Richie McBride reviews The Overstory by Richard Powers (Vintage, 2019

The Overstory (Powers, Richard; Vintage, 2019. Available on audiobook, to save trees!) Reviewer: Richie McBride

Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel leaves you imbued with the wisdom, healing, and mindfulness of trees as well as offering a skilfully guided tour of the complexities of human relationships; our loves, hopes, fears, and determination. All set within, above, beneath, and under a complex web of trees, this book demonstrates the importance of healthy forests to the future of our planet.

You will get to know trees: trees that struggle against endless human onslaught; trees that invoke joy, interest, duty, fascination and spark an artistic mission persisting through generations of one family; trees that couch lovers, inspire protection and ultimately cause imprisonment and death; trees that educate, elevate, reincarnate, inducing awe and determination; trees of no consequence, unknown and ignored, until curiosity and passion lead to a surrogate child and the decades-long conquest of massive emotional and physical disruption; trees that offer life to a stranded soul, create and dash hope, inspire radical action, but also invite imprisonment and betrayal; trees trapped in a virtual system, vital actors in a game-based world sustained by a million keyboards.

The spectre of human influence hangs over every line of this wonderful novel. Inviting comparison with other recent writings— Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (HarperCollins, 2017); Suzanne Simard’s work on forest ecology and the cooperative nature of the mycosphere —Powers’ book lays out the environmental, legal, political, economic, and ecological facts and arguments around what humans are doing to this planet. Whilst trees are centre stage, their influence on our lives is manifest through a cast of nine main characters: a forest scientist; a Vietnam veteran and tree planter; a psychology professor; a ceramics engineer; an artist; a computer game designer; an intellectual property lawyer; a court stenographer; and a (literally) born-again tree 50 Book Club

Garden campaigner who is guided by the voices of ‘the old ones’. Does it tell of hope? Yes, in places. All but one of the central human characters become activists. All emphasise the critical importance of forests, the web of life they represent and how the planet’s destiny depends upon them. They are all cyphers. Powers uses their struggles as metaphors for the struggle to save our planet. Their emotions, thoughts, actions and words frame our view and force us to look with and through trees to the real state of our world. “It’s so simple,” one character observes, “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it.” The Overstory almost reads itself. The compelling characters engaged me with their passion, humanity and dedication. Powers has previously written on topics as diverse as artificial intelligence, nuclear power, and neuroscience. In this, his twelfth novel, he delivers a book that is beautiful and uplifting, as well as challenging and darkly optimistic— for the planet, that is, the jury is still out on humankind! Not quite as nourishing as a spot of Shinrin-yoku (forest bathing), this is nonetheless a seriously entertaining and thought-provoking treat for those who ponder our place in Earth’s natural web. Herbologists will fill their boots!