Micro Review 36

 

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak (Viking Books)

advance reading copy

My love of Greece, and Greek set books, is probably clear to regular readers of this blog and a little while ago I had the chance to read two novels set in Greece in a row. Both of them had a mid 20th century setting and I enjoyed them both, however it is Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees that has stuck with me the most.

Ruth Padel's Daughters of the Labyrinth was very readable and although set in Crete during WW2 it was as different from Hislop's The Island as can be and gave me a new perspective on the Cretan occupation. It also came bang up to date the end with mentions of the Coronavirus pandemic, but unlike in some books this felt natural and not a way to shoe horn in the way the world changed in 2020.

However The Island of Trees takes up the post war history of Greece, and in particular that of Cyprus. Again this is a topic that Hislop has covered but this book is completely different and again adds a new dimension to the story.

It starts in modern day London with teenager Ada struggling with family secrets and history and slowly we learn how her family was impacted by post war unrest in Cyprus and then the Turkish/Greek conflict later in the century. More interestingly much of the story is narrated by a fig tree, who of course is old enough to have seen all of the history covered in the book.

It sounds trite but the device works completely and while I could see the broad arc of the story - two Cypriots falling in love but then torn apart as one is a Greek Christian and the other a Turkish Muslim - but I found it worked perfectly, and I loved the asides and recipes that the tree allowed us.

In my last volunteering session at the Royal Norfolk Regimental Museum before the pandemic I was looking at artefacts donated to the museum donated by soldiers who were on Cyprus during some of the timeframe covered in the book. Shafak's writing mirrored the items I'd handled so accurately I trusted her story telling completely, and even though I've never visited Cyprus I felt I could 'see' all of the action and could accept the fig tree as narrator even more willingly.

The one thing I wasn't so sure of was the target audience for the book - much of the time Ada was the lynchpin of the modern story and being a well drawn teen character I started the book thinking that this was for a YA audience. However as the novel progressed it became a much more adult tale and Ada's voice seemed just a little out of balance with the book for me. I can't quite explain what I mean but I fear that the opening will put off fans of Victoria Hislop, and that the later parts will alienate the YA readers and the book will fall down a hole and be lost - which it doesn't deserve.

Anyhow if you are missing your Greek fix as much as me this summer I recommend both of these books - but be warned they won't help with the longing for Greece!