The Overstory by Richard Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This novel reads like an epic poem to the beauty and complexity of the natural world; an invocation to understand how little we know and to know how little we understand.

"Life will not answer to reason" Powers reminds us, "and meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it." In the understory of this wildly branching narrative are the humans who live within the systems of the natural world. Trees, and nature more generally, form a metaphor for human interdependence and the slow, primitive evolution of human reason.

Powers voice is clipped, precise, almost scientific, but unambiguously poetic. This is undoubtedly a text where meaning trumps reason - but never fails to acknowledge its debt.

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