Book Review: "The Trees" by Percival Everett

I feel sorry for people who have not yet read anything by Percival Everett. Here's a story for you. I texted my brother one day about how I had bought some new books, explaining that anything by anyone called 'Percival' was bound to be good. I was so very wrong - it wasn't good, it was absolutely brilliant beyond my wildest dreams. Percival Everett is a master in dialogue, description, storytelling and more. He is a brilliant example of what it means to be a novelist and with his book The Trees, he only makes that ever clearer with his dark comedy, his Three-Billboards-esque-ideas and his brilliant writing that could make for an amazing Coen Brothers or Paul Thomas Anderson film someday. It would be a damn shame if it wasn't.

A third-person narrative, The Trees initially has no obvious links to its title until you start digging below the surface. It has a deeper meaning that you won't realise until you get a little bit into the book. I love this novel for its depiction of several storylines all at once, but more importantly so, its depiction of tbe idea of racist stereotypes.

The Trees is a shocking a startling novel about realisation and reality where realisation and reality are being hidden under the ether. As a series of murders in Mississippi rocks the casbah, the people on the inside have to figure out what is really happening here. The police are stumped except for a couple of strange and disconnected clues, the people on the outside seem to know more than they let on. It's a list of everyon who's ever been, who ever was. It cascades into a climax which is far deeper than you think it is.

With its connections to one of the most horrifying events in the pre-Civil Rights era of the USA, this book manages to frame a narrative in another and put you, reader, in the hands of one of the most unreliable testimonies in human history. A mixture of dark comedy, tragedy, anger and the rebellious spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, this novel comes as a brutal truth that the ending will help you to understand.

I was completely blown away by this novel. It's language was so perfect and read so well that you could definitely see exactly where you were whether you were in a house, or with the police, whether you witnessed a death or saw the light. It was like the tone and mood were shifting as the novel moved along, becoming more and more tense, more and more intense and more and more meaningful with each step. You think that first of all, you're moving with the police, but I would beg you to think again.

I think the Guardian was right to call it a 'potent satire' in the way it uses the image of a young boy's dead body. Yes, you guessed it - it's Emmett Till. A book of style, significance and a brilliant defiance of a system rigged to make you think a certain way about certain things - this novel takes your whole being on a hell of a ride through Money, Mississippi and, when you meet this string of wild characters, you won't be fully sure you've understood everything but the ending will hit you like bullets.

I love the satire Everett makes of both sides. He criticises everyone and everything about the rage and power, the thunder of the American political sphere and all of its friends with it. I mean just take a look at the language he uses in the book - its an outrage, its a satire, its a comedy and at its heart, it is very very tragic.

“Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life."

In conclusion to all of this I have to say that I don't know why this book did not win more awards. It is clearly one of the finest novels we have in the 21st Century and if I could go back and read the whole thing for the first time again - I definitely would.