The Overstory by Richard Powers

I do love to theme my holiday reads where possible. A recent week long Far North Queensland break in beautiful, sunny Port Douglas on the edge of the Daintree Rainforest, gave me a chance to finally read this year's Pulitzer Prize winning book by Richard Power's The Overstory. (I also packed a book of essays called City of Trees by Sophie Cunningham as a companion read - to be reviewed soon).

The Australian cover of The Overstory has been one of my favourite designs throughout 2018 and it is now one of my favourite reads of 2019. In trying to work though my feelings about this book though, it's hard to go past Benjamin Markovits' Guardian review of The Overstory, where he said,

It’s an extraordinary novel, which doesn’t mean that I always liked it. Martin Amis’s brilliant description of what it’s like to admire a book – the stages you go through, from resistance to reluctance, until you finally reach acceptance in the end – is probably more linear than what usually happens. Because reluctance and acceptance can go hand in hand...

It’s an astonishing performance. Without the steadily cumulative effect of a linear story, Powers has to conjure narrative momentum out of thin air, again and again. And mostly he succeeds. Partly because he’s incredibly good at describing trees, at turning the science into poetry...

There is something exhilarating, too, in reading a novel whose context is wider than human life. Like Moby-Dick, The Overstory leaves you with a slightly adjusted frame of reference. Time matters differently; you look at the trees outside your window more curiously. Suspiciously, even.

Yes, yes, yes! It really is extraordinary and astonishing and exhilarating, with some qualifications.

Initially I thought that following the narratives of nine individuals would be hard to track and I made a few character notes on each one, during their origin chapters, but I didn't really need to in the end. Most of the characters was so fully realised which such rich backstories, that they were all clearly delineated in my mind.

I found the story mesmerising and haunting. Trees crept into my dreams and I found myself touching trees and smelling them on my morning walks, more so than usual. Our day trip into the Daintree even gave me a chance to hug an old, old tree with gratitude.

I also learnt so much. About the catastrophic chestnut blight and the so-called nature strips left by the logging companies on the side of the road, so that from the car you cannot see that entire mountainsides of forest have been logged behind them. About how trees migrate and communicate with each other. How they protect themselves and those around them from infestations. How intricate a forest system really is. And about how quickly we're losing the old forests of the world.

My qualifications?

At times I was concerned the story might tip over into earnestness or become too worthy for it's own good, but Powers reined it in each time.

I experienced resistance a few times - especially during the activism phase of the novel. Adam, the reluctant activist character was the one who helped me through.

At times it felt a bit too easy or convenient to create a divide between those who wanted to save the old growth forests and those nasty, greedy capitalists, who didn't. We all know it's not as black and white as that and that there's a lot of nuance and complexity in between.

The really hard part, though, is coming away from this story, wanting to help, wanting to make a difference, wanting for everyone to see how important it is for all of us to maintain diversity of species, but coming up with no real solution. The activism section of the book showed how futile it is in the face of rampant materialism and capitalism. Those advocating jobs and usefulness (in the name of making more money for themselves) will never see the point of long-haired layabouts, sponging off government handouts. And any scientific study is dismissed, ridiculed or declared 'unclear' - needing more time and more study before any action can possibly be considered - as another forest is cleared.

The only option Power leaves us with, in the end, is,

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 a good story. It's poetic, urgent, timely, rich in detail, epic in nature and wears it's heart on it's sleeve. It is meaningful and satisfying.

I'm not sure we can say that this leaves us with a particularly optimist view of the human race, although, we can feel pretty sure that the trees will survive, somehow, somewhere, no matter what.

My copy of The Overstory in the Daintree Rainforest

Favourite Quote:

My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.

Favourite Character: The entire Hoel family who start this novel off with such a powerful generational story.

Favourite of Forget: Unforgettable

Facts:

• Shortlisted 2018 Man Booker Prize
• Winner 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
• Winner 2019 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
• Longlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award

1/20 Books of Winter
The Overstory was read during my week in Far North Queensland - where the average daytime temperature was a glorious 27℃. The same week in Dublin had a chillier average of 17℃.
#justsaying

The End We Start From From by Megan Hunter

There is a lot of space in Megan Hunter's The End We Start From. Known as a poet until now, her debut novel is written almost like a poem, but not quite. It's not prose as we know it either. It's fragmentary, somewhere in between.

Stark, sparse paragraphs, poetic words, no names, just letters of the alphabet. Everything is pared back to the bare minimum to create a startling story about the end of times. The End We Start From got under my skin.

Hunter's choice of epigraph was a poem by T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets,

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from. 

She then shows us the end of our known world (via an environmentally disastrous flood that covers London) through the eyes of a young woman about to give birth to her first child. The story reads almost like her journal entries. Brief snatches of time captured through the lens of baby love.

Many reviewers talked about the not-so-new idea of comparing first-time mothering with the end of the world. Curiously it wasn't this particular idea that captured my attention. I was intrigued by how this baby (and the other newborns) will be growing up in this new world which will be the only world that they know and understand. They won't have to accommodate or change or adapt to this new world order; it is their world. They won't spend their lives thinking about and regretting the wonderful old ways and wishing it could be like that again. They won't be climate change deniers or head-in-the-sander's; they will know, they will be living with it as a fact. They will belong to this new world. This is our hope and the way forward.

The story is contained not only within the carefully chosen words but also in the gaps and all that is unspoken. Hunter mentioned several times that she was trying to find a way to move between poetry and prose to find a form that suited her. It worked for me just fine.

London. Uninhabitable. A list of boroughs, like the shipping forecast, their names suddenly as perfect and tender as the names of children.

The cupboards reveal themselves more by the day: their wooden backs, the greying corners we never used to see.

Days are thin now, stretched so much that time pours through the. 

Z has learnt to smile. He has cracked with it. The smiles built up inside him, R and me smiling madly into his face until it couldn’t hold any more. It cracked, and out came his smile, urgent, almost demented.

Hunter also interspersed these fragments with flood mythologies. They reminded us that since the beginning of recorded time, humans have been grappling with the chaos that mother nature throws our way. We make up stories to help us make sense of the unknown. It made me wonder what stories would then be made up for future generations about this disaster.

My only quibble was the ending. However so many authors these days fail to capture a satisfying end note that I'm becoming used to that feeling of let down after a great read. So much thought seems to go into the epigraph but the search for an equally apt epilogue is not always given the same care.

Benedict Cumberbatch's company has apparently bought the movie rights to the book.

A shout-out to the brilliant cover design by Naomi Clark and illustration by Kazuko Nomoto. I picked this book up for the first time purely thanks to the lovely, lovely cover.

1/20 #20booksofsummer (winter)
16℃ in Sydney
20℃ in Northern Ireland