The Overstory

I borrowed Richard Power's Booker Prize short-listed doorstop, The Overstory, because someone on Facebook said it provoked more discussion in her book group than any other novel this year. It's a mighty fat book, the kind of thick adult novel that has made me quail in recent years. But I took a deep breath and dived in.

The Overstory is about trees. It follows nine characters whose stories intersect and overlap, nine people whose lives have all at some point revolved around trees. As I read I couldn't help marvelling at the incredible piece of engineering that is a tree: a elegant machine for converting carbon to oxygen, knitting together earth and air, communicating mysteriously with its fellows, providing shelter and food for countless other organisms, animals, insects and birds, infinitely adaptable, patiently extending roots and twigs, growing imperceptibly out and upward, too slowly for us to notice.

Some of the characters in The Overstory become environmental activists. Apparently this part of the book is based on real-life campaigns in the Pacific North-West of the US. They risk their lives to save the ancient trees. There are also artists, a computer game developer, a lawyer, an engineer who becomes a therapist, a scientist, who all see the trees from slightly different angles.

I've always been more of a tree person than a sea person. My family home is in the foothills of the Dandenongs, and its windows gaze out at a tree-blanketed slope. Even now as I sit in my inner-suburban living-room, I'm looking out at the dozen or so trees in our backyard and the swaying screen of leaves that soars high above the local rooftops.

Today, as I hear the clamour for more clear-felling to protect human property from bushfires, my heart sinks. Surely, if anything can save us from our doom, it will be the trees? One couple in The Overstory decide to let their garden go wild. All they have to do is... nothing. And inexorably, nature takes over. That gave me hope.