I wasn’t certain I could accept a novel largely narrated by a fig tree. This image of deathly threat dissolving into beauty is characteristic of Shafak’s magical sway. Resisting the urge to simplify or judge is a recurring theme.Īda’s favourite bedtime story from her mother featured soldiers during the second world war who feared for their lives when they saw a cloud of yellow poisonous gas floating towards them, only to realise it was thousands of migrating butterflies. We see Ada’s thinking mature, experiencing her shifts in perception incrementally. The push and pull of teenage emotion is also captured with precision.
The destruction of the natural world at first strikes as a metaphor until you realise it isn’t at all. In one of the most shattering scenes Kostas describes the hundreds of fruit bats that have perished, some so tiny they are still suckling. Trees suffer horribly, as do parrots and even ants. Through the character of Kostas, who is hyper-alert to nature, Shafak makes clear the devastation wrought by war is not unique to humans. The blast of a home-made bomb lobbed into the tavern instigates a passionate tryst and death unites others whose love is forbidden.
War and love and violence are daringly mixed in this novel. “You don’t fall in love in the midst of a civil war, when you’re hemmed in by carnage and by hatred on all sides . . . And yet there they were.” Defne, Ada’s Muslim Turkish Cypriot mother, and Kostas, her Christian Greek Cypriot father, are powerfully drawn to each other although both know their families would neither tolerate nor forgive their romance. Shafak carries us back into the summer of 1974, when two teenagers meet in secret in the store room of The Happy Fig tavern in Nicosia. Her long wild scream is a protest that none of the facts of her life add up. What was the great sadness her mother carried, self-medicating with alcohol and pills? Why did none of her mother’s family attend the funeral? Lack of knowledge unsteadies Ada and wounds her pride. When her mother’s sister, Meryem, arrives for a visit, in a flurry of over-catering and Marilyn Monroe-themed luggage, Ada’s thirst for information grows. Kostas grieves discreetly, consumed by misery in the garden at night, while Ada watches from an upper window. Her mother, Defne, died 11 months earlier, leaving Ada and her father Kostas scalded by loss. The story begins in the “late 2010s” with Ada Kazantzakis, a 16-year-old north Londoner. Oh - and one of the narrators is a fig tree. It blurs the boundaries between history and natural history in profound and original ways. Its dense mazes of memory make you set aside your own. 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 young lovers unite with “an incredulous laughter, the kind of effervescent lightness that only comes after constant distress and fear”, and much of this spirit pervades the book. This is a novel, the 12th by the British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak, in which many of the facts are sad - bereavement, violence and unbearable misunderstandings - but the atmosphere is one of great enchantment. There are eccentric aunties who chat about the gods as though they were the neighbours (Aphrodite is pretty “but a bitch”), a teenage social media storm #doyouhearmenow, a lament for the cruel trade in songbirds and a self-help guide for adults seeking arboreal consolation. The Island of Missing Trees begins with an astonishing scream of some duration and ends with the dreams of a soon-to-be unburied fig tree.īetween the scream, unleashed by the teenage heroine Ada during Mrs Wallcott’s history lesson, and the ceremonial rebirth of the fig, there are star-crossed lovers cauterised and separated by the violence of the 1974 civil war in Cyprus, investigations of multigenerational trauma and determined searches for the loved and lost.
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