Of the many tender and heart-wrenching moments in “Big Tree,” Brian Selznick’s illustrated novel about two tree seeds, it’s a small illustration toward the beginning of the book that may be the most striking.
It takes place mere moments after the seeds’ mother, a sycamore tree referred to as simply “Mama,” has been warned of an approaching wildfire.
The seeds, Merwin and Louise, have been sent flying into the air by Mama in hopes that they may escape the fire and, hopefully, take root for themselves. As the two seeds ascend and descend, they eventually cling to one another using their pappus fluff, scared but reassuring one another that they’ll be OK. Accompanied by Selznick’s poetically precise words, it’s a devastating moment; one that sets an ominous tone as the reader follows Merwin and Louise for over 500 dutifully constructed pages of prose and illustration.
“I had to give the images the same rules that the story has, which is that everything is based in science,” said Selznick, from his home in La Jolla. “Seeds don’t have faces. I really didn’t have to do any character design. I just had to draw a seed.”
Yes, many of the illustrations within “Big Tree” are just seeds, but it’s a testament to Selznick’s talent as a storyteller and illustrator in that he’s rendered them in a way that tugs at the reader’s heart strings and further invests them in the story’s themes of conservationism and existentialism.
“I’m able to use the pictures to show certain kinds of gestures, certain kinds of movement,” Selznick says. “I can have them reaching towards each other and I can show them very far away and lonely in the sky. Or I can show them close-up and leaning on each other, but to really know what they’re thinking and feeling, you would have to go into the text.”
The concept for “Big Tree,” which will be released on April 4, actually began over five years ago, not as a book but rather as a movie idea presented to Selznick by none other than Steven Spielberg.
Selznick had already worked on adapting many of his bestselling books into movies, including “Wonderstruck” and the Academy Award-nominated “Hugo” (adapted from his 2007 book, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret”), and was very interested in Spielberg’s concept of a film about, as Selznick recalls it, “nature from nature’s point of view.”
Initially, Spielberg wanted the film to take place in the Devonian period, roughly 400 million years ago and before dinosaurs roamed the earth, but Selznick says he found that there wasn’t much biodiversity in that era. After some more meetings with Spielberg, they agreed the story would take place toward the end of the Cretaceous period. Selznick began work on illustrations and storyboarding the idea, but then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and everything was put on hold.
“It became clear at that time that the movie wasn’t going to happen and that’s when I got the idea of making it into a book,” says Selznick, who says he was grateful that Spielberg and the other producers gave him their blessing to continue with the project.
Looking back on that time, Selznick says that while the pandemic didn’t overtly influence the overall story, he does say that the book was “what he needed to be writing about at that time.”
“I had the entire plot before the pandemic hit,” Selznick continues. “But when it was time to sit down and begin to turn it into an illustrated novel, it was interesting to see how closely so many of the emotional aspects of the story tracked with what was going on. Ultimately, having a story where the characters are finding themselves faced with what feels like the end of the world, it seemed very relevant; trying to hold onto hope and optimism in the face of so much grief and terror.”
There are myriad themes within Selznick’s fable, both overt and covert, including messages of conservationism, nature-based symbiosis, and even the strength of sibling relationships, but it also subtly deals in themes of language and listening.
In the book, the plants and fungi are the only ones who have dialogue and believe themselves to be the only creatures that can communicate. As Louise and Merwin’s story unfolds, it becomes clear that one of the more important messages of “Big Tree” is that anything that is alive can communicate.
For example, the trees communicate with other trees using a vast and brilliant network of roots, a fact that is actually based in science. The brilliance of “Big Tree ” is that just because humankind can’t necessarily communicate directly with other forms of life on the planet, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to listen.
“When I’m writing books, I almost never think about themes because I’m too focused on plot and characters,” Selznick its. “I don’t think that I realized just how important the theme of listening was until I myself was at the end of the story. It felt like I was discovering that myself.”
And while “Big Tree” is being published by Scholastic, a company that specializes in children’s books, it is a book that will almost certainly appeal to adults and young readers alike.
“I hope that it’s a story that can be shared within generations,” says Selznick, who will speak about the book at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies on May 8.
“For me, I learned so much while writing this book. Yes, I learned about the science of the world and the way things worked, but it also helped me work through so many of the various issues in my life. So I’m always thrilled to imagine or hear about when others connect with the story in their own ways.”
“Big Tree”
By Brian Selznick
(Scholastic Press, 2023, 528 pages)
