The Overstory by Richard Powers

My review of Richard Powers’s new novel, The Overstory (William Heinemann), appears in today’s Sunday Business Post Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

Across twelve books, Powers has established himself as one of our great contemporary novelists of science. In Galatea 2.2 (1995), he told the story of a writer tasked with helping a computer to pass the Turing Test. In the National Book Award-winning The Echo Maker (2006), he wrote about a man suffering from Capgras Syndrome – the belief that your friends and loved ones have been replaced by identical replicas. And Generosity: An Enhancement (2009) was about a woman diagnosed with hyperthymia, or an excess of happiness. 

Powers’s stories trace the fault-line between scientific rationalism and a literary (or even romantic) humanism – precisely the fault-line that James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis illuminates so clearly. Powers is an intensely cerebral writer. His novels are dense with ideas. They are often made up of many intricate narrative strands, carefully woven together. They are not, in other words, particularly light reading, and this reviewer freely admits to having given up on a few over the years.