to write her novel, “and that’s not counting all the thought and research that went in before. I read a lot of books about Agent Orange, and there was a wonderful book by Cathy Trost, ‘Elements of Risk: The Chemical Industry and Its Threat to America.’ ”

Although there are many good nonfiction books on the subject, she said, “I think fiction makes an issue like this more accessible.”

In writing her novel, Keller said, “I wanted to say something about the corrosive quality of silence, of not speaking out about issues that need to be addressed. In this case, it was chemical that was destroying life--human and animal--in the forest. But there are equivalent issues in so many areas.”

Keller says she hopes her novel will help raise awareness of the dangers toxic chemicals “and, in a universal sense, the danger of not speaking out when you have to.

“I was just reading last week about some students at Dana Hills High, who formed an organization--Students Against a Vanishing Environment--and they talked about the same issues my book does, and my book ends with the new generation having to pick up the gauntlet. Boy, if there were organizations like SAVE all over America, or if my book were to trigger somebody to saying, ‘We can help,’ that would be great.”

Keller is currently working on a new novel. Unlike “Necessary Risks,” however, it does not have an environmental theme.

“It’s totally different,” she said, preferring not to elaborate. “Hemingway says if you talk about it, you’ll lose it. I guess that’s where I’m at with this one. But I’d like to do another issue-driven book, and I fully intend to.”