MAJA LUNDE The Dream of a Tree. Reviewed by Ann Skea

The new novel from the Norwegian author of The History of Bees imagines a dystopian future where seeds are more precious than ever.

The year was 2097 and Tommy was five years old. He was playing on the beach of the abandoned container harbour in Longyearbyen on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, when he found the washed-up ash tree. The first thing he noticed was green leaves. The whole tree was there, a large bushy crown, long trunk and roots, but most amazing were the live branches and green leaves. He had never seen or touched a tree before.

He thought he should find Grandmother, because when something important happened in Svalbard, Grandmother was the one who knew best what to do.

It was his tree. He had lain down and clasped the trunk, but Rakel, who was the same age as him, had turned up and had been scornful and teasing, and they had fought until Grandmother came and separated them.

Years later, Tommy remembers this tree – his tree – and how the local people had flocked to see it and had taken it over, cut it up, and made use of every part of it. He had ‘cried himself to sleep two nights in a row’, but Grandmother had saved seeds from the tree and together they had planted them in the Four Seasons room of the greenhouse.

It is not these seeds that lie at the heart of Maja Lunde’s book, but the vast collection of seeds from around the world which are (in our own time) stored in the Global Seed Vault at Longyearbyen. Initially they were housed in the abandoned coal mines that run deep into the permafrost of Svalbard on the Norwegian archipelago that lies closest to the North Pole. In 2008, they were moved to the specially constructed vault at Longyearbyen, where they are kept as security against the loss of diversity in traditional gene banks.

By 2110, when we meet Tommy again, a global ‘Collapse’ (the details of which are not spelled out) has occurred and these seeds have become so important that a ship has come from China to collect them. But it has come, too, to rescue Tommy, his younger brothers Hilmar and Henry, and Rakel and her sister Runa, who are the only people left alive in the world’s most northern settlement.

But the ship sails away without Tommy and Rakel, and Tommy, in the opening chapters, is desperate for it to turn back and bring his brothers back to him.

‘No! Stop!’

The ship is on a steady course headed west, towards the ocean. It is in the middle of the fjord, no larger than a toy boat against the backdrop of the mountains ….

‘Please! Henry! Hilmar!’

But the ship moves steadily onwards and he would be but a tiny speck against the black beach. Even if he waves, jumps and screams, they will never notice him.

Then he remembers SvalSat, the satellite station on the mountain that had once communicated with the world. Now, ‘the remains resemble semi-mangled skeletons surrounding huge antenna discs’ but in the main building the micro power plant is still working and the radio equipment still functions. Tommy runs and climbs to SvalSat. He finds an open book about short-wave radio equipment that Rakel must have used to call for someone to rescue them, and he dons the headset:

‘Tao!’ he screams into the microphone before he has even got around to pushing the button ‘Tao please, you have to turn around! You must come back!’

But there is only silence, and when he looks outside again the ship is gone.

Tommy tries again and again. Eventually, after repeatedly using the international distress call ‘Mayday, mayday, mayday’, he gets a faint response from Tao, but she tells him that the ship’s captain, Mei Ling, is afraid of being trapped by the winter ice and of the ship being damaged by ice floes, so she refuses to turn back.

This is a dramatic start to the book and the following chapters alternate between Tommy and Tao.

Tommy distracts himself from his grief at being separated from Henry and Hilmar by immersing himself in the rich memories he has of growing up in Longyearbyen: of his mother and father, and of Grandmother, and of the thriving community that had chosen to live cut off from the world in this harsh place of landslides, avalanches and polar days and nights. It becomes clear that something terrible has happened to Rakel and that Tommy blames himself for it. He remembers her as a burden when Grandmother insisted that she and her sister should live with them; then as a skilled hunter able to creep up on and shoot the deer they come to rely on for meat; then his mixed feelings as they become teenagers sharing a small house; and her unhappiness at their isolation and fears of what the future might hold for them. Only at the end of the book can he allow the memories of what happened to Rakel to surface. Through all this, he is alone.

Tao, on the ship, is drawn to young Henry. He reminds her of her son Wei-Wei who was just three-and-a half when he died from a bee sting. Henry resists her overtures of friendship and grieves for Tommy, as does Hilmar, who becomes silent and withdrawn.

In Tao’s home in Sichuan, Wei-Wei has been adopted by the Chinese authorities as a symbol of renewal that began with the return of the bees that had been ‘declared extinct for decades’. He was ‘the child who changed everything’, ‘the beginning of a new era’ – celebrated in posters, placards and brochures. In the twelve years since his death:

… she has been the Mother incarnate. The woman who lost the Child – her son, her boy. They call him that often: the Boy. In the beginning she tried to say Wei-Wei, he has a name. But eventually she started calling him that also, just the Boy. It was simpler.

Tao has become numb with grief and is glad to focus on the mission given her by the leader, Li Chiara. ‘The seed is the core of hope,’ Li Chiara tells her, ‘And you Tao are the living carrier of our hope.’ She had hardly thought about the children who had summoned them but now she is responsible for them. And her efforts to obtain the seeds from the vault in Longyearbyen have failed.

Tommy and Rakel had led them to the seed vault but they had found it empty. They had searched everywhere for the seeds for six days but with winter closing in they had to leave without them. Tao is sure Tommy or Rakel know where they are, and once she has contact with Tommy she keeps asking him about them and asking to speak to Rakel. Tommy always makes excuses for Rakel’s absence. Eventually, he cuts off communication altogether.

The Dream of the Tree relies mostly on Tommy’s memories, which bring to life the land and its people, and the struggles he and they endure living in a place where half the year is spent in darkness, and landslides and avalanches are a constant threat. The Svalbard people are proud of their self-sufficiency and the community they have established. They have learned to use, repair and recycle everything, to rely on coal, wind and solar power, and to use the wild animals and the vast greenhouse sustainably for food. As Grandmother tells Tommy (and she frequently irritates him, and possibly the reader, by giving him lectures on history, money, genetics, politics and more), they live as people should always have lived. One lecture that did spark a deep interest in Tommy was about the Russian scientist Nikolai Vavilov, ‘the father of modern-day seed collections’. After the ship has left without him, Tommy spends a lot of time in the library devouring books about the life and death of this remarkable man.

Among Tommy’s memories, too, is the reason that the six children have become the only humans left on Svalbard. It is grim, and it has disturbing relevance to the world we live in. As does Tao’s anger, directed at those who lived before them, when, back in Sichuan, she sees:

… the fields crack open and the soil turn to dust. When the colour of small green shoots fades into dullness and they wither, are torn out of the earth and are blown away by the wind. When the children go hungry to bed.

In spite of these strong messages about what we humans are doing to our world, this book does end on a note of hope.

Maja Lunde The Dream of a Tree translated by Diane Oatley Scribner 2024 PB 480pp $34.99

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.

You can buy The Dream of a Tree from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

If you’d like to help keep the Newtown Review of Books a free and independent site for book reviews, please consider making a donation. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Tags: conservation, dystopian fiction, Longyearbyen, Maja | Lunde, Norwegian writers, seed banks, Svalbard