The Trees (2022)
Why this one?
I’m currently making my way through the 2022 Booker Shortlist.
The Trees seems to be a popular choice for the shortlist, and a popular book in general - so much so that it took me quite some time to track down a copy, with a lot of places selling out after the list was announced. It’s by Percival Everett (1956- ; active 1983- ), born Fort Gordon, Georgia, US. He studied at Brown university, where he wrote his first novel Suder (1983). Since then he’s published relatively prolifically in the US, though many of his books have been hard to get hold of in the UK.
Some of his better known novels deal satirically with racism and issues facing Black people in the US and in general, notably Erasure (2001) which focuses on how the publishing industry pigeon-holes African-American writers, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009). He has won numerous prizes over the years, and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer for 2020’s Telephone. The Trees is his first Booker nomination, though. He lives in LA and is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Thoughts, etc.
The Trees is a vicious, riotous satire that deals with the subject of lynching in the US through the twentieth century. In Money, Mississippi, a white man is found brutally murdered - garrotted by barbed wire and castrated - next to another body, that of a mutilated Black man who looks curiously like Emmet Till, who was the real-world victim of a lynching in Mississippi in 1955, aged just 14. Several more deaths occur, with the same body appearing next to them. Soon, similar incidents are occurring across the whole of the US. The set up is one of a murder mystery, albeit one that initially seems to have potentially supernatural connotations.
While the subject matter could not be more serious, the tone is wildly comic. The white characters that populate Money are near-universally portrayed as hilariously pathetic and dumb, unable to piece together what’s going on around them and immersed in both casually and actively racist behaviour, including shambolic Klan rituals. Into the mix are thrown a series of Black detectives, Ed and Jim who are perpetually embarrassed to work for the MBI (the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation) and Herberta Hind (cruelly saddled with the nickname “Herbie” by her parents) who works for your actual FBI. They navigate the horrific crime scenes and racism-riddled interactions with locals with bemused exasperation rather than shock and add to the overall comic tone of the novel. We also meet the 100+ year old Mama Z, who has created an archive in her home of every lynching to have occurred in her lifetime, which serves as a starkly presented counterpoint to the comic-horror going on in the present. One powerful chapter is simply a list of those names, presented without comment.
The humour is obviously of the darkest kind, but it’s nonetheless laugh out loud funny in many places. The outrage at the decades of racist crimes that it’s really dealing with simmers under the surface, with a certain glee taken in the graphic vengeance being enacted throughout, but otherwise a matter-of-fact cataloguing of the ongoing racism of the society in which it takes place and the dumb delusion of its inhabitants as they fail to clock the uprising that’s happening around them.
It’s a book that forces confrontation with issues that are horrific on a grand and near-incomprehensible scale, and does so by drawing you in with a deceptively simple, seductively humorous and guiltily entertaining narrative. It’s written with the page-turning pace of a thriller, full of laughs and is in those senses just a very enjoyable, easy read. It’s hugely cinematic, calling to mind a Coen Brothers scenario overcut with Jordan Peele-like use of horror and humour to tackle far deeper issues. Underneath it all, though, it’s a book about the state of the US (and the world) in 2022, in which the crimes of the past continue to haunt the present - and its quasi-supernatural uprising feels like a desire for some sort of similar catharsis in reality.
Score
9.5
A hugely powerful book thematically, and enormously enjoyable to boot. It feels like a near-nailed-on favourite for this year’s Prize and would be a richly deserved winner. You never know which was the judges will go, though. If it wins, it’ll take its place for me among the absolute best winners and definitely would be the funniest to date.
Next up
One more to go, and I’m again jumping in to a book that’s part of a series where I haven’t read the preceding novels, in the shape of Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William!, part of her Lucy Barton series.
