Life runs alongside them, unseen … A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.Īcts of arboreal ventriloquism are rare in The Overstory. That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. There’s always as much belowground as above. As the opening meditation continues the surrounding trees ‘join in’, admonishing the woman for the partiality of human understanding:Īll the ways you imagine us – bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg’s inverted space, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal – are always amputations. Indeed, Powers strives throughout to suggest how the would-be-autonomous sphere of human meaning depends upon those deeper orders that it has, in the modern era, gone to such pains to dismiss. Trees, we will later be told, are ‘making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain’. ‘Words before words’: in opposition to several hundred years of humanist ideology, Powers’ twelfth novel insists, from its very first page, on meaning as something other than, and more than, the projection of culture upon nature’s blank screen. The tree is saying things, in words before words. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life.

She is sitting on the ground, leaning against a pine tree, ‘in a park above a western city after dusk’: Richard Powers’ The Overstory, a novel concerned with the place of trees in the modern world, opens with the meditations of an as-yet unidentified woman.

The overstory