The Island of Missing Trees

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As the objectivity associated with narrative voice slips into the second person, indexical “us,” the novel expands anthropocentric literary forms to remind its reader that the literary imagination is not bound to the laws of logic but instead “makes possible the imagining of possibilities” (Ghosh 128). This is because the novel is “a medicine bundle,” in Ursula Le Guin’s evocative description, “holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us” (169). Peter Boxall similarly emphasizes the form’s “unique ability to put the relationship between art and matter, between words and the world, into a kind of motion” ( Value, 13). The novel’s “prosthetic imagination” provides for a move between mind and matter, and a productive tension “between being like something and being that something itself” (Boxall, Prosthetic, 16).

In this powerfully elegant novel, British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak wades into the Mediterranean Sea to tell a story of coexistence run amok, botched by those who inhabit the Earth together. The Island of Missing Trees is a masterpiece of allegory illustrating how fanatic hatred and collective beliefs worldwide maintain a hold on present-day lives through ancestral memory—and result in othering. Shafak shifts the story’s location chapter by chapter from the Mediterranean to London, while ceding narration in many sections to an emotional Fig Tree wringing its branches in despair. Allowing a sapling to bear witness proves to be a stroke of genius. The Fig Tree offers astute psychological observations of humans, in addition to supplying historical, environmental, and archaeological facts in a musing manner. By anthropomorphizing Nature, Shafak creates an erudite voice exhibiting wit and warmth to enhance the other roles in her drama.Ada’s history teacher asks her students not to patronise or judge the older person they are interviewing. Is that actually possible? Compassionate and enchanting, it's a transporting tale of roots, renewal and talking trees * Mail on Sunday, Best New Fiction *

The great theorizer of the historical novel, György Lukács, writes that the real merit of historical novels is not that they reproduce local customs and language with great accuracy—a task in which The Island of Missing Trees shows considerable investment—but that they dramatize historical forces in such a way that the inevitability of what happened becomes clear. The best historical novels choose their characters so that, even though they are “middle-of-the-road,” ordinary individuals, they can still help us understand how, for instance, feudalism had to make way for capitalism. I’ve always believed in inherited pain,” says Shafak. “It’s not scientific, perhaps, but things we cannot talk about easily within families do pass from one generation to the next, unspoken. In immigrant families, the older generation often wants to protect the younger from past sorrow, so they choose not to say much, and the second generation is too busy adapting, being part of the host country, to investigate. So it’s left to the third generation to dig into memory. I’ve met many third-generation immigrants who have older memories even than their parents. Their mothers and fathers tell them: ‘This is your home, forget about all that.’ But for them, identity matters.” Booker-shortlisted Shafak ( 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World) amazes with this resonant story of the generational trauma of the Cypriot Civil War * Publishers Weekly * The title “Island of the Missing Trees” itself is suggestive of the presence of the natural world. It is a tale told by a tree—a fig tree or a once “happy fig” tree. The story opens by taking the readers down the memory lane of a Ficus carica. However, before delving into the story of Kostas and Defne, the fig tree states its purpose: it was going to tell the story of losers, the ones history often forgets to mention. And it is there that The Island of Missing Trees begins, with Ada, a teenager in London who lives with her father, a biologist, and whose mother has recently died. In their garden, there is a fig tree. Ada, although named after the island, has never actually been to the home of her parents. And then that scream she gives, in the middle of the last history class before Christmas, while being instructed about a school project to interview a relative of a previous generation.To me the fig tree is both an objective historian and a relator of the natural world. For instance, the fig tree simultaneously recounts the bomb exploding in The Happy Fig in May 1974 and shares the experience of trees developing myriad ways to protect themselves from fire devastation.