Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.
A tree is not just a tree. And a book is not just a book. At least not Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-winning The Overstory . This book is the gong of the doomsday clock of our era striking midnight. It is set to the collective symphony of beings with whom we share a quarter of our DNA — trees. It does not alarm so much as wake us from our wilful slumber. Readers will begin to find meaning in the rustle of the leaves that eat light and air, in the wood that builds and sustains our world; they will rediscover the kinship with the giants that predate us by millennia; and understand quite irreversibly our total dependence on them.
Powers builds The Overstory ground-up — roots, trunk, crown, seeds. And in each phase, redefines the coordinates with which we get our bearings. Imagine trying to timestamp a person’s life against a tree that will outlive him 10 times or a 100 times over. It is a magnificent sleight of perspective which says that the markers of history, even of people, need not be human. One might be forgiven for thinking that the humans in The Overstory are simply so much fat, to be trimmed away and discarded. If only they weren’t so beautiful, so richly conjured.
Solid as a Douglas Fir
The roots of the book are individual storylines. One family/ person/ story after another, told simply and chronologically. Ignore
the gossamer-thin connector at the end of each chapter and it reads like an anthology. However, it is within this anthology that Powers acclimatises the reader with his arboreal perspective of life. He eases the reader in and crafts protagonists gradually, and weaves them together organically, until you realise we have been reading not about individual lives, but an understory of people who transact, conflict, communicate and commingle with each other.
Though it falls into the genre of cli-fi, The Overstory also manages to rise above it, due in part to Powers’ rigour in the narrative arc which, though not original or overly ambitious in format, feels as solid as a Douglas Fir. Powers is aware of the limits of empathy and attention that characterise humans. When people live, love and die alongside trees, and sometimes for them, we can’t help but superimpose one life on another.
And that really is at the core of this work. When a “tree-forest grows over 300 years, just in time to break the fall” of a protagonist, the veil is lifted on the sweep of this story, the vision of the author, and the poignant generosity of the natural world.
The little details are crafted niftily too. When Powers quotes from a book authored by one of his protagonists, it is difficult to resist the urge to try and look for it online. The vision seems to blur — and this might be deliberate — in the last act, ‘Seeds’. Just as it is hard to imagine the transformation of a 3- mm seed into a 200-ft Redwood, the seeds of hope (?) that Powers plants in the end don’t seem like all that much. But they soften the blow of the preceding 100 pages.
Hear the trees
How do we feel that blow? How can you get a reader to emotionally invest in trees? By anthropomorphising them? By having them ‘talk’ to people? Harping on their utility to humankind, perhaps? Or by pointing out the obvious but ignored fact that we need them for continued survival? The Overstory does all of this — a near-death experience causes someone to be able to ‘hear’ trees. The utility part is laid bare — not as something we already exploit, but as something we’ve barely scratched the surface of. And the benefits of simply letting them be are not just indicated but extrapolated with a level of detail that should make us blush with shame.
However, what gets us to really invest in these wooden actors is their own nature — how diverse and rich their lives are and how interconnected their story and evolution is with our own. Divesting the utility of plant-kind from the rationale of conservation makes The Overstory the most legitimate use of wood pulp in our time.
Read one way, The Overstory is a nuanced, empathetic take on the ravenous matrix of human life — the beauty of a moth’s dance into the flame. Tilt it just a smidge, and it is a devastating takedown of human ‘intelligence’. Unlike the moth, we know what would happen if we touch that fire. We created it in the first place.
The line that opens this review is the beginning of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Powers quotes this more than once. One wishes that it were true, that people could change, for their own sakes. If we don’t, the experiment of life will continue, without us.
The ex-journalist works as a consultant in fintech and crypto-economics.
The Overstory; Richard Powers, Penguin Random House, ₹499
