The Trees

Another absolutely extraordinary book, this time a novel. I was blown away by Percival Everett's latest novel, James, and his 2021 The Trees is just as powerful. It's funny and horrific, it gallops along, it's brilliant and deeply unsettling. It starts as a murder mystery, with the mutilated bodies of white men discovered along with a Black corpse who bears a striking resemblance to the body of lynched teenager Emmett Till. Two Black detectives try to unravel what's going on, as the bodies mount up and the circumstances grow more bizarre and inexplicable.

Everett's special genius is for dialogue. It fizzes and crackles like electricity through these pages, pulling the reader inexorably through a landscape of horror and rage that might otherwise be unendurable. The Trees is both furious and droll, eminently readable and starkly appalling. Everett makes the case for the history of lynching in the US as a kind of slow motion genocide, forcing us to confront the unspeakable cruelty that is a continuing reality.

The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. If great things come in threes, I can't wait to see what Everett produces after this and James.