A second thread of star-crossed love appears, this time between two men who own a tavern where Kostas and Defne meet. There in Nicosia, capital and largest city of Cyprus, Yiorgos and Yusuf built their bistro in 1955, naming the popular gathering spot The Fig Tree after the tall plant growing in the center. Hatred—of both the gay lifestyle and the fact that one man was a Greek Cypriot and the other a Turkish Cypriot—eventually explodes the place with a bomb. The ancient Fig Tree, around for close to a century, reports these events.

The story begins in the “late 2010s” with Ada Kazantzakis, a 16-year-old north Londoner. Her mother, Defne, died 11 months earlier, leaving Ada and her father Kostas scalded by loss. Kostas grieves discreetly, consumed by misery in the garden at night, while Ada watches from an upper window. Have you immigrated? Have you been rooted and uprooted and rerooted in your life? How did you make your choice as Yusuf and Yiorgos made their choice or was the choice made for you as it was for the fig tree? How did you experience that uprooting and re-rooting? This tree is wise (aren’t all tree narrators?) but can also be witty. The infamous fruit devoured in the garden of Eden was assuredly a fig, it maintains. Nice as they are — crisp, refreshing and wholesome — no one ever went overboard, in life, for an apple. Arboreal-time is equivalent to story-time – and, like a story, a tree does not grow in perfectly straight lines, flawless curves or exact right angles, but bends and twists and bifurcates into fantastical shapes […].

Church Times/Sarum College:

Throughout the novel, the human world is dependent on nature to fulfill its history. This finally comes full circle at the end of the novel, when the human and the natural become one. At the very beginning of the story, the fig tree ponders whether it is ever possible for a human to fall romantically in love with a tree. Uncanny as it might sound, the question of a romantic affair between the fig tree and Kostas, the botanist, who is obsessed with the fig, is left hanging throughout the narrative. This is finally answered when the readers get to know that the spirit of Defne transmuted inside the fig after her death. When Meryem conducts a prayer service for the spirit of Defne to reach heaven, Defne chooses to remain “rooted.” Elif Shafak very interestingly spans her novel through an entire season, from the season of “burying a fig tree” to the “unburying of the fig tree,” and in this is reflected the story of a family—Kostas, Defne, and Ada—the story of burying and unburying the past, the story of burdening and unburdening, the story of letting go and holding on. Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self intention and compassion – until we learn them not to. […] When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. […] If maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice (57). The Island of Missing Trees is a strong and enthralling work; its world of superstition, natural beauty and harsh tribal loyalties becomes your world. Its dense mazes of memory make you set aside your own. It blurs the boundaries between history and natural history in profound and original ways. Oh — and one of the narrators is a fig tree. Shafak’s own use of the novel form, in which we get the mimesis of a tree and the narrative prosthesis of a tree that produces a sense of treeness, suggests her novel is an Anthropocenic imagination, one attentive to nature’s story and temporalities. As Bruno Latour argues, storytelling is vital to how writers, and scientists alike, describe a nature that is already animated in and of itself: “Storytelling is not just a property of human language, but one of the many consequences of being thrown into a world that is, by itself, fully articulated and active” (13). Ecocriticism adds further to our understanding of how the novel treats matter, with Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann using the term “storied matter” (1) to capture how matter provides a ground for stories but, like Latour, they emphasize that it has its own story to tell: “the world’s phenomena are segments of a conversation between human and manifold human beings” (4). The Island of Missing Trees acts as a container in Le Guin’s sense, language in motion in Boxall’s, and storied matter in Iovino’s and Oppermann’s, to catalyze a movement into arboreal narrative voice and tree-as-character to face another living thing. Shafak uses narrative’s “uncanny capacity to animate voice” (Boxall, Value, 19), with the character of Ada increasingly sensing an arboreal presence despite her disbelief. As she feels empathy for the tree, “buried all alone in the garden, its remaining roots dangling by the side” (Shafak 95), a deeper, communicative connection strikes her: “she had the strangest feeling that the tree was awake too, tuned into her every movement” (95). The uncanniness of the moment, the interplay between absence and presence, is part of the novel’s arboreal aesthetic in which it stories—and legitimates—arboreal matter. With the tree’s own articulation of an arboreal world that humans imperil, we slip out of metaphor or, rather, that figure “overflows,” to borrow Stephanie Frampton’s term, into metamorphosis as “an actual metaphor, a metaphor that is no longer figurative, but descriptive” (184). Shafak comingles the figures of metaphor and metamorphosis as a “rhetorics of becoming” (Frampton 195), with the narrating tree referring to a literal fig tree—it stories that green matter and provides a resemblance to one—and becoming one through the narrative’s actualising of arboreal sentience. This is the novel’s contribution to what Latour calls our “geostory” (3), in which nature and human are no longer set apart as object and subject but instead operate on shared ground (16). Shafak’s approach provides “a less anthropocentric kind of listening” (Fargione 254) to trees that appreciates their energy.

