We think they don’t move, but they do. We think they don’t communicate, but we are wrong. They live on a different time frame, that’s all; one that takes in the great vistas from an age before people. Their gaze is farseeing, beyond us (over our heads, so to speak), and hopefully will persist long after we are gone. That is, if the world is lucky. They are trees and this novel from Richard Powers allows us to get close to something marvellous and infinitely more valuable than the surfaces of our floors, the frames of our houses, and our own front doors.
You see, it’s very easy to take up the cause after reading this book and I suppose it begs the question whether novelists should commit an act of activism in their works. Is that fiction or a soft, and therefore effective, kind of propaganda? Some think the latter is true. But this reviewer, at least, refuses to care about such things because this is an astonishingly good novel.
The Overstory tells the story of trees through a group of random characters who at first have a glancing and yet meaningful relationship with them. A huge fig breaks the fall of a man who parachutes from a helicopter during the Vietnam War. A young computer boffin falls from an oak and is paralysed. A family plants chestnut trees and through the generations only one survives a great blight which kills all others in the US. A Chinese immigrant plants a mulberry tree and, then years later, commits suicide under it when he believes there is nothing left in life for him to do.
It’s possible to think the first part of this novel, Roots, is a series of short stories, some of them long and spanning many generations. But soon the trees take hold and there is a sense that the true saga is not the human speck, but the immensity and longevity of trees.
Are we being manipulated into caring for trees? I think so, but Powers doesn’t slip the ideas in masked as something else. It’s obvious. It’s out there for everyone to see, but there is something majestic about it. The language is rich. It’s vivid. It goes like this:
‘Patricia does the estimate in her head. The odds are nothing compared to the first two great rolls of the cosmic dice: the one that took inert matter over the crest of life, and the one that led from simple bacteria to compound cells a hundred times larger and more complex. Compared to the those first two chasms, the gap between trees and people is nothing at all.’
And when thinking about the creation of the world in one day, there is this:
‘Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.’
And you see what Powers is doing here. He is playing with our narrow concepts of time. He’s kneading out our comforts zones. And again: ‘What’s crazier—plants speaking, or humans listening?’
So you can see, there is no sneaking about, nothing subliminal. Powers plays his cards for all they are worth and often its absurdly funny. Douglas, our wartime pilot, is in a bar, trying to champion the cause of trees.
‘“Now, a tree. Those guys know things on a scale and time frame we can’t even—“ A fist flings out and meets him in the cheekbone, so fast it’s like Douglas is frozen in place. He hits the fir floorboards headfirst and is out so fast he doesn’t even hear the man stand over and deliver the eulogy. “I’m sorry. But you were warned.”
I hope you didn’t miss that the floorboards Douglas hits are fir. There is a lot of this, a pointing-out of the wood in our lives. It’s a reminder that what we take today from the forests of the world will take generations to replace.
So sure, there is activism in The Overstory. Powers pushes the envelope of what can be born in fiction. He does something different and he does it well. That’s why I like it.