[I read this 2022 novel in two sections. I began with Parts 1 and 2, which I then wrote about. Then, I read and wrote about Parts 3-7, to the end of the novel. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
10 March 2024
Parts 1 and 2
This novel is ambitious in its scope. Elif Shafak has made some interesting choices about the way she tells her urgent story—about how colonialism (and post-colonialism), nationalism and religious differences create a lethal mixture that poisons lives for generations. Shafak is writing about Cyprus since the mid-20th Century, but the themes in the novel are almost universal. I had guessed, wrongly, that the author is Cypriot. In fact she was born in Turkey and has never lived on the island. One of the main characters is Greek, and this choice feels like a declaration of intent on Shafak’s part. In a country that had once been unified, albeit arbitrarily, differences and territorial disputes lead to partition, displacement and exile. It’s a process that has repeated itself in countless different countries since the former colonial powers left. Shafak takes the story of one family, and the fig tree so beloved by the father—I’m not making this up—to tell the story of uprooting and, we hope, survival.
There is so much for the reader to learn about Cyprus and its history since the Second World War that a novelist has to make decisions about what to include and exclude. Shafak isn’t giving us a history lesson, although there’s plenty of it lurking in there. What she tells us about are people’s lives, violently cut short or put under huge strain. The first chapter, following a teasing prologue, has the quiet, British-born daughter of Cypriot parents shocking her teacher, her classmates and herself by letting out a loud, uncontrollable. scream. Nobody can understand what brought it on, during one of the last lessons of term before the Christmas holidays. (The father is Greek, from an orthodox Christian heritage, while the mother, recently dead in her late fifties, had been a Turk raised as a Muslim.)
This is one timeline, the main one in the first chapter. It’s about a girl who seems to know nothing of her heritage, or how her parents met. Why have they always been so guarded? Even the tree, a narrator who has often been present at key moments, is rather coy about what went on after 1974. It, or rather, she, was there in Nicosia—and she’s there in London, growing in the garden. Elif Shafak has created a tortuous back-story to make this possible, the father having taken a viable cutting from the original tree. He likes to commune with every single organism in the natural world, and the tree is soon like one of the family. (Now, in the ‘late 2000s,’ Kostas is a respected botanist and plantsman. The tree means so much to him that Ada is embarrassed. She’ll learn, obviously.) The problem for his daughter is that since her mother’s death a year before, he spends more time communing with it—nature in general and the tree in particular—than he does with her. It’s no surprise this English girl, who is somehow not quite English enough for some of her classmates, lets out a deafening end-of-term scream. And now she doesn’t know how she will ever be able to go back to school in January.
How many threads is that so far? Bereavement, and its effect on the family dynamic. The immigrant experience, and feeling like an outsider. Humanity’s arrogance concerning the natural world. The secret life of trees, as told from the inside…. In fact, this last one might be the single thing, ridiculous though the conceit often seems, that makes this novel different. I’m not sure it will ever really work for me, so I have my doubts that it will be able to compensate for some of the novel’s limitations. I’ll come back to those…
…because there are other timelines, and other threads. That prologue, Island—we hadn’t realised yet that the narrator of it is a tree—is both a sentimental evocation of a beautiful island and a snapshot of a time when it was violently split in two. It’s policed by UN soldiers now, but they will never find the bodies of two men, former taverna owners, murdered and thrown into a well. But the reader will know soon enough, because these men are key participants in another timeline, set in the early 1970s at a time when Greeks and Turks, Christians and Moslems—and neighbours, friends—were forgetting how to live with each other in peace. And two young lovers from opposite sides of the divide find out how hard it’s going to be to make a life together. These are Kostas and Defne, later—much later—to become the father and mother of the troubled girl in the first chapter.
