DrNorway's Maja Lunde has been in circulation as the writer of the moment since the publication of her species-extinction book The Story of the Bees in 2017. How purchasing four volumes of Lunde can credit your personal climate footprint is currently still being studied. But anyone who reads “The Bees,” which is set in three time periods (1852 in England, 2007 in Ohio, and 2098 in China), and the “Water History” appendix that leads to Norway in 2017 and France in 2041, is a tome of wild horses. “Last of its Kind” (Petersburg 1881, Mongolia 1992, Norway 2064) and now the finale “A Dream of a Tree” – which can at least make an attempt at appeasement when the heating police knock on the rattling gas boiler.
Some readers actually take action after reading it, as reportedly happened with investor Jens Ultveit-Moe. He was making bigger profits during Norway's oil boom, is now a member of the Green Party, and if what the octogenarian says in Aarti's documentary The Maga Lund Phenomenon is true, then along with the sobering report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the books have been Passionate Maja Lowndes, who recently convinced him to fund a “climate house” of educational value in Oslo.
And again “A Tree's Dream” is more engaging than the rather lengthy second and third volumes of Lundy's “Climate Quartet”: some children and young people struggle to survive in an unreal and inhospitable Arctic region like the last humans on Earth. However, they know the way to the treasure that may delay the end of the human age for another round.
Our last hope lies in the Arctic Ocean
The plot has characteristics of Robinsonade. It takes place mainly in Spitsbergen at the beginning of the 22nd century. However, it sometimes jumps to the time of Stalin and Hitler, when the botanist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was working in Leningrad, and in principle the year 2008 should be added as well. At that time, the “Svalbard Global Seed Vault” was opened in Spitsbergen, a veritable vault for crop seeds from around the world secured by a Star Wars-style concrete gate. Undoubtedly, the future of humanity could depend on this “Noah’s Ark of Plants”, the interior of which is cooled to minus eighteen degrees.
Maja Lundy: “The Tree Dream.” a novel. Translated from Norwegian by Ursel Allenstein. Btb Verlag, Munich 2023. 560 pages, hardcover, €24.
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Photo: BTB Verlag
In the year 2110, the time has come: a ship from China powered by sails and solar cells is heading to Spitsbergen for much-needed seeds, and when it sets sail again, there are many children on board – but not the treasure she was hoping for. Eighteen year old Tommy. He is the children's eldest brother, and now, apart from his missing friend Raquel, he is alone on a former mining island between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole.
The novel's structure relies on the spontaneous suspense of modern television series, just as “A Dream of a Tree” seems to be the preparatory work for the series' inevitable film adaptation (hopefully a better one than Schatzing's “Swarm”). . The ship's departure without Tommy, who rushes to a rusty satellite station on the mountain and tries desperately to convince the crew to return via radio (“Mayday, mayday”), is followed by a flashback in which the back story becomes clear, piece by piece. Piece of the puzzle.
Necessity made the solution forgotten
Maja Lundy doesn't waste many words about what's happening outside Spitsbergen. The “collapse” of the world, the great hunger, and the many decades that have passed since the 2060s, when the last refugees from Norway, the “land of outlaws”, arrived in Spitsbergen, cut off contact with the outside world and, for safety, also left the airstrip and were Destroy the ports – Lundy just wants to draw them with dots.
“Explorer. Communicator. Music geek. Web buff. Social media nerd. Food fanatic.”
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