The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, Richard Preston

Emily Carr, Deep in the Forest

(June 24) The information about redwoods and other trees is fascinating... astounding... unfathomable. Just in terms of the dimensions and sheer volumes of these trees the information is amazing:

The fall of Telperion [a redwood around 360 feet tall] had created a swath of devastation in the forest. Telperion was nearly as large as the Dyerville Giant. It had smashed a smaller redwood to pieces when it fell, creating a debris field that extended in all directions. The root mass of Telperion extended about thirty feet into the air. Its prone trunk was sixteen feet in diameter -- almost three times the height of their heads as they looked up at it. Shattered branches and small exploded trees and great chunks and splinters of redwood had been flung around the hulk of the tree. Blobs of soil ranging in size from baseballs to basketballs had been thrown up to thirty yards when Telperion smacked into the ground.

“The mud splash when Telperion hit the ground must have been simply awesome,” [canopy scientist Steve] Sillett said to me. “We could see the splash mark way up on the trunks of the trees all around.” The trunks surrounding the detonation zone were coated with soil sixty feet above the ground, like a bathtub ring.

but the descriptions of the life cycles and “behaviours” of giant redwoods, sequoias and Douglas firs are equally spellbinding.

For example, Preston and Steve Sillett climb an adjacent tree to get to the top of Kronos, another 360-foot redwood:

We dropped down into a maze of standing trunks of all sizes. It was an aerial grove of redwoods that rise out of a buttressed platform extending from the side of Kronos, the largest trunk complex growing from a limb that has yet been identified on a redwood. It was the Great Kronos Complex, otherwise known as Kronos Wood. It had twenty-two trunks in it, springing out of a huge mass that grew sideways from the tree’s main trunk. The platform extended for sixty feet out of the side of Kronos. The bigger “trees” in Kronos Wood were between eighty and a hundred feet tall and up to a yard and a half across at their bases.

Who knew??

Nearby, in the same grove:

Rhea had a double top, with twin trunks, and there was a garden between them. Rhea Garden was a deep pocket of soil that had become established near the top of the tree. The pocket was filled with plants, mosses and lichens. It was like a tiny Japanese garden, and it was probably as old as the Muromachi tea gardens of Kyoto. It was built up of layers of earth that had drifted into the tree.

The descriptions of climbing techniques and of the people who climb these trees and study them are also interesting, but the way Preston presents the real-life redwood experts is a bit off-putting. He seems desperate to make his book dramatic – as if the science about these amazing trees would not be enough to make the book interesting. He provides too much weird detail about the biologists’ and daredevils’ lives, and doles it out in small vignettes that are held breathlessly suspended while we go through a round of tree observation. It’s forced and creaky. The tree lovers’ lives are only mildly interesting beyond their obsessions with giant trees. (This desperate dressing-up is foreshadowed in the title, I suppose: “A Story of Passion and Daring” = “Far More Exciting Than It Might Sound.”)

Preston also “steals” all the climbers’ best stories and tells them in the third person, as if he were there.

There are some amazing climbing stories, though. One of them made my blood freeze in my veins.

The Comfort of Strangers, Ian McEwan

Steven Klein, Stefano + Domenico "Dolce Vita"

(May 30) This is a take on an Edgar Allan Poe story, somewhat longer and totally modernized. (Specifically, it reminds me of “The Cask of Amontillado” -- they have slightly different plots, but they end similarly and create exactly the same eerie mood and creepy-Venetian atmosphere.) I kind of wish I’d known this going in -- I find it easier to stomach gruesome action when I’m expecting it.

Having read only Atonement and Enduring Love, I didn’t realize McEwan was well known as a writer of the macabre. I see now that Enduring Love has a creep factor, but, when I was reading it, it just seemed to be about the vagaries of perception, like Atonement, with maybe just a little extra psycho twist to it.

Now that I look up media reviews, I see that the echoes of Poe / Pinter / Kafka are taken for granted in McEwan: “McEwan, that master of the taciturn macabre…” (Observer); “In the U.K., … he's long been dubbed Ian Macabre” (Salon); “His gift for the cold and scary is well established, too: among the critical praise that festoons his book jackets, the word 'macabre' crops up more than once” (New York Review of Books).

So I was obviously missing a big piece of the McEwan picture and this Goth tendency has come as a nasty surprise. I was also disappointed once again by lapses in coherence such as I saw in Atonement and Enduring Love. Richard P. Brickner summed it up perfectly in the New York Times:

The book, as it develops, requires the reader to accept a questionably large amount of innocence and acquiescence in Colin and Mary, and what almost seems like a careless overdose of perversity in Robert and Caroline. On the literal level, while not actually unbelievable, ''The Comfort of Strangers'' is hard to go along with at every moment.

Brickner goes on to say that all this is forgivable: “As a nightmare, however, it is convincing and clinging. Its details are so imaginative and precise as to be a source of delight,” but I'm really offended by the lack of artistic harmony. It’s the difference between literature and vividly told newspaper stories. There’s nothing in all of The Comfort of Strangers to suggest that Colin and Mary are subconsciously looking for the kind of experience they get, or that they deserve it because of blindness or recklessness on their part, nor any forewarning whatsoever, so the ending just seems sort of random, and cheap, even.

Altogether, I’m put off binging any further on McEwan books.