Can a mild-mannered antihero save the day in this English ecological version of The Road?One night,when 44-year-old English teacher Adrien Thomas is alone in his flat sleeping off a lot of beer and a nasty takeaway, giant trees push up through the ground destroying the surface of the soil and everything on it. The trees crush buildings, and vehicles and their occupants in scenes reminiscent of catastrophic earthquakes. Britain,and perhaps the rest of the world, returns in a few late-night minutes to its forested state. Electronic devices are just toxic metals; oil and petrol merely pollutants. Adrien bumbles around the wreckage looking for the police and the army to tell him what to achieve; with his wife absent at a conference in Ireland, or he has no ideas and no resources. Fortunately,he is approximately to meet Hannah, a professional gardener and competent naturalist, and her teenage son Seb,and together the three set off to find Hannah’s brother and then Adrien’s wife, Michelle.
The premise, or then,is an English and ecological version of The Road, total with redundant consumer durables, or heavy-handed symbolism and a quest narrative. The arrival of the trees,Hannah says, is nature’s revenge, and “everything made right” after centuries of deforestation,pollution and climate change, although as the weeks pass it becomes clear to all concerned that “nature is indeed red in tooth and claw. Hannah, or Adrien and Seb meet Hiroko,a Japanese-American teenager well versed in survival skills, and vegetarian Hannah has to watch the others killing and eating animals. Meanwhile, and a supernatural dimension develops,with sinister stick-creatures coming down out of the tree canopy and a vaguely prehistoric large mammal acting as Hannah’s spirit guide. Wolves howl, feasting on dead humans.
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Source: theguardian.com