Book Review: The Overstory, by Richard Powers (2018)

 

Dear oh dear, dear reader. When I first became aware of this book, AI was in its infancy. I remember the conversation with my daughter well, when I told her that ‘there’s probably already some AI tool that will select your next favourite book for you’. Low and behold, there was. In the time since then, of course, AI has infiltrated all aspects of our working and playing lives. I only hope that the matches and promises being made now are more compactible than they proved to be back in those infantile days. I remember telling the AI bot something of the type of fiction I enjoy, and it asked me to state a favourite author, for which I nominated David Mitchell. The Overstory by Richard Powers was it’s very rapid, confident – bordering on smug – suggestion. Having thus demonstrated my IT prowess to my undoubtedly (un)impressed daughter, I didn’t think much more about it until I came across the fabled book in the non-artificial world. The blurb included a life-altering endorsement from Barak Obama no less, and I was sold. Unfortunately, as you may have already deduced, Barak and that AI bot both let me down – this is not a book I particularly enjoyed. In fact, ‘the tree book’ became something of a burden, much to my daughter’s delight… ‘have you turned another leaf yet?’… ‘you’re progressing at a tree’s pace!’… that sort of thing. Yes, it took a lot of perseverance and stamina, but I made it through.

Don’t get me wrong, I like trees. I’ve got a lot of time for trees. I appreciate and admire and respect trees. I did my fair share of climbing around in trees as a kid, and later was even accused of being a ‘tree hugger’. But there’s a lot of tree in this book. Almost every sentence, in fact, feels like it has to have some semblance of something tree-like, or at least be leading in that direction. Thus, it becomes difficult to see the wood for the trees. So, if you do take on this novel, be prepared to read a great deal about them. But here’s the thing – I’ve not come away feeling like my tree knowledge has particularly grown that much. That’s disappointing. I was trying to pay attention. Here’s one trivial party trick that has stuck with me: if you bang a nail in the trunk of a young tree at any given height from the ground, how high will that nail be if you return, say, 40 years later? You’ll find the answer somewhere in these 625 pages… I hope it’s true… It had better be true!

Some observations:

- The story made a good start. In fact, I think the first chapter was the one I enjoyed the most (about an immigrant family that heads west and plants some chestnuts, one of which grows into a tree and becomes special once most chestnut trees back east die from blight, and how successive generations of the family take monthly photographs of the tree, creating a flip-book that documents its growth).

- The book was primarily written for an American audience.

- The writing style is very matter-of-fact. Blunt. Put on a plate for you. Considerable passages of time are sometimes covered in a few sentences.

- The passage of time in general is a bit sketchy. The plot doesn’t appear to be tied down to precise timepoints and sometimes doesn’t quite seem to add up. For example, it felt to me that one character aged far too much between the Vietnam war and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but I could be wrong. Maybe it doesn’t really matter.

- The story doesn’t need the number of pages it consumes (some tress could have been saved).

The David Mitchell comparisons must come from the way the story is structured. Split into 3 main parts – Roots – Trunk – Crown, and a shorter finale – Seeds – the first instalment introduces the main characters individually, chapter by chapter. Subsequent sections go on to draw their paths together. It’s clever, but slow. The substance of it all is about protest and preservation, saving individual trees, plots of trees, forests, ecosystems and biomes threatened by developers – ecowarriors standing up to logging companies. Raising awareness of the complexity and mystery of tree life, and the fragility of the planet. There’s a scientist who makes it her quest to stock a seed bank with as many tree species as she can (although as far as I know such vaults already exist?). There’s a genius, handicapped programming nerd who creates a new, all-revealing virtual world through a multi-payer computer game.

I don’t like giving bad reviews. I don’t want to be mean or disrespectful. Who am I to criticise an award-winning author and a work shortlisted for the Booker Prize? I appreciate how much skill is required to formulate any volume of this weight. And yet the gripes keep on coming. In the middle of the story, when several of the characters were given second – forest – names, and the new and old names were then used interchangeably, I almost quit in despair. Also, when the opportunity was there to write something gripping and dramatic, the author seemed to pass it up. Two characters, for example (Olivia/Maidenhair and Nick/Watchman) spend a year living in the canopy of a huge tree, saving it from being felled. The stand-off comes to a head when helicopters are brought in to shake the protesters off their perch. In the space of a page or two, they concede defeat, evacuate the tree, and it is toppled. After a year! Nothing more to it.

The final section of the book did threaten to finally bloom into life – 600 pages in, I felt like there might be some reward. But then the ending was so limp, so arbitrary, so unfinished, it left me deflated.

Perhaps it’s better to focus on the whole point of the book. It’s a worthy cause. There are a lot of truths here. How we disrespect and undervalue nature. How a quick buck always undermines our future existence. How ignorant and wasteful we generally are. All of this we know. Heard it before, but there’s no harm in hearing it again. Having said that, I couldn’t help but feel the focus was slightly off, given the predicament of the Amazon rainforest a bit further south, for example. However, it could be that I’m just unaware of the politics of timber production in the USA towards the end of the twentieth century, and the extent of the damage that was done. I do know that Redwoods must be magnificent trees. I certainly couldn’t cut one down, even if I had the ability to. Yet I don’t believe Obama, the once most powerful man in the world, when he wrote: ‘it changed how I thought about the Earth and our place on it’. I just don’t imagine the message really got through.

Favourite character: Another gripe… I don’t really have one. Nobody really stands out in this cast. No one is particularly dislikable, but there was no one I was really rooting for. None were especially irritating, but all were, slightly. In the end, I guess it was just all about the trees.