The Trees

"Shortlist"

"That same year, Percival Everett was shortlisted for The Trees, a buddy-cop pageturner that opens in the aftermath of a series of awful murders in Money, Mississippi. “Part police procedural, part black comedy, the novel is both irreverently silly and deadly serious,” declared Houman Barekat in Literary Review . “The killings appear to be delayed revenge for historical wrongs.” Money, MS, “is MAGA country, a town of gun-loving hillbillies” where the two black FBI detectives brought in to investigate the killings face prejudice at every turn. And, overall, the novel’s “brisk narration and unusual register – an arrestingly perverse blend of playfulness and earnest moral purpose – make for a refreshing antidote to the po-faced didacticism that lets down so many contemporary novels of the politically conscientious sort.” After a brief diversion into a possible supernatural explanation, the solution transpires to be highly off-this-world. But don’t let me spoil it for you. It was one of my best books of 2022 ."

"How to explain The Trees ? It has so many disparate ingredients, which should not work together, but absolutely do. It is a gritty examination of the legacy of extreme racism and lynching in the Deep South. It’s a revenge thriller. It’s a buddy cop farce. It’s a detective novel with shades of the supernatural. And, well, it’s one of the best, most readable, funniest, and most hard-hitting novels I have ever read—never mind in 2022. In a Guardian interview , Everett talked us through his rationale for this unusual approach: It would be very easy to write a dark, dense novel about lynching that no one will read; there has to be an element of seduction. Humour is a fantastic tool because you can use it to get people to relax and then do anything you want to them. The absurdity of the inattention to the subject was the driving force of the comedy, but the novel lives as much in turning around stereotypes as it does in revealing the truth of lynching. Everett’s previous novels (he has published 21) can be tricky to get a hold of here in the UK, so he was a new writer to me. But I’ve since learned that some of his back catalogue is available via Influx Press, and it was recently announced that Jeffrey Wright will star in a new film adaptation of his 2001 novel Erasure. The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize earlier this year and I had my money on it to win. Honestly, it’s so good. Do yourself a favour and read it."

"Yes. That’s one of the most powerful elements of this book—the disjunction between the horror and the humour. Again, this is a historical narrative, beginning with the killing of Emmett Till in 1955, and addressing racial oppression in the United States, but with wonderful moments of fantasy, mysticism, magic, mixed with knockabout farce. It’s disconcerting, while you’re thinking about the long tradition of lynching in the South, to have these Keystone Cops moments. But it does intensify the emotional response and keeps you thinking on every page about what it is really like to live with this kind of systemic injustice over centuries."