Worse still, in the later pages there’s a straight-up lecture about the need to preserve forests, which reminded me of nothing less than the endless John Galt radio broadcast in Atlas Shrugged. I lost count of the number of times that Powers reminded me that trees were as old as Christianity. But after just one night up a tree, he turns into an empathy-drenched protester and falls hopelessly in love with Olivia Vendergriff, the novel’s inevitably beautiful pixie dream girl.Īs the book becomes dafter, it gets harder to endure its hectoring. He is initially described as borderline autistic, unable to understand humans and devoid of empathy. On the latter point, it seems just looking at a tree can turn characters’ lives upside down. Helicopters! Bombs! Fires! Trees falling down all over the place! People getting messages from the trees! People having massive – and massively unlikely – epiphanies!

It eventually descends into just the kind of crash-bang bollocks that makes bad comic-book adaptations so repetitively dull. In spite of that business with the rings, the opening chapters mostly feel like an extended “superheroes assemble” montage. Meanwhile, the main story descends into increasingly absurd melodrama. Powers uses the couple to crowbar in a few ideas about intellectual property and biological evolution, but otherwise they’re a distraction. The closest they get to the central protest is sometimes reading about it in newspapers. Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly’s story (concerning a divorce that is postponed when Ray has a stroke) also feels at odds with the main narrative. Neelay Mehta, a clumsily rendered Indian-American computer genius, lives an entirely separate life developing a computer game that only really fits in because the game’s structure is mixed in with tenuous metaphors about the “furious green speculations” of trees. At least three main characters never converge on the main story.

Huge chunks of the book don’t properly fit into that concentric ring structure. So: there’s plenty to appreciate if you’re predisposed to liking books and disliking the idea of environmental apocalypse.īut.

The overstory by richard powers