This is an ambitious novel. It is possible to feel the author’s frustration in not being able to express what ideally he would like to:
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He comes close to his goal. But novels need these human characters that we can latch on to, that we can connect with, characters whose language and emotions we can understand.
Yet the main, dominant character in this novel is the trees. And not even any single tree. We do get introduced to single trees, mostly at the beginning part of this epic journey, but they themselves are part of a larger interconnective collective. We are told that they are together in this and that in fact it has been discovered, finally, that they communicate and interact in ways silent, and until recently, invisible to us. They are also attached to the ground, it is all connected, and we share 25% of our genes with the trees.
We come from the trees. Not in the sense of evolving from tree-dwelling primates, but that we are of the trees themself, a branch, a curious, isolated and lonely offshoot. A tree branch that takes itself as something else, something altogether separate without the empathy and intelligence to see that we are in fact IT.
The first part of The Overstory comes on as separate stories. We are introduced to a character in each chapter most often with a tree involved and often in childhood. Is this in fact a novel at all or just a series of character studies calling itself one?
But like the humans who take themselves as separate from the trees, in the second and third sections of the book, these characters are brought together. They are brought together by the trees. We are among the people who see the trees, who feel the trees, who are vigilantly up in trees. They are people who care about the vanishing of the trees. The disappearance of beings hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years old. They want to help.
The question and the main dilemma for these good hearted characters is, how to help? Does defensive human action work in countering destructive human action? Or is there just too much human action?
What should we do or not do to be non-destructive. Is destroying ourselves, the beings who live via this industrial destruction, the answer. But if we are of the trees which are GOOD, how can we be BAD? This simple dualism can’t possibly point the way.
There is a certain open-endedness to these questions in this novel. Perhaps the spiritual mindset of the individual reader can only see it as they can. It could be read as “trees good, humans bad” and left at that.
But this is not the ultimate intention of the work. The intention is to show and call for connection, reconnection, by whatever means necessary. There might not be all that much to do right now other than stand down as much as possible and wait it out to a point when earth, trees, and humans can become one again, as they already are. The novel is never hopeless in regard to the resurgence of the trees, it’s just the humans who will blunder to doom and get themselves out of the way.
“. . . and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
The “lost people” do have compelling stories that make this a page turner at the same time as a lesson in the connectedness of everything.
While naturally missing the target that it is impossible for a novel to hit, it is an unusually and beautifully crafted great work.
