Michelle Dsouza
Nobody told me the Fig Tree was a character. I went in expecting a love story set against the backdrop of Cyprus's 1974 division, and I got that, but I also got a century-old Ficus carica with opinions about bats, butterflies, human grief, and the particular way people avoid learning things about trees because they are afraid of what they might find out. That surprise alone tells you something about what Elif Shafak is doing here.
The book moves across two timelines. In 1970s Cyprus, Kostas, a Greek Cypriot, and Defne, a Turkish Cypriot, fall in love inside a taverna where a fig tree grows through a cavity in the roof. The tree watches everything. Decades later, in London, their daughter Ada is sixteen, recently bereaved, and struggling with a grief nobody around her will name directly. A fig tree grows in the garden of her family home. The two timelines fold into each other, and so do the losses.
Shafak's structural choice to give the Fig Tree its own narrative voice is the book's biggest risk and its greatest success. For most of the book it operates as narrator: balanced, observant, unbiased, knowing things about the natural world that no human character could deliver without it feeling like a lecture. The information never feels like a lecture. You learn about fig wasp symbiosis, bat deaths in wartime, butterfly migration patterns, and fungal networks under the soil, and none of it feels grafted on. It feels like the world the story lives inside. The butterfly migration section is the one that stayed with me longest. Butterflies are always moving, always seeking change. Shafak places that against forced human migration and says nothing further. She doesn't need to.
The reveal that Defne is the Fig Tree is the emotional hinge the whole book builds toward. Looking back, the narration doesn't change. The Fig Tree knew more about trees than Defne ever could have. But the love in those observations, the way it watches Kostas and Ada, the way it grieves without naming grief, that lands differently once you know. Shafak earns it.
Kostas works precisely because he is readable throughout. His love, his values, his steadiness never shift. He is a man who loves with his whole self and carries loss the same way. His loneliness after Defne mirrors Chico the parrot's in a way the book makes quietly explicit, two beings kept company by a tree when the person they needed most was gone. Meryem, Defne's aunt, arrives from Cyprus and immediately becomes the book's warmth and its wit. Her proverbs, her superstitions, her absolute certainty about everything she believes, and the way her certainty softens the story's grief without dismissing it. She is the reason the book doesn't collapse under its own weight.
Ada's arc is the one place the book leaves a thread slightly loose. The classroom incident points toward something the narrative doesn't fully resolve. I've decided that's intentional. Sometimes grief gets so large you scream in public and no tidy resolution follows. The book trusts the reader to sit with that.
The writing shifts register between the human chapters and the Fig Tree's narration, and that shift works harder than it sounds. It physically resets your pace. Shafak handles the political history of Cyprus with the care it deserves. She doesn't treat the 1974 division as backdrop. She puts two teenagers in love across a fault line that their families and their governments drew, and she asks you to understand what it costs them. "You don't fall in love in Cyprus in the summer of 1974. Not here, not now. And yet there they were, the two of them." That's the whole book in four sentences.
I teared up at the end. Defne being the Fig Tree, watching over Ada and Kostas, staying behind in the only form she could. My heart hurt and was full at the same time. I didn't expect a book about trees to do that to me.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
Nobody told me the Fig Tree was a character. I went in expecting a love story set against the backdrop of Cyprus's 1974 division, and I got that, but I also got a century-old Ficus carica with opinions about bats, butterflies, human grief, and the particular way people avoid learning things about trees because they are afraid of what they might find out. That surprise alone tells you something about what Elif Shafak is doing here.
The book moves across two timelines. In 1970s Cyprus, Kostas, a Greek Cypriot, and Defne, a Turkish Cypriot, fall in love inside a taverna where a fig tree grows through a cavity in the roof. The tree watches everything. Decades later, in London, their daughter Ada is sixteen, recently bereaved, and struggling with a grief nobody around her will name directly. A fig tree grows in the garden of her family home. The two timelines fold into each other, and so do the losses.
Shafak's structural choice to give the Fig Tree its own narrative voice is the book's biggest risk and its greatest success. For most of the book it operates as narrator: balanced, observant, unbiased, knowing things about the natural world that no human character could deliver without it feeling like a lecture. The information never feels like a lecture. You learn about fig wasp symbiosis, bat deaths in wartime, butterfly migration patterns, and fungal networks under the soil, and none of it feels grafted on. It feels like the world the story lives inside. The butterfly migration section is the one that stayed with me longest. Butterflies are always moving, always seeking change. Shafak places that against forced human migration and says nothing further. She doesn't need to.
The reveal that Defne is the Fig Tree is the emotional hinge the whole book builds toward. Looking back, the narration doesn't change. The Fig Tree knew more about trees than Defne ever could have. But the love in those observations, the way it watches Kostas and Ada, the way it grieves without naming grief, that lands differently once you know. Shafak earns it.
Kostas works precisely because he is readable throughout. His love, his values, his steadiness never shift. He is a man who loves with his whole self and carries loss the same way. His loneliness after Defne mirrors Chico the parrot's in a way the book makes quietly explicit, two beings kept company by a tree when the person they needed most was gone. Meryem, Defne's aunt, arrives from Cyprus and immediately becomes the book's warmth and its wit. Her proverbs, her superstitions, her absolute certainty about everything she believes, and the way her certainty softens the story's grief without dismissing it. She is the reason the book doesn't collapse under its own weight.
Ada's arc is the one place the book leaves a thread slightly loose. The classroom incident points toward something the narrative doesn't fully resolve. I've decided that's intentional. Sometimes grief gets so large you scream in public and no tidy resolution follows. The book trusts the reader to sit with that.
The writing shifts register between the human chapters and the Fig Tree's narration, and that shift works harder than it sounds. It physically resets your pace. Shafak handles the political history of Cyprus with the care it deserves. She doesn't treat the 1974 division as backdrop. She puts two teenagers in love across a fault line that their families and their governments drew, and she asks you to understand what it costs them. "You don't fall in love in Cyprus in the summer of 1974. Not here, not now. And yet there they were, the two of them." That's the whole book in four sentences.
I teared up at the end. Defne being the Fig Tree, watching over Ada and Kostas, staying behind in the only form she could. My heart hurt and was full at the same time. I didn't expect a book about trees to do that to me.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.