the overstory [richard powers]

This is a curious novel in so far as on one hand it made me want to buy it for almost everyone I know and on the other hand it ended up driving me a bit nuts. The one hand has to do with the thematic and the first half of the novel. The other has to do with the second half, when to my mind the writing started to lose its way. I read on compulsively, but increasingly frustrated by the way the book seemed to drag itself out. This is, it should be acknowledged, quite a banal reaction to what is in so many ways a remarkable novel, so perhaps as the reaction to that frustration dissipates what will remain is the potency of the book’s thematic. Powers has an agenda and he maps it out. Trees communicate. They are older and wiser than humans. We continue to destroy forests, oblivious of what we are losing, slaves to short-term capitalism. It looks as though this thesis will never lose its topicality. One thinks that in the age of Bolsonaro and Trump its importance is even more pressing, but Humbolt noted how the eco-system in South America was already being affected by colonial exploitation of timber, and one can go further back to the destruction of forests for shipbuilding as far back as the middle ages. Humanity has been persecuting trees for as long as ‘civilisation’ has been a thing. 

The novel collects a group of characters who get drawn into the struggle to preserve Pacific North American forests. The first part, or the roots of the book, set out these individuals’ stories, which are brought together in the second part, which ends in tragedy. The book then addresses the aftermath of that tragedy, over the course of twenty years. Lacking the glue of a unifying mission for the characters, It becomes more rangy, or dispersed. The conceit is that this is like the crown of a tree, where the branches veer away from the trunk into their individual journeys towards the sky. The novel becomes increasingly metaphysical, as the years and events fly by. Whatever its literary merits, and they are many in spite of reservations, the significance and brilliance of the premise is undeniable. Powers succeeds in opening up a new way of perceiving the world. I defy anyone to read this book and ever look at a tree in the same way again.