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.
Misogyny, rights & Rowling
It might have seemed as if the isolation of lockdown was making people mad last month when the stars of …