Two quotes from different parts of this book:

"The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story."

And

"Yes! And what do all good stories do?" There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. "They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t."

I should come clean at the start of this review. Richard Powers is my favourite author. I have read all his previous novels and have been desperate to read this one ever since I first heard about it a few months ago. I am grateful to the publisher, via NetGalley, for the opportunity to read an ARC a couple of months prior to publication date.

The overstory is the name given to the part of a forest that protrudes above the canopy. When you look at a rainforest, for example, what you see from above is the canopy with trees standing out above it. What you don’t see unless you get into the rainforest is the understory that sits below the canopy but above the ground, then the shrub layer below that and, finally, the forest floor.

It is clear from page 1 of this book that the trees will be the stars of the show. Repeatedly, they are referred to as "the most wondrous products of four billion years of creation" and the book is shot through with the most astonishing and mind-blowing information about trees. In particular, the books tells us a lot about how and what trees communicate with each other. For example, when a tree comes under threat from an insect of some kind, it tells its neighbours who respond by releasing insecticide to protect themselves. In a large forest, many trees whose roots meet actually meld their root systems together making the whole forest an interconnected network where the trees nurture their young and heal their wounded. Not so long ago, all this was the stuff of ridicule, but today a lot of it has been demonstrated and more is being discovered all the time.

What Richard Powers wants his readers to realise is what this means for humanity. He wants us to realise how important trees are for the world. And he chooses to do this not with a text book but with a story.

His story is structured like a tree. The first 150 pages consist of the "Roots". These are 8 apparently independent short stories giving us the back story for 9 different people. One, for example, tells us the family history of a some immigrants into America (mid-1800s) ending with an artist in recent times who inherits the family collection of photographs all of the same chestnut tree taking at monthly intervals over generations. In another, a hearing and speech impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with each other. The unifying theme across all the stories is the presence of trees. And it is worth noting those trees because, as many people know, trees have huge mythical and symbolic meanings and the trees Powers chooses for each of his characters are not random selections.

The next 200 pages are "Trunk". Here the stories of the individuals that we now know quite well start to merge and connect. Some merge completely, others connect tangentially. This passage is overtly political. Don’t expect an unbiased overview: this is an impassioned plea for the protection of trees set in the form of a story. It is an attempt to make readers realise how temporary humans are in the grand scheme of things…

"But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died."

…and how much more permanent trees are…

"Out in the yard, all around the house, the things they’ve planted in years gone by are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain. But the humans hear nothing."

Then we have 120 pages called "Crown" where the stories separate after a dramatic climax to Trunk, but remain connected, branching out in different directions.

Then, finally, "Seeds" tells us some of the outcomes of the stories and leaves us poised for the next steps in others. It includes a plea for us to look at things differently.

"The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees."

I think this is perhaps one of Powers' most accessible novels. It feels to me, fresh from finishing it, like his most passionate one. Yes, there is some science, but a lot of it is explained carefully. This novel does not require and scientific background that some of Powers' novels have asked the reader for. And there is no music in this book, which is the other thing that Powers often includes in his novels and often does so in a fairly technical way. This one is, by contrast, far more emotional: it feels like a book Powers has written because he wants, as the quote at the start of this review says, to change people’s minds. In my case, he is perhaps preaching to the converted because I am already a believer in conservation and already convinced of the importance of trees. Even so, this book taught me many things and fired up a stronger passion in me for the natural world. I have to hope that others will read it and become equally convinced of the need for intelligent conservation work.

I know I am biased because of my love for all of Powers’ novels, but I think it is possible I have now, even only in January, read my favourite book of 2018.

An exhausting but exhilarating experience. To say this book is about a diverse group of people who come to 'see' trees and what they then do to protect and defend them does not come close to describing what this book is about, the stories it tells, all the meaning it conveys. It is beautifully written; lyrical and poetic and deeply satisfying. Characters that get under your skin, that you genuinely care about, that have you gorging on the narrative with undisguised greed. That have you ready to fire-bomb for the cause - the passion elicited is thus. And the trees! Dream-like, other worldly descriptions of entities rooted deeply in this one, the trees are the stars of the show.

And what a show it is. Eye-opening, moving, shocking, enthralling, enraging, fascinating, timely, important. A wake up call, a rallying cry, a classic newly grown and thoroughly enjoyable. Very highly recommended.

The Overstory is the first Richard Powers novel I have read but he, and indeed this book, comes highly recommended (not least by my good Goodreads friend Neil) and this was certainly a striking if flawed read.

The first part of the novel consists of 8 separate short stories (ranging from 9 to 33 pages) with the background and life of some, at that time, unconnected characters.

In each of the stories trees play a part, albeit with very varying levels of significance. And all the stories are told in something of a breathless present tense, one key theme being to contrast the trivial affairs of humanity (at both a personal and geopolitical level) with the long-term perspective of trees, with shades of Reservoir 13 and the way it set human life on equal terms to the cycles of nature and its subversion of the traditional pyschological novel form. One character: tries to read a novel, something about priviliged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations. He throws it against the wall. Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.