How many new threads or themes is that? Three? Four? Who’s counting? And always, whatever the humans get up to, there are the songbirds, the fragrant trees, the—what? The best bits of a child’s encyclopaedia of the wonderful natural world. There are villains in this novel, but they are all human. Nature just gets on with being itself, and Shafak does her best to make it sound ravishing. ‘Every year sea turtles would come ashore to lay their eggs in the powdery sand. The late afternoon wind brought along the scent of gardenia, cyclamen, lavender, honeysuckle….’ But damn. ‘Whispers of distrust and conspiracy rippled in the dark. For the island was riven into two pieces—the north and the south.’ It’s those pesky humans again.
The lovers’ timeline begins at this time. We find out a little about their families and childhoods: his, with a father who died before his time, activist brothers both recently killed, and an ultra-strict Orthodox Christian mother; hers with an older sister and strictly Moslem father, who would be appalled if a daughter of his were to even think of marrying outside her culture and religion. So we immediately see where this is going. The battle-lines are already being drawn up, and there’s real jeopardy in the lovers’ almost nightly meetings. They are able to meet in secret at the taverna, The Happy Fig, the tree its great glory in the centre of it. The bonhomie and all-round good fellowship here is a microcosm of the best aspects of cross-cultural contact. Having Greek and Turkish lovers meeting there is the owners’ little boost to cross-culturalism—Y and Y are a mixed couple themselves. But we know what’s coming, because those clues in the prologue are unmistakeable…
…and it starts with a bomb. Some staff and customers are killed, but the owners’ spirit is still strong. They can more or less carry on for a while, but it’s soon clear that the magic is gone, the tree is damaged, and we know that worse is to come. All we are sure of is that the lovers’ shared lives in London doesn’t begin until the early 2000s, when Defne is already past 40, unwittingly pregnant with Ada. Maybe it’s her sense of exile that leads to her depression and alcoholism, only really referred to in hushed tones, or hushed narrative hints. The first big lesson for Ada is arriving home from primary school, to find Defne almost passed out. When she stands up, she steps on the little castle Ada has spent all afternoon making from recycled cartons. What’s a quiet seven- or eight-year-old to do but accept it and move on?
That’s a one-off flashback. In the ‘late 2010s,’ a few days into the Christmas holidays, Defne’s older sister arrives. This is Meryem, who had not been at the funeral a year ago. She is a traditional Muslim woman, and brings food, a whole history of domestic culture, and… what? She’s a fairly obvious symbol both of the richness of a heritage, and the narrow boundaries it presents for women who see no reason to escape it. Defne’s relationship with Kostas had led to a rift in the family that Meryem didn’t have the power to heal and, we assume, she didn’t dare to attend the funeral. But she’s here now, buying bright clothes she has never dared to wear in Cyprus. Ada is cool at first, resenting this aunt she has never met and who stayed away until now. But, day by day, she can’t help but be intrigued by what she brings. Ada has had a lonely life, and Kostas hasn’t the emotional resources to help her as much as he thinks he should….
We can see another thread developing, the influence of this outsider who is also—though Ada doesn’t know it—a part of her past that her parents always wanted to keep her from. Defne had been the opposite of Meryem in many ways, moving away from the what she saw as a rigid culture. In London, both she and Kostas kept almost every aspect of their different heritages locked away in the past. This didn’t seem to work, for any of them—which, I suppose, is why Ada is more open to what Meryem offers than she realises. The reader can see, even if Ada can’t yet, that she will soon have the chance to do the Christmas homework that had been set, to interview an older family member about their early life. Ada had thought she wouldn’t be able to, because she wasn’t even going to attempt it with Kostas. As I said, a thread waiting to be followed: Ada’s connecting with her heritage through this unexpected fount of oral history. You couldn’t make it up.
There’s plenty more—how could there not be in a novel full of so many different things it can feel exhausting?—but I’ll stop there. Except for the fig tree’s version of the Adam and Eve story, a clever bit of feminist (and plantist) revisionism. The old story never suggested the fruit of the tree of knowledge was an apple, and the tree claims it was a fig. It’s my favourite thing in the novel so far.
