This is a much reveiwed book so I am not entirely sure what I can say about it that others haven’t. It is such a large book with so many strands, it is almost impossible to hold it all in your head. Maybe it was designed to be like that. I am going to pull out three things that this novel of ideas (A novel of ideas is one in which the plot is driven by an exploration of an idea or set of related ideas, and all other elements of the story are subservient to that idea ) made me think about.

It is a book that argues for a way forward in climate change and saving forests and that way forward is interdisciplinary, just like the book is. It brings together science, myths and the literary arts to provide a more compelling case that just might affect us on an emotional level. In fact, this is signalled at the very beginning of the book in the epigraphs with quotes from an essayist, a scientist and environmentalist and an Aboriginal Australian.

The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The ony thing that can do that is a good story.

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The book starts with the stories (understories) of nine characters – you read almost a third of the book, entitled Roots – with several of these characters connected to the world of research. The purpose of these stories is to show their tree consciousness, how their upbringing and work helped shape them to become the activists they were. The science of trees is therefore easy to present, both the over-the-air communication and mycorrhizal exchanges being based on a real-life conflict between Suzanne Simard and the rest of the scientific community. She was shunned over her ideas that trees communicated through chemicals released into the air and helped each other in times of stress, and like the character Patricia Westerford, she hid quietly, but continued to work.

Powers is an author who understands that climate change demands a broader and more comprehensive solution than one discipline can offer.

One of the other key ideas in The Overstory is timescales; the book has a narrated timespan of 250 years if we start with the Hoel family migrating to America, the average life span of a tree. Powers is urging us to consider trees as communal beings and that they provide an ‘overstory’ to human lives. Often, we are ‘plant blind’ – a scientific term to describe how we don’t see plants that we pass everyday, and that trees and humans are entwined in so many ways. One example of the timescale being greater than a human one is the idea that the Hoel family have of taking a picture of a Chestnut tree they planted outside their house every month. This tradition passed down through the generations until they had hundreds if not thousands of pictures of the tree and could flick through them to see the growth. The images excluded everything else and demonstrated the idea that trees keep on going regardless of what we do, although we can help and nurture along the way. It also demonstrates that the book is interested in what is going on in the images – the trees are the thing.

Contrast this timescale with the timescale of the deforestation. How laws which were meant to stop logging meant that the companies speeded up their logging in order to cut as much as they could before the law came into being. Or, the timescale of the tree planting that Dougie undertook. Years planting thousands of slips to reforest an area only to have it pointed out that all he was doing was providing companies with ways to cut more not reforesting.

We could also consider the trees that were significant in the book. The Chestnut that the Hoel family planted and that was immune to the blight that most others succumbed to. There is the oak that causes Neelay’s accident and the Banyan that Douglas gets caught in when he ejects out of a plane. Trees saving humans. And in order that humans save trees, there is the Giant Redwood that Olivia and Nick live in, up in the canopy for a year, trying to save it.

The writing is wonderful: poetic in places; direct in others. Two of the characters, Dorothy and Ray are reading their way through The Hundred Greatest Novels of All time.

The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands. But they share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive — character — is all that matters in the end. It’s a child’s creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs.

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So here we have the third important thing for me. A desire to rethink how we live alongside and with non-human living beings. What would it mean to live alongside an ancient forest, taking only what is necessary and the forest can stand? Perhaps we should be talking to First Nation People here who have been doing this for centuries rather than listening to our current mindset of take what we can and then take a bit/a lot more.

I thought the way the book was structured was really clever. Roots, Trunk, Leaves and Seeds as sections. The roots were the nine individual stories of people who gradually became connected in the Trunk section to protest against deforestation. In Leaves they were protesting, living a life of activism, giving up their day jobs and joining others, and then in seeds they disperse with fragmented stories of the nine characters and how they go on to germinate ideas in others. This last part I found quite hard to keep together but again, I think that was an intended outcome of the section.

This is a story where trees influence people.