This is a wonderful novel. Normally one keeps this comment for the last line of the review, but I am so enthusiastic about The Island of Missing Trees that I want to put my cards on the table straightaway ... one of the most entertaining history lessons you have ever had ... Ada, perfectly drawn, experiences in-person and online bullying in her north London school in episodes that seem sadly realistic ... Although the novel is rich in themes, its backbone is how Ada comes to terms with the turbulent history of her ancestral island and her own parents , and she could be classified as the main protagonist. The character who steals the show, however, is definitely the fig tree ... Generally I am suspicious of anthropomorphised animals or things in contemporary fiction. They can be tricksy devices cloaking paucity of original thought. Not so here ... All the characters in the novel are just as strongly drawn ... This is fiction at its best.
American readers unfamiliar with the tumultuous history of Cyprus will appreciate how gracefully Shafak folds in details about the violence that swept across the island nation in the second half of the 20th century. But this is not a novel about the cataclysms that reshape nations; it’s about how those disasters recast ordinary lives ... isn’t just a cleverly constructed novel; it’s explicitly about the way stories are constructed, the way meaning is created, and the way devotion persists. Without snarling readers in a thicket of confusion — don’t worry, each chapter is clearly dated — Shafak involves us in the task of assembling these events ... Yes, it’s an odd conceit, particularly whimsical for a novel that explores such painful material, but not surprising from Shafak. As an author, she’s that rare alchemist who can mix grains of tragedy and delight without diminishing the savor of either. The results may sometimes feel surreal, but this technique allows her to capture the impossibly strange events of real life ... Near the end, Kostas’s precious tree tells us, 'If it’s love you’re after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig.' This novel offers the same invitation — and the same reward.
... a strong and enthralling work; its world of superstition, natural beauty and harsh tribal loyalties becomes your world. Its dense mazes of memory make you set aside your own. It blurs the boundaries between history and natural history in profound and original ways ... War and love and violence are daringly mixed in this novel ... Shafak...writes with great control about despair ... The push and pull of teenage emotion is also captured with precision. We see Ada’s thinking mature, experiencing her shifts in perception incrementally. Resisting the urge to simplify or judge is a recurring theme ... a complex and powerful work in which the harrowing material settles on the reader delicately.
... with its complex structure — the setting jumps from contemporary London to Cyprus in 1974 and the early 2000s, and many chapters are told from the perspective of a fig tree — Shafak’s novel conveys how our ancestors’ stories can reach us obliquely, unconsciously ... If Shafak’s prose is occasionally cloying, leaning heavily into nature metaphors, The Island of Missing Trees is not overly sentimental. Shafak is cleareyed about how difficult it is to reach across the gulfs within our families: At the end of the novel, Ada is only beginning to learn about her history, and her grief.
Shafak has penned another masterpiece ... The pain of Kostas’ yearning and regret are palpable, and Shafak makes him a very engaging and heartfelt personage of love everlasting, even in all its painfulness ... has all the elements of a tragic love story, a raging war-time drama, and an important attempt to use the past to define and explain the present ... How the trees create a through line from one generation to another is perhaps the most moving part of the book. It’s a warning and a respite from the horrors of the natural world that we are witness to every day ... The idea of Ada having that tree as a reminder of her connection to her family is a wonderful symbol of survival and redemption and the fact that some things find a way to adapt and move into the future with remarkable stability and determination ... the perfect story for these changing times, but first and foremost it’s an important document of the history of Turkey. It combines large social issues with rather common yet heart-wrenching ones. In the course of doing so, it educates and elevates our hearts and minds well beyond the pettiness of our present-day pandemic discourse. Perhaps unwittingly, Shafak has written a novel that helps us identify and reclaim our love of the world even in the midst of unspeakable sadness and difficulty.
Shafak’s voice is tender but piercing, laying out each character’s joy and hurt as the novel unravels and reweaves itself across generations, borders, and butterfly migrations.
By weaving together the past and present, Shafak provides incisive reflection on the trauma, displacement, migration, and loss that ensued during the civil war—experiences shared by both the fig tree (brought from Cyprus to England by Defne and Kostas) and its owners. Loss suffuses the lives of all ... At many points, the writing is both rich and tender. I especially enjoyed the scenes of some of the peripheral characters ... But I found the overall pacing slow at times, and the interceding observations by the fig tree felt disruptive and self-conscious as the novel progressed. Nonetheless, the research Shafak presents about trees, especially early on, dazzled me ... The reveal at the end was not entirely surprising, but I enjoyed it. Shafak bridges the disconnect so many of us feel in these times between our technology-glutted, hamster-wheel lives and the grounding comfort of the natural world by imbuing the fig tree with a humanity and grace we actual humans achieve only sporadically.
The novel shifts easily in time and space, but even more interesting is the way that it functions as a story of environment and species ... Shafak’s novel, particularly in the meditative moments when the fig tree speaks, asks readers to see beyond themselves, to consider cultures and conflicts that are not their own, to see how each action ripples.
... a poignant follow-up: an exploration of traumatic separation, displacement and exile ... Non-human narrators can be very tricky—if not unbearable—and initially the fig narrator feels like a handy construct, providing bite-sized lessons in history, politics and arboreal science. But gradually its voice softens, grows acceptable and even, at times, beguiling. And this, essentially, is Shafak’s real genius: she is, quite simply, a great storyteller. She knows exactly when to dangle unanswered questions, when to drench our senses, when to offer meaningful musings, elegant metaphors and tugs at the heartstrings. There are perhaps signs of creative haste: a visiting aunt feels a little like a cipher, and a promising storyline for Ada remains underdeveloped. But the bombardment of riches grows cumulatively enlightening, and that torn, exiled, outspoken fig bears fruit.
