markm reviewed The overstory by Richard L. Powers
Review of 'The overstory' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
The author likes trees (Even those among us who call climate change a Chinese hoax can say that!) and he is dismayed as we approach the end of our times. He has created an extraordinary literary work that uses trees as an image, a metaphor, and an underlying structure at every level from the smallest expressed thought to the whole novel. Beginning with a series of short story-like introductions to the novel's human characters and their relationships with trees, we progress to another story about the battle to preserve trees in which our characters meet and interact, and to the dénouement of their lives corresponding to the beginning of the end of the Anthropocene epoch. The verbal richness of the work in its final pages leaves us with small traces of hope; the possibility that a character's massive online game is a new reality and the thought that maybe only …
The author likes trees (Even those among us who call climate change a Chinese hoax can say that!) and he is dismayed as we approach the end of our times. He has created an extraordinary literary work that uses trees as an image, a metaphor, and an underlying structure at every level from the smallest expressed thought to the whole novel. Beginning with a series of short story-like introductions to the novel's human characters and their relationships with trees, we progress to another story about the battle to preserve trees in which our characters meet and interact, and to the dénouement of their lives corresponding to the beginning of the end of the Anthropocene epoch. The verbal richness of the work in its final pages leaves us with small traces of hope; the possibility that a character's massive online game is a new reality and the thought that maybe only our destruction will permit the persistence of life on earth.
One of the characters is asked to travel across the country to give a lecture on trees to a group looking for simple answers to how they can help the environment. She thinks,
She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it's the stuff of poems. If forests were patentable, she'd get an ovation.