Since the publication of her species extinction tome "The History of the Bees" in 2017, the Norwegian Maja Lunde has been passed around like the writer of the hour. How exactly the purchase of four volumes of Lunde can be credited to the personal carbon footprint is currently still being examined. But anyone who has read the "Bees" set on three time scales (1852 in England, 2007 in Ohio, 2098 in China), the supplement "The History of Water" leading to Norway in 2017 and France in 2041, the wild horse volume "The Last of Their Kind" (Petersburg 1881, Mongolia 1992, Norway 2064) and now the finale "The Dream of a Tree" - can at least start an attempt at appeasement, when the heating police knock on the rattling gas boiler.
And some readers really take action after reading it, as it is said to have been with investor Jens Ulltveit-Moe. He used to make major profits in Norway's oil boom, is now a Green, and if it is true what the octogenarian tells in the unctuous Arte documentary "The Phenomenon of Maja Lunde", then it was not only the sober report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but also the emotional books of Maja Lunde that recently moved him to finance an educationally valuable "climate house" in Oslo.
"The Dream of a Tree" is again more appealing than the somewhat lengthy second and third volumes of Lunde's alarmist "Climate Quartet": Some children and adolescents fight for survival in an unreal, inhospitable Arctic landscape like the last humans on earth. And yet they know the way to a treasure that could perhaps delay the end of the human age for a while.
Our last hope lies in the Arctic Ocean
The plot has traits of a Robinsonade. It is mainly set on Spitsbergen at the beginning of the 22nd century. However, it occasionally jumps to the time of Stalin and Hitler, in which the botanist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov worked in Leningrad, and in principle one would have to accept the year 2008 as well. At that time, the "Svalbard Global Seed Vault" was opened on Spitsbergen, a real vault secured with a Star Wars-like concrete portal for the seeds of crops from all over the world. In case of doubt, the future of humanity could depend on this "Noah's Ark of plants", whose interiors are cooled down to minus eighteen degrees, when everything is in the bucket.
In 2110, the time has come: a ship from China powered by sails and solar panels heads for Spitsbergen to fetch the urgently needed seeds, and when it departs, it has several children on board – but not the hoped-for treasure and not the main character of the novel, eighteen-year-old Tommy. He is the children's big brother and now, apart from his missing girlfriend Rakel, alone on the former mining island between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole.
The structure of the novel is based on the automatic suspense of modern television series, as the "Dream of a Tree" seems to be the preparatory work for the inevitable (hopefully better than the film adaptation of Schätzing's "Swarm") film adaptation of the series. The departure of the ship without Tommy, who rushes into the rusty satellite station on the mountain and desperately tries to persuade the crew to turn back by radio ("Mayday, mayday"), is followed by flashbacks with which the prehistory becomes recognizable piece by piece of the puzzle.
Necessity has made the solution obsolete
Maja Lunde doesn't say too many words about what is happening outside Spitsbergen. The "collapse" of the world, the great hunger, the many decades since the sixties of the 21st century, when the last refugees from Norway, the "land of the outlaws", arrived on Spitsbergen, broke off contact with the outside world and, to be on the safe side, also destroyed the runway and ports – Lunde only wants to sketch it out in dots.