Our Father Who Art in the Tree

Through the eyes of a precocious young girl, Judy Pascoe brings us a magical tale of love and loss that is infused with lyrical beauty and spiritual depth.For ten-year-old Simone O’Neill, the death of her father is shattering: she blames him for running away, and has nightmares about him lying awake in his grave. It’s been three months, but still her mother Dawn cries herself to sleep at night and cuts herself off from her children, unable to cope with the curve life has thrown her. Simone’s brothers have also retreated into their own worlds, and as tension overtakes the home, leaving each of the family isolated in his or her grief, Simone’s sorrow begins to turn to hate.Then one day, soon after a visit to her father’s grave that left her scared of the ants that worked the soil, something magical happens as Simone stands in her family’s backyard. “Don’t worry about the ants,” she hears, and it seems to be coming from a massive tree. “They’re everywhere. Why are there so many?” she asks the air. “They’re busy,” is the reply, and “Yes, it’s me.” It is then that Simone realizes that her father is not trapped in his grave or up in heaven, but has gone to live in the large tree behind the house. At first she’s terrified, spends weeks sprinting through the yard avoiding the tree’s calls, but then one day she decides to face the truth, and climbs. And when her father begins to speak, she embraces his presence: “I didn’t hate him so much now for dying, because for the first time since he died I could remember what he was like when he wasalive.”With this discovery begins Our Father Who Art in a Tree, an enchanting and enchanted novel about life and death and all of the layers of love, loss, family, belief and community that lie in between -- or in the way. In an effort to console her mother, Simone shares her secret and brings her into the fold, so Dawn can at last unburden herself of some of the grief that has consumed her and try to move on. In the tree, Simone’s mother is able to share her pain with her husband, and also recapture some of the joy of their marriage. But when a new man enters her life, Dawn is faced with the hardest decision of all: whether to hang on or let go.In the unbearable heat and drought of a single Australian summer, Dawn’s inability to choose torments both her and her children, and the tree begins to take over their home as well as their thoughts. The branches scratch a nightly warning on the sides of the house. Roots begin to fill the drains and attack the foundations. An errant limb crashes through the window and sprawls onto Dawn’s bed, coming to rest on the husband’s side. Gradually an entire community is pulled in by its force: extended family members arrive and try to help Dawn cope; neighbours intercede, withdraw. But it is not all anguish, here. The ladies of the Neighbourhood Watch, concerned for their suburban calm, face off against Simone’s elderly aunts, who totter around on high heels and understand that Mr. O’Neill is just not ready to go, in an Us versus Them bridge tournament that puts the life of the tree at stake. Yet it is only when the weather finally breaks and a storm of cyclone strength and fury hits the neighbourhood that Simone’s family -- and their faith in the future -- is put to the ultimate test. Author Biography: Judy Pascoe was born and educated in Australia, and is originally from Brisbane, in Queensland. During the writing of Our Father Who Art in a Tree she drew heavily on her memories of her homeland -- and the power of the Australian landscape -- to infuse her story with its rich sense of place. “I guess the point I wanted to make was that even in the blandest Australian suburb the power of the landscape is inescapable,” she has said. “Australians have been influenced by that landscape in more ways than they know.” Today, Pascoe lives in the historic Cotswolds region of Gloucestershire, England, with her partner of fifteen years and their two children, plus four chickens, a puppy, and a hamster.When Pascoe originally set out to tell the story at the heart of Our Father Who Art in a Tree, she envisioned it as a film, and the film rights were sold to Disney Pictures. That this story began as a screenplay is not surprising, as Pascoe had worked for years in the performing and screen arts; she worked for many seasons as an acrobat with Circus Oz, touring Australia and the world, before relocating to the United Kingdom and becoming a stand-up comedienne on the U.K. comedy circuit. There, she has also worked as an actor, a television presenter, a scriptwriter, and a script doctor, but she has increasingly turned to writing since the birth of her children: “When I had kids I decided that I needed a job which did not involve so much travelling.”Disney was excited about the project from the start. However, after five years of dealing with the film studio and the endless rewrites required as the story was “developed,” Pascoe became increasingly tired of the process. As is often the norm in Hollywood, the script was constantly in rewrites as different actors and actresses showed interest and as producers fluctuated between planning a high-budget visual feast and a simpler, elegant film that could be done for less money. “It is very hard when your work is changed on the whim of an actor or a director,” Pascoe has said, although she stuck with the development process for five years. “You do get sucked into the madness of it because it is quite funny really, but it is very frustrating.” In the end, when Disney asked to extend their option on the film rights, Pascoe declined.It was then that Pascoe decided to turn the screenplay into a novel, and once she started writing she found the story took shape very quickly on the page. Writing while her kids were at school, she was determined from the start to create a novel that was literary and multi-levelled yet at the same time would not daunt readers who had busy lives. “I actually wrote it with people who have children in mind,” she has said. “It’s hard to find books which are short enough to have time for when you have kids.” What she ended up with is Our Father Who Art in a Tree: a slender novel at 208 pages, but one in which each image resonates with enough mythic force to crack the covers wide open.With it, Judy Pascoe has been well received internationally as a novelist with a fresh new voice. Our Father Who Art in a Tree was published in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom in 2002, and in Canada and the United States in 2003. It will also be published in France, Sweden, Germany, Japan, and Italy.