No less a writer than Margaret Atwood has said of Richard Powers that “it’s not possible for him to write an uninteresting book”. On the evidence of The Overstory, he is continuing a remarkable run that began when he came to prominence in 2006 with the National Book award-winning The Echo Maker. This is a mighty, at times even monolithic, work that combines the multi-narrative approach of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas with a paean to the grandeur and wonder of trees that elegantly sidesteps pretension and overambition. Early comparisons to Moby-Dick are unfairly lofty, but this fine book can stand on its own.
Powers marshals a diverse central cast of nine characters, dealing with the history of migration to America. We meet, among others, a plant biologist named Patricia “Plant-Patty” Westerford, whose research into the world of trees is controversial and groundbreakingly bold; the Hoel family, a set of Norwegian immigrants whose dedication to a great chestnut tree comes to represent the passing of time; and, most memorably, Olivia Vandergriff. Her surname might suggest a Harry Potter character, but Powers depicts this bored college student, who finds herself fascinated by ecology after nearly dying due to a drug-induced misadventure, with remarkable empathy and interest. Even her romance with a fellow activist who is one of the Hoel boys – which in a lesser book might have seemed like a cheap attempt to reconcile two disparate narratives – is written with a freshness that belies the well-worn subject matter.
As befits a book that spans centuries, there is a richness and allusiveness to the prose that reaches back as far as Thoreau’s Walden, and Emerson – who supplies a wise epigraph, musing on “a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me”, when confronted with the interrelation between man and nature – is an acknowledged touchstone. The Overstory is high-minded but never precious, although it is a pity that Powers does not acknowledge Larkin’s poem The Trees, which, in its final verse, almost anticipates the themes discussed here – “Last year is dead, they seem to say/Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.”
Yet it would not work as a narrative if the main characters were not richly detailed. There is always a risk with a book of this sort that at least one of the strands can feel redundant – dead wood, if you will – and, unfortunately, there are some longueurs from time to time, not least in the shape of Neelay, a paraplegic who is master of all he surveys in his virtual world (named, appropriately enough, Mastery) but who fails to realise that far greater riches can be obtained from the wonders around him. Here, Powers becomes didactic; he seems to write with distaste for Neelay’s “swollen, snapped claw” and how “he’s grown so gaunt he’s set for sainthood”, and the sympathy that he extends to his other creations is in shorter supply.
There are additional minor criticisms. The book is long and could have done with an edit, and Powers’s ecological message, heartfelt though it is, might strike some readers as on the nose in places; his obvious identification with “Plant-Patty” means that, as one character muses, the “burning down the library, art museum, pharmacy and hall of records, all at once” cannot be seen as anything other than a crime against nature, but it is unlikely that anyone would think otherwise.
Nonetheless, when set against Powers’s greater achievements, these are but woodworm compared with the majestic redwood of a novel that he has constructed. It is fitting that it ends with a message of hope. As with Larkin, a belief that humanity is capable of redeeming itself and beginning “afresh, afresh, afresh”.
• The Overstory by Richard Powers is published by William Heinemann (£18.99). To order a copy for £15.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
