Into the woods

This is a novel about trees, written in the shape of a tree (eight introductory background chapters, called ‘Roots’; a ‘Trunk’; a ‘Crown’; some ‘Seeds’), and which unashamedly references every tree you might half-remember, from Eden to Auden (‘A culture is no better than its woods’). It revolves around various efforts to save trees, whether by seedbanks or political activism, and details the ways in which its group of protagonists becomes radicalised and willing to put their lives on the line, or even kill, to save the few remaining patches of old forest in the USA.

One of these protagonists, Olivia, turns towards the forest when she has a near-death experience and starts to sense the spirit of the trees calling to her. Another one, Douglas, ends up Unabomber-ing away in a ghost town in the woods. Towards the end of the novel, a third protagonist, Nick, known for much of the novel by his ‘forest name’ of ‘Watchman’, starts to make a large-scale piece of earth art out of various fallen trunks and branches. He is helped in this by a couple of Native Americans, who speak ‘in a language so old it sounds like stones tossed in a brook’, and who seem to exist primarily to allow clumsy ‘mystic Indian’ scenes to take place:

Nick’s hand goes out, gesturing towards the conifers. ‘It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They’re not that hard to hear.’ The man chuckles. ‘We’ve been trying to tell you that since 1492.’

So, a novel with a fair degree of tolerance for what Lord Business calls ‘hippy-dippy baloney’, and one that fits neatly into the various permitted patterns of white American guilt, where characters’ motives are always seen and interpreted in their best possible light.