I
have never read a better novel than The
Overstory by Richard Powers. In depth, vision, language, and intention the
book is astonishing. Powers intends nothing less than to show humanity within
the world that gave birth to our species, and particularly within the forest
that has sheltered and nurtured us as witnessed by the many legends and myths
from Yggdrasil, the world tree to the Biblical Tree of Knowledge to the Persian
world tree Gaokerena. Powers even reminds us that tree and truth share a
linguistic root. Like one of those images which appears in the foreground only
to recede, the human characters of the novel often become background as the
forest moves forward.
The
human characters are a motley crew: Nick, the son of Iowa farmers who, by
accident, have one of the last chestnuts in America to survive a blight; Olivia,
electrocuted, who gains an ability to understand the language of trees;
Douglas, a Vietnam vet, ejected from a bomber, who “tumbles into the branches of
a banyan, that one-tree forest that has grown up over the course of three
hundred years just in time to break his fall.” There are more: the
accountant, the forestry expert, the amateur actors, the gaming millionaire.
Some meet, some fall in love, some become allies in the struggle to impede
their narcissistic species’ “endless suicidal appetite” for destroying the
forest that still sustains not only human life but that of species not yet even
named.
In
a large novel where every dense, poetic page requires attentive reading, I
think my favorite story is that of Nick and Olivia when they ascend the trunk
of Mimas, one of the last giant old-growth redwoods, scheduled to be turned
into lumber. They hope their presence can prevent the destruction of their
host. High in the branches they discover a new world: “Fog coats the canopy.
Through an opening in Mimas’ crown, the tufted spires of nearby trunks stand
swirled in the gauze of a Chinese landscape. There’s more substance to the
grayish puffs than there is to the green-brown spikes poking through them. All
around them spreads an Ordovician fairy-tale. It’s morning like the morning
when life first came up on dry land.”
But
The Overstory belongs to the trees.
There are the Apple trees whose fruit appears in so many mythologies: “myths
are basic truths, twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past,
memories waiting to become predictions.” The Eastern White Pine once
“giants four feet wide, their trunks shooting eighty feet straight up…that
stood in endless stands that darkened the air with pollen each spring.” Britain
gained lordship of the seas by making these pines masts for “their leviathan
frigates.” The Chestnut: “the tree of the tanning industry, of railroad ties,
train cars, telegraph poles, fuel, fences, houses, barns, fine desks, tables,
pianos, crates, paper pulp, and endless free shade and food—the most harvested
tree in the country.” And many, many more. Indeed the notion that trees
are merely lumber is understood as sacrilege long before the end.
It
is the character of Patricia Westerford, a botanist, who clarifies the vision
of the novel. She sees that trees and humans, after billions of years, still
have a quarter of their genes in common. Laughed out of scientific and academic
circles because she dared to assign behavior to trees, behavior such as
intention and communication, Westerford goes on to discover the deepest truth
of all: “There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. The bird
and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. A third or more of the food a big
tree makes may go to feed other organisms. Even different kinds of trees form
partnerships.”
The Overstory suggests that life may probably find its
way despite what people are destroying—after all the planet has experienced
near-total extinctions several times before—the question is whether humans will
survive. “Now they need only learn what life wants from humans. It’s a big
question to be sure. Too big for people alone. But people aren’t alone, and
they never have been.”
