With its different parts and styles the book has an ambitious structure, and, much as I loved the story, the structure doesn't always work.
There are also lovely vignettes of smaller relationships – Robert's with his grumpy grey horse, for instance, the two dour outcasts who come to an understanding of each other's ways, and Robert's somewhat vexed relationship with Lobb, who comes and goes as he pleases. The large and the small themes work as point and counterpoint throughout the book, which closely resembles an orchestral composition with its rises and falls. In the novel the themes of the giant tree and the tiny apple seed mirror the themes of the massive colonisation of North America by individuals, all playing their part in a bigger picture. Somewhat adrift in the world, Robert becomes adept at avoiding commitment until his sister and his occasional lover Molly prove to him that perhaps, after all, family is worth something.Īs with John Chapman, Lobb was a real figure – a Cornish plant collector employed by Veitch Nurseries of Exeter who was responsible for introducing the Monkey Puzzle tree from Chile and the Sequoia from North America to England – earning him the nickname "Messenger of the Big Tree". The letters fatefully miss each other by weeks, or months or years.
Recognising a fellow tree lover, Lobb offers Robert work, and in this second part of the book much of the plot is driven by letters from Robert to his siblings, recounting his adventures, and letters from his sister Martha to him. As the dominoes start to fall towards an inevitable tragedy, Robert runs from what he has witnessed and from the continuing shadows of the past.Īfter the destruction of the "family", such as it was, it is Robert's life we follow as he travels west to California, where he meets an eccentric Cornish plant collector, William Lobb, in the middle of a grove of giant sequoias.
Of the Goodenoughs' children, only Robert has an interest in becoming an orchardist, and he is himself the product of a secret liaison. There are also other uncomfortable ripples, including the disquieting presence of the apple-tree distributor, John Chapman – a character based on the real-life Johnny Appleseed. This book is, for much of it, ineffably sad, an almost translucent sadness of lives gone wrong, hopes and dreams disappointed and deaths of children from swamp-fever.
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