It’s widely recommended that fiction writers best start their work with an action scene, not only to catch the attention of the reader but also, perhaps more importantly for them, to catch the attention of a publisher. Though I have generally learned to comply with this practice, I still struggle with the its universality. In another place, I have put my case for this view, citing the example of one of China’s greatest literary works, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guangzhong, a 1500 page novel with 120 chapters that takes a few hundred pages for things to really get going. If I am in the hands of a good writer, I know the set up may take time and that’s okay with me.
Merlinda Bobis is such an author I trust in the way she sets up her stories. In her novel, In The Name of the Trees, she takes her time to lay the ground work and build the world or rather the worlds of her characters as she introduces them one by one. The main characters are four women, named after Philippine trees (an enduring metaphor throughout the novel- which at times extends to indigenous Australian species), women of different generations within the same Philippine family. With Bobis, I already know that the novel as a whole will deliver. And this novel certainly does. It is a rich story of healing that unfolds step by step drawing towards itself so many layers of human experience.
I recently came across a review of the novel which used the term polyvocal to describe its style. I’ve never seen that word before but I like the description. There are many voices, many points of view, across generations, and they communicate in several languages, their efforts highlighting the limits of language as people struggle to understand their world and the people around them. In the early pages, we work to stay focused on the story as we encounter the discontinuous shiftings between the new life in Canberra, Australia and the old life in the ancestral Philippine village. Who would have thought the migrant experience is otherwise? While the characters have been trained into patterns of thinking and being, for better or worse, by their experiences of colonialism and the migration experience etc, they all reach for a better knowing, a feeling of alignment with nature and with who they really are despite the traumas they have lived through.
A big achievement of this book is the way it takes us deep into worlds of being for these women, these migrants, who know there is a better, more wholesome, tradition than the one they encounter each day. It immediately reminded me of one of Australia’s greatest novels, Carpentaria, by Alexis Wright. I credit that book with taking readers deeper into the mind of an indigenous Australian than any other novel I’ve read. Again, I am reminded of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and her brilliant portrayal of the black slaves in America from their own point of view.
Bobis, as a teacher, is well schooled in the theory of the other. The relationship between the self and the other is a huge philosophical question. But to think that we look after ourselves while others can look after themselves embodies such a mechanical view of the world, as if two disconnected beings stand in a world of separate things. We are now beginning to realise that we are organically connected in more ways than we can barely imagine. That is part of the value of reading good literature- to gain insight into the other, yes, so we can better know who we really are.
Of course, the main thread of the story is the healing process and the revelations that it brings. But I also must mention Bobis’s rich use of language and her wonderful landscape descriptions. Just beautiful. I must record how I have a fully grown crepe myrtle that towers in the corner of my front yard, one of the most beautiful trees in my street in summer. We follow its annual cycle of leaflessness, leafing, flowering followed by the falling of the leaves. After reading Bobis’s account of the crepe myrtle (banaba) and how almost every part of the tree has medicinal value, I now see this tree in a fuller light.
With the metaphor of trees and their enduring memories so beautifully expressed, I was also reminded of a recent visit to a timber recycling shop, and the fellow who obviously loved his job there began to share with me his ideas of how timber always strives to be timber no matter how people treat it. I felt like he was shaman-like in his respect for the wood in his shop and the way he saw trees and timber so very differently from other people. I get a similar feeling reading this novel, a reminder of the gentle knowing from our pre-Christian, pre-colonial, pre-industrial days still holds something of value in our modern world today.