The tree is central to the novel’s exploration of the past’s uncanny incursion into the present in three interlinked ways. First, it is as an authorial medium, with Shafak herself commenting on how the idea of a narrating tree provided “a sense of freedom that I needed to dare tell the story” (qtd. in Nair) of a divided Cyprus. 2 The novel’s arboreal narrator focalizes this history, bearing witness to the “division of the island into a Greek South and a Turkish North” and the displacement of thirty percent of the population (Dietzel 2; 146). As one historian of the conflict observes, “all Cypriots have been haunted and branded […] by this protracted, never-ending confrontation,” characterized as it is by ethnonationalism on both sides (Anastasiou 10). Second, the tree is a memorial medium through which the novel negotiates the island’s history. The “missing” in the title connects deforestation and ecocide to the legacy of the disappeared on both sides of the island’s divide. Third, the tree is a more-than-human medium, or an imaginative leap into arboreal life that enacts an intraspecies communion with nature, which is accorded a subject status at the level of narrative and story. The revelation that we have a narrating tree comes early in the novel, in its second chapter, so that readers experience her as a companion to the opening narrative voice. As such, Kostas’ observation to his daughter—“We’re only just beginning to discover the language of trees” (Shafak 41)—has metafictional significance. Identifying dead from conflict around the world is happening every day. As Shafak shares in her interview with Steve Inskeep, the reason that Cypriots are working to find the bones of people who went missing during the ethnic violence is that One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as ‘natural resources’ is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk. I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather, it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination (16). Cyprus is famous for its halloumi ( helim) cheese, which is popular in the UK, too. What is the significance of food in The Island of Missing Trees? Do men and women respond to trauma differently? What do the responses of Defne and Kostas say about their characters?Perhaps the most fascinating and intriguing aspect of the novel is Elif Shafak’s treatment of the natural, which is infused with the magical. The story is replete with symbolic representations; needless to say, ‘tree’ is the primary symbol. Divided into six parts, each part of the novel is designated a title with reference to the tree: The first being “How to Bury a Tree,” the second is titled “Roots,” symbolizing cultural identity and traditional values; the third is “Trunk,” suggesting a connection; the fourth is “Branches,” representing wildness and freedom; the fifth part is titled“Ecosystem,” which is an amalgamation of Roots, Trunk, and Branches, also representing society. Acting as a perfect conclusion, the final part of the novel is titled “How to Unbury a Tree.” When Kostas and Defne carry with them a dead and decaying segment of the fig tree to England, the readers are made aware of the plight suffered by the immigrants and the displaced. The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton also explores intergenerational trauma in a novel. Disappeared It has stopped raining now, and the cafe is closing, so we go out into the fresh air. We’re heading in different directions, but she’s determined to walk me to the park gate. I notice what a good listener she is, her body angled towards mine confidingly. She is a very serious person. It’s not only that she regards it as her political duty to talk of such things as equality and diversity; she seems to relish doing so. But there’s a larky, student-ish side to her, too. Is it true that she loves heavy metal, I ask. Her gentleness seems a bit at odds with headbanging. “Oh, yes,” she says. “I’ve always loved it.” She lists several bands, none of which I’ve heard of. “I like all the sub-genres: industrial, viking…” While she’s working, she listens to the same song over and over, using headphones so her children don’t complain. Crikey. Can she concentrate? “Yes! That’s when I write best. I don’t like silence. It makes me nervous.” Somewhere in the distance, I hear the obliging roar of a motorbike. Shafak has chosen Cyprus rather than, perhaps, the Armenian genocide that continues to haunt her native Turkey. Trauma and intergenerational transfer of memories are of much wider relevance for migrant communities, and for those among whom they seek to rebuild their lives. The Bible speaks of “the sins of the fathers” which will continue to haunt future generations; but perhaps we need to speak also of “the trauma of the mothers” which will be present in the lives of future generations, and which needs to be dealt with.

