Hate trees? You'll hate this. Then again, what kind of idiot hates trees? Those great big lovable wooden bastards are everyone's friends: you can climb in them, shelter under them, eat the fruit and nuts they produce (even when the fruit is actually a berry, the nut is actually a seed or a legume et tediously cetera), and then cut them down, chop them up and use the wood to build boats, houses, aeroplanes and what have you. Trouble is, once you cut a tree down, it's dead, and it takes bleedin' centuries to grow a new one. So you have what you might call a sustainability problem and a requirement for humanity, as the de facto custodians of the planet, to manage the available resources in a responsible way. So are we doing that? Are we fuck. Now read on...
Enough of this Meetings With Remarkable Trees stuff, though - let's meet some actual people. Each of the principal protagonists gets an introductory chapter, each chapter recounting some childhood background loosely associated with a particular species of tree. So Nick Hoel gets an American chestnut on the family farm, valiantly holding out against the merciless sweep of chestnut blight across North America in the early 20th century; Chinese immigrant's daughter Mimi Ma gets a mulberry in the garden of their family home; Adam Appich gets a maple; Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly get an oak and a lime respectively; Douglas Pavlicek gets a Douglas fir (though the tree that rescues him when he parachutes out of a burning plane in Vietnam is some exotic species of fig); wheelchair-bound software genius Neelay Mehta gets a fig; Patricia Westerford gets a beech; Olivia Vandergriff gets a ginkgo.
Having introduced our characters (generally as children) we now zoom ahead and gradually meet them all again as adults. Olivia Vandergriff's life is transformed when she is shocked - literally - out of her slightly aimless student existence by a badly-wired bedside lamp and, convinced that some higher power is using her as a conduit, heads off on a cross-country trip in her car with some fuzzy-edged ideas about saving trees. On the way she meets up with Nick Hoel, tending to a dying chestnut and an empty house at the family farm in Iowa, and he agrees to join her.
Eventually Olivia, Nick, Adam Appich (now a psychologist), Mimi Ma (an engineer) and Douglas Pavlicek (a drifter and occasional forestry worker) form a loose collective campaigning for environmental reform. This starts as the usual non-violent chaining themselves to bulldozers and occupying trees (Olivia and Nick spend most of a year up a giant redwood) but eventually the group as a whole decide that the only way to shock humanity out of its gradual and inexorable slide towards irreversible eco-disaster is direct action, and moreover direct action of the destructive and explodey variety.
Meanwhile Patricia Westerford, a botanist specialising in trees, writes a paper detailing some of her theories about how trees communicate with each other and is roundly mocked by her colleagues for such crazy hippy-dippy nonsense.
Chastened by this experience, Patricia retreats to a hermit-like existence as a forest ranger for the next couple of decades until scientific orthodoxy catches up with her and she belatedly becomes a celebrity, helped by a book contract and subsequent popular-science bestseller.
It soon becomes clear that humanity isn't going to suddenly have a big collective moment of clarity, shrug off its slash-and-burn ways and embrace a more sustainable but less comfortable way of life, and things start to fall apart. The whole eco-terrorism gig, always a bit perilous, goes spectacularly tits-up as the group botch the bombing of a development project which is about to dispatch an area of forest and Olivia dies. After ceremonially lobbing her corpse on the resulting inferno, the group disperses and all take up separate lives, but with the nagging knowledge that The Man may one day come for them.
Ray and Dorothy have led a more conventional life, his income as a prominent lawyer keeping them comfortably off. Tensions arise when they are unable to have children, and ramp up when Dorothy has an affair. Ray's reaction to this is to have a spectacular brain aneurysm and require round-the-clock care for the rest of his life, something Dorothy commendably abandons her carefree boning to do. Pretty clearly Ray isn't going to be up for any tree-related activism but he and Dorothy fill their later years conducting a quiet suburban rebellion and letting their garden re-wild itself, much to the chagrin of the neighbours.
Patricia, meanwhile, a couple of bestsellers notwithstanding, has decided that the best thing humanity can do for the good of the planet is hasten its own demise, and that only a spectacular gesture in this direction can engage people's attention. So she agrees to be a guest speaker at an eco-convention and plans to commit suicide as a spectacular climax to a lecture. Will this shocking gesture do any good?
Adam, meanwhile, is giving a lecture of his own, having resumed his career as a psychologist. One day the inevitable happens and a team of armed FBI agents shows up in the back row; Adam immediately knows what has happened. But maybe he can use his subsequent high-profile domestic terrorism trial as a means of publicising the cause?
Neelay, meanwhile, has become one of the richest individuals in the USA by designing a series of computer games. Inspired by Patricia's actions he turns his attention to designing some sort of bot army that can use Big Data to co-ordinate a response to the climate crisis. Can AI succeed where humanity has failed?
So I'm pretty sure all but the most bone-headed denialists acknowledge that climate change is a thing, and that one of the primary causes is galloping deforestation, sustained by humanity's uncontrollable breeding habits and voracious appetite for wood for all manner of uses. What, The Overstory asks, are we going to do about it?
Well, the short answer is: no easy answers are offered here, and probably rightly so given that this is at least ostensibly a novel set in the real world where people are reluctant to give up their colour TVs and digital watches and suddenly start living on acorn paste and ferns. While there are some encouraging signs of a spread of eco-activism following some of the high-profile events (Adam's trial, for instance) it's still all very slow and there seems to be a suggestion that technology (most likely Neelay's bot army) will be the thing most likely to save us. Personally I'm not persuaded that this is true and am highly suspicious that those who are haven't seen The Matrix.
Structurally the book is a bit odd - the character introductions in the first section ("Roots") are compelling little short stories and probably the most focused and enjoyable bits of the book. The remaining sections ("Trunk", "Crown" and "Seeds") seem a bit unfocused in comparison (the book as a whole is a beefy 625 pages) and feel like they could have used a trim - it's not very clear to me, for instance, what purpose Ray and Dorothy's story serves here and what would have been lost by leaving it out. You might also reflect on the momentous and life-changing (life-ending, in Olivia's case) activities of the eco-terrorism group and ask: what did that actually achieve, in the end? You'd probably, if you were honest, have to answer: well it isn't very clear at the end, but possibly not much.
That said the depth of research here and evident love of the subject is impressive and the story being told is never less than compelling, and anything that prompts us puny humans to think on a timescale not directly tailored to our own brief lifespans is probably valuable. So it's highly readable and thought-provoking without my being completely knocked sideways by it in the same way as the judging panel for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize evidently were. Previous Pulitzer winners here include Breathing Lessons, Foreign Affairs, The Bridge Of San Luis Rey, Gilead, Beloved, The Grapes Of Wrath, The Road, Independence Day, A Thousand Acres and The Shipping News.
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