Given Shafak’s affinity for the natural world, with whole pages of soaring, rich detail about songbirds or butterflies, the occasional cliched sentence was a surprise ... The personification of the fig tree is a mixed bag, a device I worried might infantilise this adult text. And the more 'human' the tree—its love for Kostas, the way it feels 'jet lagged', even its concern for Ada—the less interesting, even mawkish, it seemed. Add the contrivance of small creatures whispering plot points to its branches and for me, coincidence trumped craft. But when Shafak goes deeper into its arboreal life, the tree’s voice is a delight ... when the novel’s sure and towering end arrived, nearly all Shafak’s decisions made sense, moving me to tears and humbling me with the confidence of a storyteller for whom every decision is deliberate. This is a beautiful novel—imperfect, but made ferocious by its uncompromising empathy.
Shafak draws on a rich array of sources in her latest novel. Not only does the story feature a prominent fig-tree narrator, who brings her own arboreal expertise into the story, but Shafak also uses the island as a focal point to weave together myth (Aphrodite is believed to have emerged from the water in Cyprus), politics (the UN Committee on Missing Persons’ work in Cyprus), zoology (the mass die-off of fruit bats in the island in the 1970s), and lepidopterology (Cyprus remains an important waypoint for the annual migration cycle of Painted Lady butterflies). Though rich in historical anecdotes, interesting trivia, and local color—Cypriot delicacies, Turkish proverbs, and Greek terms of endearment abound—the novel is most significant as a piece of historical recovery ... 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 ... Shafak’s project sits uneasily within that understanding of the historical novel. On the one hand, the characterization seems apt: we have one Turkish Cypriot and one Greek Cypriot who embody historic conflict, a teenage daughter who stands for the new generation, and an aunt who stands for tradition. None of these characters are developed beyond what is strictly necessary for their narrative purpose. At the end of the novel, practically all we know about Define and Kostas, for example, is that one is a Turkish Cypriot (and an archaeologist), the other a Greek Cypriot (and a plant scientist), and that the civil unrest in the island made their lives very difficult.
Shafak tells a story that brings its rich and troubled history vividly to life ... This is an unusual book, original in its structure and held together by a range of likeable characters. Shafak writes of what she knows and what she loves.
The novel, full of arborescent meanderings, grasps at ecological transcendence, exploring the effects that war has not just on humans but also the natural world. But it muddles this effort with its anthropomorphising of the fig tree, a narrator prone to rambling exposition, gossip and maudlin outbursts. Though it harps on the incompatibility of arboreal time and human time, it is sentimentally anthropocentric in its outlook. If there is one thing Shafak unfailingly excels at, it is scene-setting. Her portrait of Cyprus seems to spring off the page in all its fresh beauty ... She is especially good with food ... In such passages does the sap of the story begin to flow, thick with loss and love.
... the arboreal narrator gives the author the chance to talk about ecological devastation, including the mass death of bats and slaughter of songbirds, as well as the migration of butterflies and eradication of malaria on the island. Though these are important themes, the tree explores them somewhat awkwardly, in a voice that veers between a didactic drone...and an overblown florid lyricism ... Shafak is a storyteller rather than a subtle observer of character; her writing depends on easily recognizable types that serve her event-driven narrative ... Throughout the novel, Turkish Cypriots are referred to as 'Turks' and 'Muslims'. In reality, Turkish Cypriot national identity is multiple and shifting ... Assiduously avoiding nuance...Elif Shafak is famous for representing those marginalized by the Turkish government, so it is bewildering to find her wrapping the bare bones of Turkish nationalist propaganda in platitudes about overcoming timeless enmities...to produce a novel that silences an entire culture and the diverse multinational identities of all Cypriots.
... this politically-so-correct novel is also good, often moving, intelligent and beautifully written. One may even set a prejudice against talking trees aside when one realizes that Shafak rather neatly employs her fig tree to impart necessary information about the historical background to her story ... A lot of this novel is journalism—intelligent, good-quality journalism, but journalism all the same. Yet there are so many fine things here. The treatment of lives damaged by public events is excellent. So is the evocation of Cyprus, its history, landscape and culture. Whenever the author forgets that she is a public figure making important pronouncements about the state of the world and instead remembers that she is a novelist breathing life into her imagined characters, the novel is delightful, beautiful, moving and enriching.
Shafak...writes in English in a lyrical, magical realist mode that somewhat leavens her story’s darkness ... not simply a commentary on the bitter legacy of war, which Shafak suggests will shape future generations no matter how hard we try to prevent it from doing so; it is also a commentary on the folly of our adversarial relationship with nature and our refusal to learn from the flora and fauna with which we share the planet. Shafak’s English prose, though sometimes glorious, often relies on overly familiar phrases. But the scope of her thematic ambition is impressive, and she is a compelling storyteller. She writes as well about teenage irascibility as about profound human suffering, and, like the wise fig tree, understands the interconnectedness of all things great and small.
... imaginative, provocative, witty, and profound ... As the full, heartbreaking tale of Kostas and Defne flowers in flashbacks, Shafak, alternating between bracing matter-of-factness and glorious metaphorical descriptions, casts light on the atrocities of ethnic violence, the valor of those who search for and excavate mass graves, the inheritance of trauma, and the wonders of trees and nature’s interconnectivity ... Shafak propagates an enthralling, historically revelatory, ecologically radiant, and emotionally lush tale of loss and renewal.
Booker-shortlisted Shafak...amazes with this resonant story ... by the end Ada’s story reaches an unexpected and satisfying destination. Shafak’s fans are in for a treat, and those new to her will be eager to discover her earlier work.
