One night, while Britain sleeps, trees burst through the ground, demolishing houses, roads and cities, obliterating modern infrastructure and reclaiming the land as forest. Life is destroyed along with everything humans have come to rely on, from mobile phones to readily available food.
The protagonist, middle-aged former history teacher Adrien is home alone while his wife, Michelle, attends a conference in Ireland. He is not a likely survivor of this pastoral nightmare. But a serendipitous meeting with nature-loving Hannah, her quietly stoical son, Seb, and a Japanese-American teenager – who just happens to be trained in capturing and killing wild animals – instigates a quest through the woods. First, they go in search of Hannah’s brother and then across the Irish Sea to find Michelle. Along the way, they meet fellow survivors – clergymen, fishermen, lawyers – as the dissolution of civilised society rapidly becomes apparent.
The strength of the novel – Shaw’s third – is in the visceral descriptions of the forest: the reader feels, smells and hears the trees, convincingly portrayed as sinister, formidable and with unnerving intentions of their own. Shaw gradually builds up a sense of the supernatural, including “whisperers” – small twig-and-leaf creatures visible only to selected humans.
His characterisations are less assured. Adrien is not entirely plausible: overweight, self-loathing and directionless in his career, he gorges on takeaways and alcohol and yet, when the time comes to leave with Hannah and her son, an unlikely fastidiousness prompts him to pack “seven pairs of everything”, plus enough toiletries to stock a branch of Boots. When, after 460 pages of self-doubt and cowardice, Adrien finally becomes a hero, some readers might find their patience with him has already worn thin. Similarly, Shaw never seems to get under the skin of his other key characters, each of them having their designated role to play rather than rounded lives of their own.
Still, The Trees is a bold, intriguing conceit for a dystopian environmental novel. Although the pacing can be uneven, and the story languorous as a result, it is a valiant exploration into notions of power and leadership, and what humans can do when tested to their limits.
The Trees is published by Bloomsbury (£8.99). Click here to buy it for £7.37
