The Trees by Percival Everett

This novel is on the Booker shortlist for 2022 and I can see why.   A Black comedy in every sense this tells the story of some mysterious murders centred on a town called Money, Mississippi.    Masquerading as an offbeat, horrific (and very funny) police procedural/murder mystery, this is a fast moving story about a family of rednecks and then an ever widening circle of white victims being murdered, with the common denominator being a dead Black man at every scene.  Using the real life lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 in the real Money, Mississippi this very quickly turns into an angry and sharp commentary on race in America today, with the caricatured rednecks as victims being a lot less real than the Black cops and suspects.   The references to the dead waking, and a whole chapter being taken up with listing the names of Black men lynched in America, together with the shocking statistics of how few of these crimes were ever investigated, let alone solved and someone punished, makes it clear that Black deaths, not just Black Lives, should matter, but apparently still don't.   The disappearing corpses were a nice touch too.   

For all of the lack of subtlety in the metaphors, (the message does everything but physically hit you over the head) the actual writing is beautifully done, with finely drawn role reversals of race stereotypes at pretty much every level.    This is about being awake in a world where Trumpism and populism are alive and well, and it is becoming acceptable again to say and do the most appalling things in the name of freedom and free speech.   The retribution was well deserved, although terrifying, particularly when it starts to reach across generations to those who have condoned, lived off or simply benefitted from the original sins.   

In a week of the World Cup in Qatar where the treatment of migrant workers and gay safety (let alone rights) are being ignored for money and sport  on top of the pressure being placed on human rights of all kinds in the western world too, I found it impossible to read without getting angry and sad, and perhaps a  little scared too.   The reckoning may well be coming.