The Island of Missing Trees

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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

The great theorizer of the historical novel, György Lukács, writes that the real merit of historical novels is not that they reproduce local customs and language with great accuracy—a task in which The Island of Missing Trees shows considerable investment—but that they dramatize historical forces in such a way that the inevitability of what happened becomes clear. The best historical novels choose their characters so that, even though they are “middle-of-the-road,” ordinary individuals, they can still help us understand how, for instance, feudalism had to make way for capitalism. Turkish-British author Elif Shafak’s new novel, The Island of Missing Trees, revisits some of her favorite themes: nonlinear history, the redemptive power of stories, and immigrants and outsiders. The titular island of the novel is Cyprus, and the story mostly moves between the 2010s and the early 1970s, right around the time when intercommunal violence between the island’s Turkish and Greek communities escalated. At the heart of the novel is a star-crossed couple—Kostas, a Greek Cypriot, and Defne, a Turkish Cypriot. By the time we reach the 2010s, Kostas and Defne are married, have moved to England, and are raising a daughter named Ada (“island” in Turkish), but their past still haunts them. Literature helps open questions that we must addres. The Island of Missing Trees is a novel that asks so many important questions to help us individually and collectively create a better future. Ever since, Cyprus has been divided, with a United Nations peacekeeping force maintaining a buffer zone between the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Adding to the multicultural mix are British military bases still on the island, which used to be part of the British Empire until 1960. If trees could talk, what might they tell us? “Well,” says the Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak, smiling at me over a cup of mint tea, her long hair a little damp from the rain. “They live a lot longer than us. So they see a lot more than we do. Perhaps they can help us to have a calmer, wiser angle on things.” In unison, we turn our heads towards the window. We’re both slightly anxious, I think, Shafak because she arrived for our meeting a tiny bit late, and me because this cafe in Holland Park is so noisy and crowded (we can’t sit outside because yet another violent summer squall has just blown in). A sycamore or horse chestnut-induced sense of perspective could be just what the pair of us need.

The Church Times Archive

In The Island of Missing Trees, prizewinning author Elif Shafak brings us a rich, magical tale of belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature, and, finally, renewal. The novel Violeta also talks about the disappeared of South America in the brutal regimes of the second half of the 20th century. A rich, magical new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World.

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.’” 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 War and love and violence are daringly mixed in this novel. The blast of a home-made bomb lobbed into the tavern instigates a passionate tryst and death unites others whose love is forbidden.A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES is balm for our bruised times' David Mitchell

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.” Proposing arboreal collaboration and reciprocity as exemplum for humanity , The Island of Missing Trees proposes an ethical value-system in which humans are urged to recognize the rights of nature. The tree records the threats to its own life, explaining that “a tree’s rings do not only reveal its age, but also the traumas it has endured, including wildfires, and thus, carved deep in each circle, is a near-death experience, an unhealed scar” (45). In this moment, the novel implies a broad ethical question: “Do trees have intrinsic rights?” (Jones and Cloke 220) and, if so, who grants them, and how do we defend them? The fig tree is shown to have self-knowledge, and makes meaning out of green, scarred matter; this, in turn, makes matter meaningful, both in and of itself as well as for humans. Emphasizing the intra-actions of matter and meaning, Karen Barad reminds us that “knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part” (185). For her, the rings of a tree reveal how matter has agency, engraining a tree’s history “within and as part of the world” (Barad 180). Shafak’s novel similarly shows the tree within and part of the world, creating those arborealities that I have been tracing that bring us from representing to knowing to valuing arboreal life, or an “ethico-onto-epistemology” (185) that recognizes the “differential intelligibility” (335) of more-than-human life. This is most evident where the tree outlines arboreal time through its rings:In this powerfully elegant novel, British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak wades into the Mediterranean Sea to tell a story of coexistence run amok, botched by those who inhabit the Earth together. The Island of Missing Trees is a masterpiece of allegory illustrating how fanatic hatred and collective beliefs worldwide maintain a hold on present-day lives through ancestral memory—and result in othering. This was so true of both the novel itself (honestly pretty much all the books I most enjoy reading) as well as Ada’s learning her parents’ story within the novel. There are bits and pieces, circles within circles (similar to tree rings! like arboreal time), threads that are started and dropped. And so often starting a story can seem insurmountable. But remembered it is, and not just on the island itself and among the people who live there now, but also among the many Cypriots who left their homes and settled elsewhere, in the hope of starting again.