The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak

This 2021 novel is a beautifully told story about horrendous events. Set variously in Cyprus in 1974, England late 2010s, and Cyprus early 2000s, it relates the Cyprus division and coup in 1974, when an island inhabited by Greek and Turkish Cypriots split into warring factions resulting in murder, war, and dislocation. A Greek and a Turk, both islanders, fall in love. 

Kostas is a gentle thoughtful youth who loves the natural world; Dafne is a fiery freedom-loving girl drawn to his quiet kindness. In Cyprus at that time, they cannot be seen together. A tavern and restaurant in Nicosia, the capital, The Happy Fig, is run by two men, a Greek and a Turk, who welcome all. A fig tree lives inside the restaurant, and narrates chapters of this story. This non-human perspective embraces what we are learning about trees: their communication with each other and with other plant life and their shared earth, through mycorrhizal networks. 

The other major character is Kostas and Dafne’s teenage daughter Ada, born and raised in England. She is a child of the modern world, while Kostas has become a biologist specializing in trees, Dafne an archaeologist. Ada has grown up without an extended family – both her parents’ families shunned them for their choice of partner, so when her mother’s sister visits, she begins to learn her past. 

Kostas tells Ada: 

"I think it’s possible to deduce a person’s character based on what they first notice about a tree… some people stand in front of a tree and the first thing they notice is the trunk. These are the ones who prioritize order, safety, rules, continuity. Then there are those who pick out the branches before anything else. They yearn for change, a sense of freedom. And then there are those who are drawn to the roots, though concealed under the ground. They have a deep emotional attachment to their heritage, identity, relations…”  

This book is not a fantasy; it is firmly rooted in history and biology, including the rising effects of climate change: altered migration patterns, stressed plants and animals. The author also observes the impacts of traditional human behaviors on our world: in Europe, songbirds are considered a delicacy, with millions captured and killed yearly to become exotic meals in fancy restaurants. Kostas’s own mother stuffs and roasts songbirds, which the boy cannot bring himself to eat. She doesn’t think about the slaughter – eating them is a tradition. He can see only wanton devastation. 

Shafak is a fine writer and this novel is a beautiful portrayal of civilization on edge, humans out of synch with the rest of the world. The slow-rolling catastrophe of our dangerously-heating planet seems unable to get our attention to address it. But banishing the words “climate change” from US Government websites will not make it go away. Dismantling FEMA and knee-capping the National Weather Service and NOAA will only worsen the effects – while we whistle past the graveyard of the huge percentage of species facing extinction, too slow to adapt to unprecedented circumstances.