Parts 3-7—to the end
I read the rest of the novel in a day or two, and I’m not really convinced by what Shafak is trying to do. ‘Ambitious in its scope,’ I called it after the first two sections, and this is what creates some of the problems. There’s just too much going on, and very few issues are dealt with in enough depth to be satisfying for the reader. Don’t get me wrong. I’m full of admiration for what Shafak is attempting here, and her foregrounding of the ecological effects of humanity’s arrogant exploitation and consequent destruction of the natural world offers a neat balance to the human stories. Offers, but maybe doesn’t always deliver. There’s a lot of it—the terrible effect on Nature—in the latter part of the novel. But Shafak has a lot of human ground to cover too, especially in the shorter final two or three chapters. Things get lost along the way.
The other difficulty, for me, arises from the narrative choices this author has made. Those timelines, plus another she introduces to cover ‘the early 2000s’ when Kostas and Defne are reunited and she comes back with him to London, take away an important part of reading any novel. Too often, we know how things are going to turn out. Those dead men down the well in the prologue, who we recognise as the taverna owners as soon as a special gold watch is mentioned in Part 2, are doomed from that moment for the reader—and the search for their bodies in Part 5 or 6 becomes almost pedestrian. We know where they are, and we know Shafak will make sure the super-caring agency Defne works for will find them. In the same timeline, Defne’s surprising taste for drink—there’s a hint it’s brought on by the stress of her war-begotten separation from her destiny—will lead to her death in her late 50s. We’ve already been there, and Shafak never attempts to present the slow unfolding of her tragedy. In fact, Defne never really has any presence at all in London. She’s just another casualty of war.
I don’t want to go on about chances missed by this novelist, themes and storylines not fully worked out. Maybe it would be better to focus on what new and unusual things she attempts—that word again—whether or not she achieves a palpable hit every time. Like her controversial decision to leave some of the heaviest narrative work to a sentient tree. It’s silly, obviously, and it’s hard not to mention the absurdity of it when talking about the novel. But Shafak is able to take the narrative in entirely different directions, particularly in suggesting a vision of nature in which every cell and filament of the biosphere is part of an integrated, communicative whole. The gossip of women in the human world is nothing compared to the bush telegraph of the botanical matrix. Every plant and tree—all female, obviously—can be in the know about everything, sometimes almost instantly. Which is a neat way to explain the tree narrator’s omniscience.
I can’t help wishing that Shafak had been able to suggest the same sense of integration in her human narrative. This is a novel about disjunction, the fracturing of communities and lives… but that’s no excuse for some of the characters to seem almost marginalised. I’ve mentioned Defne, whose story isn’t given the space it needs—which is a big gap, because hers is the most tragic experience in the novel. And to some extent, the same goes for all the characters. Ada, we are to believe, goes from a literally screaming sense of displacement to an acceptance of her own place in British society in the course of a two-week school holiday. The aunt she never wants to meet makes her realise, conveniently, that there are other histories, women’s histories told through conversations and traditional textile crafts passed down through generations of women. Wouldn’t it be nice if things were really that neat?
Meanwhile there’s Kostas, the plant-hugging weirdo Ada’s classmates used to mock but who, we know, is now going to be shown far more respect. And Aunt Meryem, parachuted in—OK, not literally, she disembarks like any other passenger on the plane from Cyprus—to fill in the gaping holes in Ada’s understanding of her heritage. The tree lets us understand that she wouldn’t need this auntie ex machina if only humans were as fully connected as their female counterparts in the plant world. Without Meryem, Ada’s two-week break from school would never have sorted her out so thoroughly. She’s even going to be able to talk to that boy she likes without the kind of confused embarrassment that has prevented her from becoming who she really is.
Because yes, reader, it’s a feel-good narrative. Lives are fractured, even smashed to pieces sometimes—thanks for the reminder, Defne, and thanks to those too-traditional families in Cyprus who don’t understand the destructiveness of tribal loyalties—but people survive. And wouldn’t it be nice if Kostas, a new Dr Doolittle, could teach us how to talk to the plants? Well, maybe he will.
We can read it for you wholesale 