ELIF SHAFAK The Island of Missing Trees. Reviewed by Ann Skea

The twelfth novel from British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak evokes the history of Cyprus in a story of love and grief.

Once upon a memory, at the far end of the Mediterranean Sea, there lay an island so beautiful and blue that many travellers, pilgrims, crusaders and merchants who fell in love with it either never wanted to leave or tried to tow it with hemp ropes all the way back to their own countries.

Legend, perhaps.

The island is Cyprus, and in The Island of Missing Trees Elif Shafak tells a story that brings its rich and troubled history vividly to life.

The cover of this book is garlanded with words of praise from bestselling authors. Robert MacFarlane, known for his innovative writing about wild nature, calls it ‘A brilliant novel’; William Boyd, author of the latest James Bond novel, describes it as ‘Magical’. The opinionated Fig Tree, which narrates many of Shafak’s chapters, is certainly magical; so, too, are the fragments of ritual magic and myth that become part of the story; and the poetry of some of the prose. The main story, however, charts the fragmented love story of Defne and Kostas, and it is firmly set in the real world of ethnic and religious unrest, displacement, and civil war.

This history does not dominate the book. Instead it is told obliquely through the memories of Fig Tree (who is a distinctive character in the book), through the lives of Defne and Kostos, and, especially, through their daughter Ada Kazantzakis, a 16-year-old London teenager who becomes curious as to why her parents are so reluctant to discuss their early lives:

She had never met her relatives on either side. She knew they lived in Cyprus somewhere but that was about the extent of her knowledge … The only close relative she had heard of was a certain aunt, Meryem, who sent cheerful postcards of sunny beaches and wildflower pastures that jarred with her complete lack of presence in their lives.

Ada is a normal teenager, anxious to be accepted by her classmates, studying hard for important exams, beginning to be interested in one particular boy in her class, and embarrassed by her father.

Somewhere in her young life Ada had understood that he was very different from other fathers, but she still found it hard to take kindly to his obsession with plants. Everyone else’s fathers worked in offices, shops or government departments, wore matching suits, white shirts and polished black shoes, whereas hers was usually clad in a waterproof jacket, a pair of olive or brown moleskin trousers, rugged boots …. An evolutionary ecologist and botanist, he had published twelve books …. Ada had no idea what kind of people would read the sort of books her father wrote, but she hadn’t dared mention them to anyone at school.

Ada and her father tread warily around each other, each afraid of upsetting the other, both mourning the recent death of her mother. Then two things happen that change Ada’s life.

First, she has a sudden, unprecedented and uncontrollable breakdown in class, which someone films and puts on the internet, where it goes viral. There, she is ‘a freak’ and ‘clearly faking it’, but the video becomes something others identify with and one woman creates a hash tag #doyouhearmenow, which attracts a large following. Ada does not want to go back to school.

Second, her mother’s sister, Meryem, suddenly turns up from Cyprus and Kostas invites her to stay with them. Ada immediately hates her. Meryem, however, ignores Ada’s hostility. She chats to her and insists that she comes to eat some of the delicious Cyprian foods that she cooks; she practises Cyprian customs, and is full of Cyprian superstitions and sayings. Ada does not believe in half the things Meryem does and says but she learns more about Cyprus and about her parents’ past. Slowly, the two form a friendly bond.

Meanwhile, there are regular chapters voiced by a Cyprian fig tree, grown from a cutting Kostas had smuggled into London from Cyprus and nurtured in his garden. Fig Tree is chatty, opinionated, boastful, proud, and a source not only of the history of Cyprus but also of many unrelated facts. At times her voice is poetic; at other times, didactic. ‘I am Ficus carica, known as the edible common fig, though there’s nothing common about me,’ she tells us,

I was born and raised in Nicosia, once upon a time. Those who knew me back then couldn’t help breaking into a smile, a tender glint in their eyes. I was treasured and loved to such a degree that they named a tavern after me … THE HAPPY FIG.

Fig Tree, which once grew through the middle of this tavern, observed the rich life around her, the mixture of cultures, the young lovers (Defne and Kostas) who secretly met there, and the owners Yirgos (a Greek Cypriot) and Usuf (a Turkish Cypriot), whose cooking and friendliness made the tavern ‘a popular hang-out’ before the civil war began.

Fig Tree knows the history of fig trees, their botany, their sensory abilities, and she explains the rich biological networks that support them and keep them in touch with other species. She knows the complex biology of the animals that visit her or live with her. Sometimes, she is too keen to tell us all the scientific facts about these animals – bees and mice, for example – and risks boring us. At other times she can be very funny as she reinterprets well-known stories. Adam, of course, was not seduced by Eve with an apple:

With all due respect to believers, it makes no sense to assume that the first man and the first woman were tempted to sin by eating some plain old apple … Adam and Eve shared a tender, ripe, deliciously alluring, aromatic fig, splitting it open right down the middle … then they covered themselves with the leaves of the tree they happened to be standing under. As for the apple, I am sorry, it didn’t even figure.

In London, in bitter weather, Kostas buries his growing fig tree to protect it, as is the custom in Cyprus. Two pages tell us, with small illustrations, ‘How to Bury a Fig Tree in Ten Steps’ and, later, two more pages offer instructions on how to ‘unbury’ it. Another two pages provide a menu from The Happy Fig tavern, which includes ‘Crushed Sour Wheat Soup (Trahanas/Tarhana)’, ‘Oven-baked Spicy Moussaka’ and ‘Naughty Hot Chocolate with Whipped Cream and Vodka’. All this balances the horrors of the civil war, which Fig Tree also remembers.

One icy winter night, Ada accidentally sees her aunt, watched by her father, performing some sort of ceremony in the garden beside his buried fig tree. It is Fig Tree who explains this as ‘a ritual for the dead’, an ancient practice, usually done under a fig tree, which will ‘guide to safety the spirit of a loved one’. Meryem had come to London to do this for her sister.

‘Meryem is an odd one, full of contradictions,’ says Fig Tree. Her superstitions, her cooking, her stories and her memories bring Ada her Cyprian heritage and remind her of the myths and legends her mother used to tell her. It is Meryem, like Fig Tree, who also tells the story of Defne and Kostas, which is the underlying theme of the book, and their story is deftly and movingly revealed.

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, and her words in the final paragraph of the book are exactly right:

So many of things in this novel are based on historical facts and events … But everything here is fiction – a mixture of wonder, dreams, love, sorrow and imagination.

Elif Shafak The Island of Missing Trees Viking 2021 PB 368pp $32.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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