The Trees was first published in 2021 and subsequently shortlisted for 2022’s Booker Prize as well as winning the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize that same year. So, depth and humour. Everett’s 22nd novel is set in the modern day during the first Trump administration, in Money, Mississippi. Whilst the outer world is circa 2016-2020, Money, as the characters describe, is not even in this century. By that, Everett highlights that segregation and racism are still daily themes in Money; white supremacy movements still form an undercurrent.
The story begins with several grisly murders of white people who seem to be connected to the non-fictional lynching of a 14 year old boy, Emmett Till, a generation earlier. What follows is a revenge thriller, maybe with a touch of horror, as special detectives Ed Morgan and Jim Davies search to solve the case in Money but also understand what’s happening more broadly across the country. In the wake of those murders, Everett is asking what the response would be if it were white Americans being murdered. How would the institutions respond differently?
I absolutely sped through this book; it’s got snappy, amusing dialogue set off against very deep, very real, very current issues. Everett highlights how unchanged the country is when it comes to race, using the southern states as an initial example. Everett applies a sharp, satirical tone to his examination of those states initially and then secondly to the centralised institutions that control them and the country as a whole.
To me, the pace had something of a movie feel to it: clipped short scene-like chapters are common. It starts with an almost Tarantino feel: a couple of sharp, self-aware cops drawn into a situation nobody is prepared for and then has the context and the dark humour of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. There is an additional ineffable Everett element here; a comic horror or supernatural realism that you see around the edges but is never fully confirmed.
The Trees takes a strong look at the brutality of America’s past and how more needs to be done to correct it today. Because of the way Everett decides to finish the story, the questions linger longer in the mind and everyone should ruminate on them. This is a story about lynching and re-balance through revenge. It hits hard because it should. The Trees makes you consider all those African and Asian Americans who were murdered for as little as talking to a white woman. Where is the justice? Everett asks what would happen if revenge is taken for those murdered purely due to race; The Trees extends from the past to an unresolved future with the races and situations reversed.
This is a powerful novel and an education; a dark story with shards of humour.
D