Book Report: The Island of Missing Trees (4)

25. Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees (2021) (11/7/22)

A friend recommended this book the other week, saying it was one she'd already read twice and could see reading yet again. She absolutely loved it. That's high praise. And while I don't expect to be rereading this, I did enjoy it—mostly. 

It's a story of a divided land: Cyprus. And of people, Turks and Greeks, divided by war. And of young lovers, Kostas and Dafne, similarly divided by circumstance, by history. The story plays out in several time frames: the late 2010s in England, 1974 in Cyprus, and the early 2000s in Cyprus. 

In the present-day story, we have Kostas and his teenage daughter, Ada, who have grown increasingly apart since Dafne's death the year before. (Yes, we learn right off that the two lovers do marry.) Then Ada has a disturbing experience at school, which makes her feel ostracized and odd. At the same time, her aunt Meryem, Dafne's sister, comes to visit, and Ada isn't entirely welcoming. Why did none of her mother's family come to help grieve when Dafne died? 

The older stories tell of young Kostas and Dafne's illicit courtship, aided by two tavern owners, also Turkish and Greek, and then of their reunion twenty-five years later, long after Kostas, at his mother's insistence when the bloodshed in Cyprus became unbearable, had moved to England to live with his uncle. In the meantime, he has become a respected botanist, and Dafne has become an anthropologist. When they meet again, she is part of a team that is looking for the bones of the dead on the island. 

It's a good enough story, though there were no surprises. (Kind of like real life, I suppose.) Even the sad fate of the two tavern owners, who happen in addition to be gay—sin heaped upon sin, for those days and that culture—is essentially laid out at the very start, in a prologue. But Shafak does an excellent job of telling the history of Cyprus, all the divisions and animosities, through these characters' stories. I remember reading about the partition and the violence back in the 70s; Shafak makes all that come alive and underscores the sadness, pain, and confusion of the time. Also the echoing silences.

What I did not like was the use of a gimmick: a narrating fig tree. Although I appreciated most of what the tree had to say—it proved a useful stratagem for relaying all sorts of random stuff, about natural history especially, the bees and butterflies and songbirds and, of course, trees of all sorts, but also about Cyprus and humanity—it felt like an annoying contrivance. It found a sort of redemption at the very end, I suppose (the only real "surprise" in the book), but still...

There was also something about the writing itself, just the way the words were put on the paper, that I found irritating. I can't put my finger on it. Maybe a sort of preachiness?

But all that said, yes, I am glad I read this book. I learned a lot. 

I didn't flag any passages, but I did stick page 141 in my mind. It's the darn fig tree talking:

They call it the Green Line, the partition that cuts through Cyprus, aiming to separate Greeks from Turks, Christians from Muslims. It acquired its name not because it was marked with mile after mile of primeval forest, but simply because a British major general, setting out to draw the border on a map spread out before him, happened to use a green chinagraph pencil.
     The colour was not a random choice. Blue would have been too Greek and red too Turkish. Yellow represented idealism and hope, but it could also be interpreted as cowardice or deceit. Pink, associated with youth and playfulness as well as femininity, would simply not work. Nor would purple, symbolizing ambition, luxury and power, have produced the desired result. Neither white nor black would do, they were too decisive. Whereas green, used in mapping to mark pathways, seemed less contentious, a more unifying and neutral alternative.
     Green, the colour of trees.