E Shafak's THE ISLAND of MISSING TREES Ambitious but Misses the Mark

Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist and activist whose writings and outspoken activism have led her to emigrate from Turkey to the UK to avoid prosecution. Her writing style is eloquent and extraordinary in the narrative voices she creates. In "The Island" the heroine is voiced by a fig tree. The tree was at the center of a pub in Cyprus that was the social center for the village in the 1970's and oversaw the social divide between the Turkish and Greeks.   Also set in the UK in the 2000's, a sapling of the fig tree is transplanted by Kostas whose story is rooted in his love for Defne which began as a secretive tryst between young lovers circumventing their families' forbiddance to meet due to their cultural hatred. Separated by Kostas' "temporary" move to the UK and then civil unrest in Cyprus, the two become reconnected many years later, marry and have their daughter Ada.  At first, I was charmed by the patient and omnipresent tree whose wisdom and melancholy discourse lay the foundation of what transpires over the years. However, the sedentary oration grew stiff and tedious.  Her (the tree is definitely a she) commune with animals and nefarious insects became officious as if leafing through the non-fiction work, "The Hidden Lives of Trees". Kostas and his teenage daughter Ada, with whom the novel begins are likable characters but the divergent timelines, numerous characters and the fig's anthropomorphism bear such sharp schisms as to dice the plot in different stories that felt coerced together and disjointed.  Kostas and Defne's love story was touching but Defne's struggles once they married and living safely abroad felt ambiguous. Ada was drawn as an intelligent, fierce young woman coping with the loss of her mother and estrangement from her father. However, her life in the 21st C in which she gains enlightenment from her mom's sister whom she hadn't met til a year after her mother's death, was undercooked.  And, the turbulent years in Cyprus seemed unclear and insignificant.  While I admire Shafak's ambitious novel, every time I came back to it, I felt tangled in a different story. I didn't enjoy this novel as much as her other works. Still, I appreciate her pleasing writing style with its unique voices.  But in the stump, the fig was given too much say and too many other branches did not bear sufficient fruit.