The Overstory

Shortlisted for, and favourite to win, the 2018 Man Booker prize, The Overstory stands apart from most other contemporary novels.

The first surprise is that it doesn’t centre around people and their problems; the second that it is fundamentally evangelistic. By that I don’t mean that it is a Christian book (far from it, in fact), rather that it aims to convict readers and change their thinking and lives. The message that it proclaims on every page is that trees are complex ‘social beings with memory and agency’, which deserve our reverence.

Wooden communication

It might be a shock to you to learn that trees communicate with each other. It certainly was to me, and if I hadn’t stumbled upon this fact a couple of months ago when turning on the radio¹, I might have dismissed The Overstory as fictional whimsy. But this is genuine science. The root systems of trees in forests send messages to each other, appearing to collaborate and share resources. Above the ground, trees learn to recognise danger and then to anticipate it. Or maybe something like that – it’s hard to write about this without using anthropomorphic language.

But the trees aren’t the main characters in The Overstory, though they are its point. Instead the book begins with eight separate stories, revealing to us nine characters who have significant relationships with trees. One inherits a book of photos of the same chestnut tree, taken a month apart over decades. Another has a father who teaches her every day about the forest. Another has his life saved when he falls from an aeroplane onto a banyan tree. Yet another hears ancient voices telling her to rescue trees. These lives become gradually intertwined into a narrative centred on eco-activism and a seemingly doomed fight to save ancient US woodland.

A pantheism of sorts

The book is long. 500 pages of unremitting present-tense action and powerful description. I was taken with it and found it hard to put down, but ultimately frustrated. The aim of author Richard Powers is ‘to resurrect a very old form of tree consciousness, a religion of attention and accommodation, a pantheism of sorts’ which failed to convince me stylistically as well as philosophically.

There is no debate or nuance in this book, despite the careful sentences, colourful vocabulary and genuinely interesting ideas. All the activists are good, all those who would chop down trees bad. For fiction to work, above all else characters need to be credible and complex, but these are not.

Dead-end virtue

So why has it done so well? I think because it speaks into a world dominated by dismal evolutionary materialism with significant truths: we are all interconnected; the created order is awesome; sacrifice is hardwired into our psyche; and we humans have a responsibility to act. But, like today’s veganism and identity politics, it offers something which looks like immediate virtue but is an ultimate dead-end. Nature can lower the blood pressure, but it can’t offer us hope, or cleanse the conscience. And if everything is God, then God is impersonal and the personal really matters very little.

Caring for nature

There is a challenge for Christians here then. Because we do have reasons to care for nature and for the individual; the personal God we know as Trinity made all for his own glory and he commands us to subdue and steward creation and to love our neighbours.

So, are we prepared to honour the creator of trees by truly caring for his complex, beautiful creation? More than others we should be filled with wonder at nature (Psalm 8), as it testifies to an even greater beauty. More than others we should be ready to reduce our consumption so that we steward God’s resources for the good of all, for we know of his love for all he has made (Psalm 145).

Sarah lives in Huddersfield and is a member of Hope Church where her husband is a pastor. She teaches A level English and is currently studying for a Masters in theology.