Greenwood

 

From the world's dust-choked cities they venture to this exclusive arboreal resort – a remote forested island off the Pacific Rim of British Columbia – to be transformed, renewed, and reconnected. To be reminded that the Earth's once-thundering green heart has not flatlined, that the soul of all living things has not come to dust and that it isn't too late and that all is not lost. They come here to the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral to ingest this outrageous lie, and it's Jake Greenwood's job as Forest Guide to spoon-feed it to them.

They took all the trees 
Put 'em in a tree museum 
And they charged the people 
A dollar and a half just to see 'em

  
It would seem that trees are really having a moment: as I was reading Greenwood, I thought, “This is like Richard Powers' The Overstory meets David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas”, but then I went to Goodreads and saw that that's exactly what the publisher's blurb says, so I'll offer out instead that this is like a mix of Annie Proulx's Barkskins and Harley Rustad's Big Lonely Doug, informed by Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees (So. Many. Tree. Books. Good thing I like them.). Greenwood itself is a sprawling, multigenerational family saga that not only uses trees as overt subject matter (their exploitation as resource, their physiology and importance to the ecosystem, their use in art and craft) but also uses trees and forests as ongoing metaphors for people, families, and society at large. This is definitely my favourite of what I've read of author Michael Christie, and despite its length and unconventional format, probably the most accessible read on 2019's Giller Prize longlist. Always interesting and often touching, this was a very good read indeed.

One is subject to much talk nowadays concerning family trees and roots and bloodlines and such, as if a family were an eternal fact, a continuous branching upwards through time immemorial. But the truth is that all family lines, from the highest to the lowest, originate somewhere, on some particular day. Even the grandest trees must've once been seeds spun helpless on the wind, and then just meek saplings nosing up from the soil. We know this for certain because on the night of April 29, 1908, a family took root before our eyes.

The opening quote takes place in the future: it's 2038, and after an ecological disaster known as the Withering (in which an uncontrollable fungus decimated most of the world's trees – leaving a few, mostly island-based, forests untouched and the rest of the world plagued by killer duststorms), forest guide Jake (for Jacinda) Greenwood counts herself lucky to have a job in the severely depressed economy; even if it is leading megarich tourists through her beloved old growth woodlands while they stare at their phones and pose for faux-pious selfies with towering Douglas firs. An orphan with no known relatives, Jake's present is bleak and she despairs for the future and the burden of student loans that she knows she'll never be able to repay. But when a former acquaintance appears on the island with an old diary and some information about Jake's unknown family tree, a mystery is presented that will eventually take the reader back in time over a hundred years and clear across to Canada's east coast.

Time, Liam has learned, is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates – in the body, in the world – like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light then dark. Each one dependent upon the last. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure.

There is an illustration at the beginning of Greenwood of the cross-section of a tree, with its outermost ring labelled as 2038, several other important years identified, and its centre, the “heartwood”, labelled as 1908. And that's how the narrative is structured (and why it recalls Cloud Atlas): After meeting Jake in the first section, set in 2038, the story rewinds to 2008 (and the story of Jake's father, Liam), then jumps back to 1974 (and the story of Liam's mother, Willow), to 1934 (and the stories of the two Greenwood brothers; one a lumber tycoon and the other a rail-hopping hobo), and then finally to 1908 and the genesis of the Greenwood line. The mysteries pile up with every cut to an earlier timeline, but after the middle section in the earliest setting, the story expands outwards again, revisiting 1934, 1974, 2008, and finally gets back to 2038, with information and revelations accumulating along the way until a satisfying resolution is arrived at. Spending time in so many different eras allows for a fascinating overview of Canadian history – a soldier from rural New Brunswick suffers the effects of shell-shock after WWI, a widow runs a Saskatchewan farm during the Great Depression, we explore Vancouver's twentieth century opium dens, and later, its eco-warrior ethos – and we meet the high and the low; everyone given a sympathetic portrayal. It was interesting that in each year Christie decided to set his story, characters are wondering if it's fair to bring children into their fallen world, and his answer, every time, seems to be that people don't so much choose to procreate as they, like a forest of trees under ecological pressure, throw their genetic material into the wind and trust that something will take root and begin its own struggle to survive. And like a forest of trees that appear to be competing for sunlight in the canopy while sharing resources underground, humanity operates through a combination of selfishness and generosity, and against all odds, even the under-resourced find ways to carry on into the future.

What are families other than fictions? Stories told about a particular cluster of people for a particular reason? And like all stories, families are not born, they're invented, pieced together from love and lies and nothing else.

I liked the overall narrative and the intriguing history it explores, the characters and the ways in which I was made to care for them, and the unconventional structure kept me totally engaged. I found the tree and forest metaphors became a little laboured, but did like the organic introduction of tree science; I liked the line-by-line writing, but some points of plot and philosophy underwhelmed. Ultimately, this is an epic of Canadian fiction and deserves a wide readership.

The longlist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize:

Days by Moonlight by André Alexis

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
Late Breaking by K.D. Miller
Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin
Lampedusa by Steven Price
Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta

Reproduction by Ian Williams


The prize was won by Ian Williams for Reproduction, but my favourite was Michael Crummey's The Innocents.