For example one story includes the passage:

'The farm survives the chaos of God’s will. Two years after Appomattox, between tilling, plowing, planting, roguing, weeding, and harvesting, Jørgen finishes the new house. Crops come in and are carried off. Hoel sons step into the traces alongside their ox-like father. Daughters disperse in marriage to nearby farms. Villages sprout up. The dirt track past the farm turns into a real road. The youngest son works in the Polk County Assessor’s Office. The middle boy becomes a banker in Ames. The eldest son, John, stays on the farm with his family and works it as his parents decline. John Hoel throws in with speed, progress, and machines. He buys a steam tractor that both plows and threshes, reaps and binds. It bellows as it works, like something set free from hell.

For the last remaining chestnut, all this happens in a couple of new fissures, an inch of added rings. The tree bulks out. Its bark spirals upward like Trajan’s Column. Its scalloped leaves carry on turning sunlight into tissue. It more than abides; it flourishes, a globe of green health and vigor.'

And a Banyan tree’s perspective:

'It grew; its roots slipped down and encased its host. Decades passed. Centuries. War on the backs of elephants gave way to televised moon landings and hydrogen bombs.

Another character ponders an oak;

Thrones have crumbled and new empires arisen; great ideas have been born and great pictures painted, and the world revolutionised by science and invention; and still no man can say how many centuries this Oak will endure or what nations and creeds it may outlive.'

Some of the stories, and characters work better than others. E.g. I wasn’t too convinced by the rather cliched Chinese emigre father, and one of his daughters has a remarkably poor grasp of primary school level combinatorial maths for someone who is supposed to be aYale economist. When the three daughters need to decide who each inherits which of three jade rings: apparently (3! - 1) is approximately 12.

'Amelia stares. “Who’s supposed to get which one?” “There’s a right way to do this,” Mimi says. “And a dozen wrong ones.” Carmen sighs. “Which one is this?” “Shut up. Close your eyes. On the count of three, take one.” '

At times the exposition in the stories would seem better suited to non-fiction and Powers chooses to lightly fictionalise some real-life developments and people. Indeed I was a little disappointed at the lack of any acknowledgement or references for further reading at the end, albeit this was a Kindle ARC so perhaps this may appear in the final version.

E.g. one character is a participant in the Stamford Prison Experiment, another learns behavioural psychology from some (in reality well known) experiments in a (fictional) book “The Ape Inside Us” by Rubin Rabinowski. A third invents the whole idea of world building god games (like Sim City and Sid Meier’s Civilisation).

And in the book’s own specialist topic area, Patricia Westerford, later to become a best-selling author of seminal popular science books on the life of trees, is, earlier in her career, ridiculed by her fellow research students (as “Plant-Patty”) and humiliated and ostracised by the academic community when she is, in the novel, the first person to propose the (later academically credited) idea of trees communcating by airborne semaphores.

In some stories the intervention of the trees is, at least in the characters’ minds, quite explicit, notably Olivia, a failing actuarial science student, squandering her life on alcohol and drugs, who is temporarily dead after an accidental electrocution and, while in that state, is spoken to by trees summoning her back to the land of the living as they have a purpose for her life.

'In those seconds while she had no pulse, large, powerful, but desperate shapes beckoned to her. They showed her something, pleading with her.'

Or more prosaically perhaps her heart was jolted back to life when she fell off her bed on to the floor and she imagined the conversation.

She already had, as a trainee actuary, a more important calling of course, as one of her lectures correctly tells her:

'“Insurance,” the lecturer says, “is the backbone of civilization. No risk pool—no skyscrapers, no blockbuster movies, no large-scale agriculture, no organized medicine.”'

But on the novel’s worldview, and certainly Olivia’s, actuarial science and insurance is the epitome of what is wrong in human society and its pursuit of economic growth. She later tells a fellow eco-warrior:

'“I was about three credit hours short of a degree in actuarial science. Do you know what actuarial science is?” “I . . . Is this a trick question?” “It’s the science of replacing an entire human life with its cash value.”'

In the novel’s world view one is presumably meant to be outraged that such a science exists and delighted that Olivia’s death-state revelation diverted her towards domestic terrorism. Not quite, as an actuary myself, my reaction!

That the threads of these stories will be brought together is perhaps obvious to the reader from the outset (not least from the publisher’s blurb) but first made explicit as this part draws to a close:

'Across the road from where she’s parked, aspens tumble down the basin toward Fish Lake, where five years earlier a Chinese refugee engineer took his three daughters camping on the way to visiting Yellowstone. The oldest girl, named for a Puccini opera heroine, will soon be wanted by the feds for fifty million dollars of arson.

Two thousand miles to the east, a student sculptor born into an Iowa farming family, on a pilgrimage to the Met, walks past the single quaking aspen in all of Central Park and doesn’t notice it. He’ll live to walk past the tree again, thirty years later, but only because of swearing to the Puccini heroine that no matter how bad things get, he won’t kill himself.