As a heartbroken Kostas ineffectually circles his quiet teenager, Aunt Meryem arrives with two suitcases emblazoned with pictures of Marilyn Monroe and as many recipes as aphorisms, plaiting and replaiting her hair and never knowing when to mind her business. Every culture has an auntie like her. “‘Signs of the Apocalypse,’ mutters Meryem, turning off the TV. ‘It’s climate change,’ says Ada, without lifting her gaze from her phone.” She is a wonderful counterpoint to Ada’s teenage superiority, and the women eventually come to mirror each other in their vulnerability at a time of change. “‘I blame the menopause,’ says Meryem. ‘I was always tidy and organised … I don’t want to clean up any more.’” A protester in front of a poster of Shafak during a demonstration outside the court during September’s 2006 trial. Photograph: Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty Images As with the Ovidian intertext, the novel’s Shakespearean epigraph introduces an ecological history that is suggestive of stages in the human-nature relationship, where that relationship is not hierarchical, as in Genesis, and Judeo-Christian creation stories more generally, but instead recognizes the animacy of all living organisms. Todd Borlik notes that in contrast to biblical tradition, “Ovid’s universe is far more dynamic and fluid, in which every creature can mutate into something else” (30). If not mutation, movement is suggested through Macbeth and the witches’ prophecy of a marching forest. To Macbeth himself, it is not only conceivable but verifiable, and supported by the messenger’s conditional, ocular proof, “As I did stand my watch upon the hill, | I looked toward Birnam, and anon methought | The Wood began to move” (5.5.31–33). The play’s lively forest is, significantly, the consequence of felling, with Malcolm’s instruction, “Let every soldier hew him down a bough | And bear ’t before him” (5.4.4–5), announcing both a martial strategy, as the branches provide camouflage, and a deeper, extractive proto-capitalist logic: Malcolm and his men assume the right to take nature for their needs. An animist world is set in opposition to an Anthropocentric one.The Island of Missing Trees captivated me as I learned some history of Cyprus and some tree wisdom— not an expected combination! There are myriad ways for readers to connect their experiences and learning with this novel. Intergeneration trauma is explored in Ada’s family as well as in nature, as the story unravels through bits and pieces in three time periods— Cyprus in 1974, Cyprus in the early 2000s and London in the late 2010s. In addition the ecosystem, the flow of time, and secrets are essential elements of the novel that we have each experienced personally. Everyone in the novel holds onto secrets— their relationships with someone their family wouldn’t approve of, their sexual identity, a pregnancy, a history. Which secrets were most devestating? Which were most important to hold onto? The former lovers reconnect, and Kostas persuades Defne to join him in London, to start again, to forget what has been. With them, they take a cutting of the old fig tree, which Kostas carefully tends and eventually plants in the garden of their north London home. Alongside the main narrative, the tree speaks, reflects, and offers wisdom about the realities of which humankind cannot bear too much.

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.” Ongoing Covid restrictions, reduced air and freight capacity, high volumes and winter weather conditions are all impacting transportation and local delivery across the globe. Shafak combines mimicry and metaphor in her Fig Tree character as the tree’s annual rings communicate history and symbolize human immigration. The Fig Tree takes its role as a storyteller very seriously, explaining how it tries “to grasp every story through diverse angles, shifting perspectives, conflicting narratives,” drawing a biological parallel: “Truth is a rhizome—an underground plant stem with lateral shoots. You need to dig deep to reach it and, once unearthed, you have to treat it with respect.” Inhabiting a voice from a different species in an authentic manner is difficult, but the Fig Tree pulls it off with endearing dignity by highlighting collaborative experiences. “Untold stories bring us together,” Shafak writes. “Numbness is destroying our world.” Elif Shafak

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The poetic writing style that Shafak writes with may not be for all readers. At times, the descriptions can be overly detailed and not central to the story. Yet, one cannot deny the impact of the richness of her writing. SHAFAK: I wanted an observer that lives longer than human beings, you know? Trees have this, you know, longevity. They were here before us, and they will most probably be here long after we humans have disappeared - but also to think more closely about issues like, what does it mean to be rooted, uprooted and rerooted? So if you're telling the story of immigrants, people have experienced displacement, either within the island or outside. Then to think this through roots and uprootedness was an important not only metaphor but an important emotional attachment for me. Throughout, she keeps returning to that larger question: Can trauma mark our genes, and can that DNA change be inherited? Analogies of epigenetic heredity appear in other works, such as Frank Herbert’s Dune, Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, or Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. Poignant . . . [Shafak] knows exactly when to dangle unanswered questions, when to drench our senses, when to offer meaningful musings, elegant metaphors and tugs at the heartstrings * Sunday Times * Ada’s history teacher asks her students not to patronise or judge the older person they are interviewing. Is that actually possible?