THE OVERSTORY by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton, 2018)
This great society is going to smash;
They cannot fool us with how fast they go,
How much they cost each other and the gods.
A culture is no better than its woods.
W.H. Auden – Bucolics Part II – Woods (1953)
The pitch for this remarkable novel, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is that it follows the converging stories of nine people who are transformed by the emergence of tree consciousness.
In the first section called ‘Roots’ there are separate back stories, more like fables, which introduce the reader to these diverse characters. The following three sections – Trunk, Crown & Seeds – show how these lives interconnect.
Significantly, none of them start out as political activists but each, for different reasons, feel moved to act out of a sense of moral outrage over the way our eco-systems have been, and are still being, destroyed for the sake of economic gain.
The book has 9 humans and over 300 named trees; the latter are in many ways the real protagonists. Powers wants us to appreciate the interdependence between humanity and the inanimate world. In an interview at Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris, he poses the question: “What if the living world sets patterns that we have to accommodate?”
Richard Powers and a tree
In an interview with Sierra Magazine , the author points out that “Literary fiction has been somewhat blind to the real world”. He argues that by focusing primarily on psychological and sociological themes, novelists have ignored stories in which individuals are interacting directly with the environment.
He admits that he was in his mid-50s before he realized how important trees are to our existence. They were here before us and will survive after we’ve gone. They are living proof that “A thing can travel everywhere just by standing still”.
The rise of Extinction Rebellion protests and the School Strikes for Climate movement makes this a highly topical theme. Anyone already in sympathy for these causes should read it immediately. Those who are in opposition should also read it and hopefully their minds may become a little greener as a result.
Powers is on the side of the trees but he’s intelligent enough to realize that you don’t convince people to change their viewpoint by hammering them with statistics or standing imperiously on the moral high ground. As he writes, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story”.
The Overstory is not just a good story, but a series of great ones. It achieves what all the best fiction does in that it changes the way you see the world around you. I ,for one, will never look at trees the same way again.
