Review: The Overstory by Richard Powers

Powers by Nature

Richard Powers is a master at alchemising science into captivating stories: his novels have explored subjects including artificial intelligence, genetics, pharmaceuticals, and neurology. In The Overstory, Powers turns his attention to trees in a timely attempt to reimagine our relationship with woodlands.

^{The overstory refers to the forest canopy, and it hints at the novel’s central theme of interconnection and interdependence.}

At the dizzying pace life and society take these days, a review of last year’s Pulitzer Prize-winner might seem like old news. But a year is a fraction of a second in a forest, as Powers demonstrates in his latest novel. Eight stories unfurl and intertwine over decades and generations, yet this is but the blink of an eye to the old beings – the ancient oaks and primordial redwoods – that inhabit the world with our characters, all of whom are drawn together by a calling to protect the natural world. The novel is a praise song to the marvels and majesty of trees.

The mythically slow growth of the trees is contrasted with the wild speed at which humans are felling forests in the name of ‘progress’. In the novel, this destruction comes primarily from clear-cutting swathes of towering redwoods, some of which are over 1,000 years old, to harvest the timber and replant fast-growing monocultures. This crime galvanises the characters into activism. Reading the novel here and now, such destruction hits home. In the UK, 38% of our ancient native woodland has been felled over the last century and replanted mostly with non-native conifers for timber production. Now our ancient woodland is under threat from HS2, which is set to affect 108 ancient woods.

We urgently need to rethink our relationship with the natural world, and The Overstory frames the issue afresh.

For many of us who are distant from the affected sites, reports and statistics like this are abstract. They are the kind of thing we might tut about and discuss in indignant tones, but reports and statistics lack the emotional force required to rouse real action. The Overstory, while also celebrating the wonders of trees, conjures the gut-wrenching grief such losses deserve: the stubbled, lifeless landscapes of deforestation, the quick deaths of slow-growing giants – even the loss of a single mulberry tree is devastatingly poignant. At times the novel feels like a eulogy to the natural world, or maybe to humanity’s place within it: there is the unmistakeable sense that Earth will shrug us off if our presence becomes too taxing.

And yet, the novel never feels polemical. The science and politics of deforestation would be clumsy in the hands of a lesser writer, but The Overstory is expertly wrought. Powers packs his novel with a diverse cast of detailed, distinct characters, from the vagrant Vietnam veteran, Douglas Pavlicek, to Mimi Ma, a Chinese America engineer who is haunted by her father’s suicide. He draws from the fields of mythology, science and psychology, from fantasy, thriller and drama, to produce a work that is so richly, rewardingly varied that it seems to have its own ecosystem. Each sentence is exquisitely crafted. The language is both poetic and precise, both rhythmic and rich in information; my copy is dog-eared in dozens of places to bookmark bizarre botanical facts and beautiful writing – often within the same passage.

Powers manages to portray the trees themselves as compelling characters… godlike in their ancient wisdom.

One of the most remarkable feats is how Powers manages to portray the trees themselves as compelling characters. As you read, they transform from still, silent things into mysterious, sentient beings, godlike in their ancient wisdom. Connected by mycorrhizal networks, forest communities trade food and messages; dying trees bequeath goods to their neighbours before they fall and provide food and a fertile bed for saplings when they rot; individuals warn one another of insect attacks and call on others for help; and an 80,000-year-old aspen, massed over a hundred acres as a single clonal colony, migrates motionlessly in search of a mate. This novel shifts your perspective: time changes and trees come to life. The effect is a sense of awe.

Yet despite my glowing praise (and its Pulitzer Prize), the novel has its flaws. Powers should place a little more trust in the reader: at times he can be rather heavy-handed with moral and narrative points, but the novel’s many merits make this easy to forgive. The characters, too, could have used some pruning. For instance Neelay Mehta, a wheelchair-bound computer-coding prodigy, is a superfluous addition; after a promising opening, Neelay’s story fails to takes root and remains disconnected from the other narrative strands. The Brinkmans, similarly, stand apart from the central cast of characters. While their story is satisfying in its own right, it never ties into the wider over-story, and thus ends with a slight sense of disappointment; it flowers but fails to bear fruit.

Nevertheless, The Overstory is a stunning novel. Not only is it intoxicatingly well-written but it is also vitally important. We are at a pivotal point in the fight against the climate crisis and we need to act. Reports and statistics are important, but stories speak to us on a deeper level that the bald facts just cannot fathom. We urgently need to rethink our relationship with the natural world, and The Overstory frames the issue afresh.