Richard, thank you so much for coming to talk to me about your novel The Overstory
- It is my absolute pleasure. - We are sat, very fittingly I think, under
a gorgeous tree, an oak tree. - That's right, a Cecil oak, an enormous one.
It seems a very fitting place to sit here and talk about your novel which is very much
about trees. And I think so much about trees actually that it almost pushes the
human characters into a different perspective - we'll come back to that
later. I wanted to ask first about structure. Your novels often have a
structure which is influenced by the theme or the content of the book and I
think very strongly so in this case. Could you tell us a little bit about how
this novel is structured and why you chose to do it in that way?
It is in four sections: Roots, Trunk, Crown and Seeds. I didn't have that structure when I set
out. I was going to try to take my 9 characters and tell a straightforward
chronological story and just crosscut between them based on what was happening
when. And at the end of a rather gargantuan first draft I realized that's
going to be tough going for a reader to keep track of so many protagonists who
are just introduced by whatever event happens to be happening in a given year.
So I went back in and separated these stories so that all the back
stories for each character were independent and that the reader could
get to know each character slowly, almost as in a series of short stories, for
a grand, gigantic overture, if you will, before they began
to come together into the principal drama of the story. When I stood back
from that and looked at what I had, I realized that there was a wonderful
structural analogy to a tree. What I had were nine independent roots coming up
into a shared stem, when that shared story reaches a kind of
catastrophic moment and the characters are propelled outward
again into their own separate lives that became my crown. And at the very end
the long-term unforeseen consequences of their actions throughout this great
process rain back down again and produce the seeds of hope or possibility that
carry the story forward beyond the last page of the book.
I mentioned earlier about how the prominence of trees actually pushes the human
characters into a different perspective. We're very used to reading fiction about
people, where they are the central character and whilst you do have your
protagonists in this book and we, as you say, we do get to know them all very well
through that opening section of the book, the perspective is shifted by the lifetime of trees
No, it's interesting that you mentioned that time element. I
mean there are parts of the book that function almost like a time-lapse
film. In fact one of the opening stories has to do with taking a picture a month
for several decades of one enormous chestnut. And the family story is just
kind of flickering around in the foreground of this great tree that's
unfolding on an entirely different frame of time. This book is about taking the
nonhuman seriously, it's about realizing that we are not alone on this earth and
the rest of creation is not there simply to be a resource to us. So what I ended
up doing was creating a kind of dramatic stage where the lives of the humans and
the lives of these enormous slow-moving, complicated, social, ingenious, non-human
protagonists could for a while meet in the same dramatic moment. But it
did require, as you say, cross cutting back and forth between a recognizable
social story and a biological story that makes the social story possible, but
is also on the brink of becoming something else at the hands of the
social. But finding a way of having those two completely different kinds of agents
and creatures defining each other, reciprocally connecting to each other.
In each of your novels there is often a piece of science that blows my mind and
you have something in The Overstory which I found absolutely fascinating
which is this idea of trees communicating with each other in order
to form social protection really against predators and disease and things like
that. Could you tell us a bit more about that because it really is extraordinary.
This is research that's come on in the last few decades that has completely
changed the way that we think about forests and trees. And you've already hinted at
the nature. It's now very well established that trees signal to each
other over the air. They come together to form collaborative immune systems, they
warn each other of infestation. They're also deeply connected
underground in mycorrhizal connections with fungus. The discovery
that trees feed and heal each other, that they keep their their young and their
sick alive has changed not only our understanding of the society of trees
but the nature of Darwinian evolution. Once you discover
that a Douglas fir can be feeding and nurturing a birch, you think about the
green world in a different way. And that same kind of interdependence that same
kind of reciprocity of course has always and will always include human beings. We just
have to come to realize it and to join this story that we've separated ourselves
from, artificially and wrongly.
Researching the book and writing it has had quite a profound effect on you and your life hasn't it?
I was living in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley in northern California when I got the tree bug and I
got it from the redwoods on the mountains above Silicon Valley, in the
Santa Cruz Mountains of second-growth redwood forests up there. But I then went
through this multi-year process of realizing that I had walked through the
world in a kind of waking dream without actually seeing the neighbors.
As my obsession grew and I ended up reading over 120 books about trees in single
volume studies about trees, not to mention many more times that in articles,
I just, you know I was obsessed with traveling, seeing, learning; and I kept
reading about what an old-growth forest looked like and how rare they are. I mean
I was stunned to discover that between 95 and 98 percent
of the original forests of North America that were present when Europeans arrived
are gone. And to see that remaining few percent the books kept saying you have
to go to the southern Appalachia, to the Smoky Mountains where a large
percentage of the remnant eastern broadleaf forests still exist. I went
down there three years ago as a research project and I instantly felt like I had
never been so well, or so happy just being in a place. And I bought a house
and I moved down there and I've been living down there ever since and this
book has been out for a while and I don't see myself moving. I just, it's
changed not only where I live but how I live. It's changed the pace and the tempo of my days.
When I was reading your novel I happened to meet and interview the
theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli and he saw what I was reading and he asked
me what it was and what it was about and I explained and mentioned the tree
connection and he said that when he gets very nervous before delivering a lecture,
which you wouldn't know watching any of his lectures, he will take himself
outside and he will go to a huge tree and he will talk to it. And he will find
that incredibly calming and helps him to sort of see things in perspective and
then he's filled with the confidence to go and address that room of people. What do you think that is?
There's something that psychologists call species loneliness,
this horrific sense that there is no meaning outside of us and
we're the only game in town, we're the only interesting prospect and
that's a terrifying thing. I think when Rovelli goes outside and sits by that tree
and talks to it he's defeating species loneliness. He's saying there is a
meaning so far beyond me and there is a frame of connectivity so much larger and
so much longer than I am, I don't have to worry anymore. I'm out there, you know,
I'm imbricated into processes that are so liberating to
understand. I'm just a tiny bit of this experiment and the experiment goes on and on and on.
Richard it was such a pleasure to read your book but even
more of a pleasure to take the time to talk to you about it so thank you very much
Thanks so much Will.