"The Overstory" by Richard Powers

This ecolit novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018. It is about trees and the people who love them.

It starts with 'Roots': potted biographies, including, where appropriate, family histories, of the characters who will come together in the main part of the book (called Trunk). Nicholas, an artist, grows up on a farm in Iowa in the shadow of one of America's last chestnuts. Mimi Ma's father is an engineer who escaped China just before the communist takeover. Adam is a strange lad who is fascinated by behaviour. Ray and Dorothy are a courting couple who come together during an amateur performance of Macbeth. Douglas is a Vietnam vet drifting through life. Neelay is a young lad with the dream of becoming a computer programmer. Patricia is a scientist whose paper on how trees communicate is met with widespread scorn. Olivia, my favourite character, is a dissolute student who electrocutes herself by accident.

Their lives, at least to some extent, interconnect. I knew that was going to happen because that's the way these sorts of books are structured; had the stories remained separate I would have been disappointed. After all, we are told time and time again that trees act collectively. But it takes nearly a third of the book before there is any sort of linkage.  Five of these characters become part of a group of eco activists trying to halt deforestation in the United States. Their story has a plot arc which climaxes just after the two-thirds mark. The other four characters don't really become involved in the main plot, although they are also connected in some way to trees.

The final section of the book only occupies that last 5%, by which time the consequences have already been spilling over the narrative.

The story is told by head-hopping from character to character but always in the third person and in the present tense. After the Roots section, in which each character gets the whole chapter, the narrative is fragmented and sometimes it took a few paragraphs for me to work out whose perspective we were now exploring; the fact that the eco-activists adopted tree noms de guerre did not help my confusion.

It's quite preachy; there were times when it seemed to be an issue-driven novel; I would have preferred more story and less lecturing. Not that the story wasn't shocking, both in terms of the scale of the ecocide practised by the logging industry and the terrible way in which the police acted as a private army for big business. There was a lot of stuff about trees; in this way it was a bit like Moby-Dick. Perhaps Powers hoped that his book would do for trees what Melville's did for whales. 

Powers also wrote The Gold Bug Variations

Selected quotes:

Page numbers refer to the 2022 Heinemann London UK hardback edition 

• “Always the animals. First the dogs - especially the three-legged one, half wild with affection every time Nick's family pulled into the long gravel drive.” (Roots: Nicholas Hoel)
• “Humankind is deeply ill. The species won't last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.” (Roots: Adam Appich)
• “Humans carry around legacy behaviours and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seemed like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We're all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.” (Roots: Adam Appich)
• “There is, of course, no freedom. There are only ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not.” (Roots: Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly)
• “It's Douggie's growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.” (Roots: Douglas Pavlicek)
• “The forest from its first day of creation. But it turns out Gilgamesh and his Punk friend Enkidu have already been through and trashed the place. Oldest story in the world.” (Roots: Douglas Pavlicek)
• “Photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation’s entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act.” (Roots: Patricia Westerford)
• “For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms.” (Trunk, p158)
• “She remembers what Jesus said about the flowers, and not worrying about tomorrow. Once the nuns made every student memorize a Bible passage; she chose that one to irritate the teacher, who was big on personal responsibility. She liked the Jesus who would appall every law-abiding, property-acquiring American Christian. Jesus the Communist, the crazed shop-trasher, the friend of deadbeats.” (Trunk, pp 160 - 161)
• “Myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.” (Trunk, p162)
• “There comes a moment ... when you must turn your pretty backwater sector of the universe into a revenue stream.” (Trunk, p191)
• “As with running a business, the point is to keep playing for as long as possible.” (Trunk, p193)
• “Large men with legible biceps.” (Trunk, p199)
• “The person in your life's passenger seat? Always a hitchhiker, to be dropped off just down the road.” (Trunk, p199)
• “She's no warier of him than a lake’s surface is wary of the wind.” (Trunk, p200)
• “The hour smells moist and loamy, and the soil hums under his bare feet.” (Trunk, p362)
• “A Midas problem. Everything’s dying a gold-plated death.” (Trunk, p377)

September 2024; 502 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God