To the north, up the curving spine of the Rockies, on a farm near Idaho Falls, a veteran airman, that very afternoon, builds horse stalls for a friend from his old squadron. It’s a pity hire, one that comes with room and board, and the vet plans to leave the gig as soon as he can. But for today, he makes the corral siding out of aspen. As poor as the wood is for lumber, it won’t shatter when a horse kicks it.

In a St. Paul suburb not far from Lake Elmo, two aspens grow near the south wall of an intellectual property lawyer’s house. He’s only dimly aware of them, and when his free-spirit girlfriend asks, he tells her they’re birches. In time, two great strokes will lay the lawyer low, reducing all aspens, birches, beeches, pines, oaks, and maples to a single word that will take him half a minute to pronounce.

On the West Coast, in the emerging Silicon Valley, a Gujarati-American boy and his father build primitive aspens out of chunky, black-and-white pixels. They’re writing a game that feels to the boy like walking through the forest primeval.

These people are nothing to Plant-Patty. And yet their lives have long been connected, deep underground. Their kinship will work like an unfolding book. The past always comes clearer, in the future.

Years from now, she’ll write a book of her own, The Secret Forest. Its opening page will read:

You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . . .'

This opening passage from her book is seen as so persuasive by Powers that he has its magic work on several characters and repeats it several times for the reader’s benefit. Which is worrying given the rather pseudo-scientific nature of the claim and the many different ways of measuring DNA comparability. Albeit, this pseudo-science is quite deliberate since Plant-Patty is on a campaign for hearts and minds, intentionally antromophosing the way that trees form a community of sorts:

'The reading public needs such a phrase to make the miracle a little more vivid, visible. It’s something she learned long ago, from her father: people see better what looks like them. “Giving trees” is something any generous person can understand and love. And with those two words, Patricia Westerford seals her own fate and changes the future. Even the future of trees.'

At this point the book almost seems set for a Marvel superhero movie style denouement. 8 people (actually 9 as one story tells of a couple), seemingly ordinary but actually with unique skills, are summoned by the trees to take part in their epic battle for survival against their greatest enemy, humanity’s obsession with economic progress.

It doesn’t quite play out as explicitly as that, albeit the book and most of the characters would buy in to the sentiment, and it is left entirely to the reader’s interpretation as to whether the world of trees really has intervened in these human lives.

5 of the characters do eventually form a team of eco-activists, eco-terrorists in the authorities’ view, full blown versions of Swampy (at one point they end up in the self-proclaimed “Free Bioregion of Cascadia”) battling, at times literally, against the destruction of American woodlands.

Whether one has sympathy with their cause or not, this second section of the novel is certainly a fascinating insight into the methods, experiences and motivation of eco-activists.

Albeit the novel does seem, alongside the characters, a little too convinced of the worthiness of their cause, if only the scales would fall from people’s eyes. The following exchange, albeit taking place not on a dusty Middle East road but at the top of a tree canopy in a magnificent but threatened forest, was apparently all it took for a Damascene conversion, turning a behavioural pyschologist, actually there to study the delusions of the protestors (“a study on misguided idealism”), into a radical eco-warrior.

'“Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?” The question seems so far beyond calculation it’s meaningless. Then some small jam in him dislodges, and it’s like an unblinding. “Yes.”'

The story highlights, not always one suspects deliberately, the naivety of their view as to the rightness of their cause and hence the legitimacy of their controversial methods (illegal, not via democractic routes, avowedly non-violent but destructive of property and intended to provoke a violent response).

Of course one justification for their methods is the inability to achieve their aims via democratic methods - as the book proclaims at one point “The authority of people is bankrupt” - which one could either impute (disappointingly) to the corruption and hence invalidity of modern democracy or, more simply, to the fact that trees don’t vote.

Which makes for some very interesting and timely echoes, albeit not drawn by Powers as this as a US book, to the UK suffrage movement which achieved its aims exactly 100 years ago. But the read-over that the book makes instead, to the Occupy movement,seems if anything to weaken the novel’s cause.

The novel contains some wonderful writing on trees and the amazing things they can do, things that scientists are only just starting to discover. And indeed the book hints at more radical ideas as to the intelligence of trees that might be yet to come:

'“Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.”'

Much of this was in the form of exposition disguised as fiction and I did wonder at times if Powers should have written, or I may have gained more by reading, a non fiction book such as Plant-Patty’s. Although Powers would argue his work is done if, as I suspect, many readers of his novel are inspired to seek out and read such books (another reason why an acknowledgements / sources / further reading section really should be added).

And I couldn’t help but draw a slightly unfavourable contrast to Matthias Enard’s magnificent Compass which handles the erudition as fiction in a more accomplished and literary manner.

But nevertheless, and as the length of my review shows, this was a highly stimulating read and I enjoyed its 500 plus pages, even if I was not always entirely persuaded by Powers’s literary methods or his cause.

Recommended and thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.