Percival Everett - The Trees

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

Brilliant but slightly flawed 

 

 I thought much of The Trees was brilliant, but it was somewhat flawed.

In the small town of Money, Mississippi there are strange goings on. Relatives of now-dead racists who were the instigators of a terrible lynching many years ago are being killed in apparently inexplicable circumstances, possibly by the ghost of the lynched boy, in ways which resemble the lynching. Black detectives come to town to investigate, to find – unsurprisingly – that attitudes and language haven’t changed all that much. As more bodies emerge, things become even more complicated and widespread, and the hideous reality of lynchings becomes more and more apparent.

The real strength of the book is the balance which Percival Everett strikes between humour, satire and horror. It is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny in places and the banter between the two Black detectives (and sometimes with the racist cops and others they meet) is brilliant; natural, biting, funny and a harsh light on sometimes disguised attitudes. Then, around half way through the book, there is a sort of brief interlude in which we see a dossier of a lynching; it is simply horrifying and, after the slightly knockabout feel hitherto, it hits like a hammer blow, as does the list of names of victims of lynchings which follows it. At one point, too, the lyrics of Strange Fruit are quoted in full – another incredibly powerful moment.

I have to say that later in the book, that skilful balance is lost rather. We do get a stark, unspoken, contrast between the panic caused by the murder of a number of White people with the utter indifference to the murders by lynching of black people. However, it takes on some of the character of farce, which for me robs it of some of its power. All the white supremacists are depicted as semi-literate idiots, many have pantomimic names, there is a rather clumsy (if apposite) satire of Donald Trump, and so on. While I agree wholeheartedly with the points Everett is making, this comes over as bitterly sarcastic ranting rather than the careful, poised and powerfully structured narrative of the earlier parts of the book and, for me, it diminished rather than enhanced the power of what was being said.

Reservations aside, this is a very good and extremely readable book which has very important and timely things to say and I can recommend it.