They live on pallets wedged between branches high up in the trees. They give them names, take storms like surfers the waves, and when it gets cold, they connect their sleeping bags to one. They chain themselves with handcuffs and bicycle handle locks. Until the dredgers arrive, the helicopters, the chainsaws, the police.
No, this is not a scene from the news about the evacuation of the Hambacher Wald. This is part of the burly middle section of Richard Powers' novel "The Roots of Life", a 600-page ode to trees, woods, undergrowth. In which all characters are activists. Or will be. What is also part of the problem of this story with the soulful German title is: Trees are miracles, forests vital for humanity and earth, yes - but as salary then as flat as the thicket, after the Black Forest club has marched through.
It is sometimes scary when current literature reflects events that are the focus of everyday debate. If she meets a topic that no press department could plan. Especially in an era in which climate change is even being questioned by the US president, literature that feels committed to genres such as "ecofiction" or "nature writing" is indispensable as a time mirror, such as Annie Proulx's "Aus hartem Holz" or "Das Year of the Flood "by Margaret Atwood. To show how the phase in which humanity revolves around itself as if it were the sun itself, can give way to unconditional biocentrism.
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Author Richard Powers
It succeeds Powers, who is now nominated with this twelfth novel for the Booker Prize, quite to ignite the big bang, to arouse much sympathy with these borky creatures. Thanks to his nine ambassadors, who in shading pose the radical question: what to do to help these miracles of four billion years? And: what is the limit?
For example, Nick, an artist whose ancestor once planted chestnuts from Brooklyn in Iowa, until one of them as a long-visible sign perpetually towers above all change, photographed for decades, month after month, from the same point. Or Mimi, whose father holds a mulberry tree in the garden in memory of his Chinese homeland. Adam, a psychologist who studies the ant choreography around his maple as a child. Patricia, dendrologist, who started her birch experiments with her father and is turning research around with her studies on tree communication. Douglas, Vietnam veteran who survived a kill as he and his parachute got stuck in the treetops of a pine forest.
Sawed too much for effect
Her pathos continues to thrill, in this novel composed of individual parts like the canopy, after being named in the original: "The Overstory", a game with the meaning of "floor" and "story". Individually with their initiation moments introduced into "roots", their paths in "tribe" mostly cross into activism groups and their lives are recounted ten, twenty years later in "crown" and "seed".
They expire this plant being, so they are often sorted out as gaga. And they are hit to the core when they discover that a huge forest area has been hollowed out and only the brink remained, as a facade. They are astonished because this photosynthesis is a "masterpiece of chemical engineering", "breathtaking magical art". This is sometimes more insistent than any book by Peter Wohlleben or any other work of the current forest obsession.
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Richard Powers:
The roots of life
From the English by Gabriele Kempf-Allié, Manfred Allié
S. Fischer, 624 pages, 26 euros
Order at Amazon. Order from Thalia.
So, now comes the but. The transplantation of the structure of the novel, the unmistakable sound of proselytism: that's all too much cut for effect. "She sees it, a snapshot of glittering gold," it is said, "trees and humans at war for land and water and air, and she can hear it, louder than the rustle of trembling leaves, which side loses her victory becomes." This just barely passes the ecociche of Maja Lund's bee-and-water novels.
But the most incomprehensible thing is: Powers tells an activism story from yesterday, from the Redwood conservationists who occupied trees in the 1980s. And to carry out in his today only private dispute. This nostalgia is bizarre in light of the omnipresent destruction of nature in North and South America, not to mention the RWE forestry.
The brutality of reality is more effective around tree lengths. Every TV minute about the madness in the Hambacher Wald is enough. An insanity that is to give way to a vorgestriges energy concept, a 12,000 year old mixed forest. Yes, Powers' story remains when the last tree is cleared. But it already sounds like a monument. And that's certainly the worst thing you can do to the forests of this world right now.