Michael Christie’s first novel, If I Fall, If I Die, was one of my favourite books of the past five years. It was a surprise to me, but one I will be forever grateful to have discovered. Since closing the cover of that book, I’ve been waiting for Christie to publish another one. So when I found out Greenwood was on the schedule for release in September, I immediately pre-ordered it at an exorbitant price to ensure I would get my eager little hands on it right away. It got here the day after publication, and I dove straight into it. I don’t remember the last time I started reading a book within hours of its arrival and didn’t get distracted. This one took me ten days, but I didn’t read any other books in that time. It’s the first time in months I’ve been this invested, not just in a particular book, but in reading as an activity. I largely read during half hour chunks of down time, but with this book I went back to it as soon as the kid was tucked into bed, and kept reading until my eyes were closing more than once.
It’s a hard book to describe, because its structure is complex. The simplified version is that it’s a multi-generational story about the Greenwood family, starting 2038 and skipping around through time back to the 1930s. Now, I don’t normally like family sagas. But this was a rare example of one that managed to hold my interest fairly evenly throughout. I think part of what made this such an interesting family narrative was that it’s not a traditional family. There are no easy linear family lines – even those that are genetic are complex and uncertain. There are orphans, foundlings, criminals, vagrants, tycoons and hidden love affairs. There are disagreements, estrangements and misunderstandings. But there’s also sacrifice, loyalty and a whole lot of love.
The story bounces around not only through different eras and generations, but within them. There are usually a couple of different storylines going on at a time, and sometimes the timeline is a little messy. The story comes in pieces, and new mysteries appear even as old ones are solved. I liked that it wasn’t linear – the book starts with the most modern storyline – because you know what the story is working towards, it’s just a matter of figuring out how all paths led there.
Like in any story of this kind, there are characters you like, characters you hate, and a few you love to hate. Even the villains usually have their pathos, and it’s hard to deny at least a small amount of understanding to most of them (with a couple of notable exceptions). My favourite character was the one we spend the most time with – Everett Greenwood. His story is one that will pull at your heartstrings, but he’s not perfect. When we meet him he’s only recently managed to find solid ground after a horrific experience in the first world war, and years of alcoholism and wandering after. But his life is soon to be upturned once again, but in a very different fashion.
What I loved most about him is that while on the surface he’s troubled, underneath all that he is still able to deeply care about another human being, and learns to accept his limitations and find a way to work within them rather than give up. I struggle with this and my situation is nowhere near as difficult or traumatic as several in his life. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is just get up in the morning and keep on living. But he does, and he is willing to sacrifice his small measure of comfort and security to save another’s life. He never seeks or gets acknowledgement for this, and he pays a hefty price for doing so, but there is never an ounce of regret. There are lessons to be learned from this character, even if some of them are what not to do.
I’m not going to say this book was perfect – there were times when I wasn’t sure about the shifts between times and characters, and it felt a little jumpy rather than seamlessly transitioning. There were questions about some of the characters that were never answered, and some of the storylines were longer than they really needed to be. There were opportunities for characters to make simple choices that would have changed fate for the better, and it was frustrating that they didn’t do so. But I could forgive any small faults in the structure of the book for the characters and story.
I think Michael Christie has a particular talent. He is a skilled writer on a line-by-line basis, and his characters always get me fully invested. But what he truly excels at is storytelling. Teasing out information at an even pace and keeping the reader interested. In both his books there’s a certain messiness to how the story is told, and yet in both cases it just works. From the first chapter of this book I was more invested than I’ve been in a long time. It is hard to draw me in that quickly, but he managed to do so, and to keep my interest right the way through.
One of the things I loved most about this book, however, is something that won’t hold for all readers. This is a deeply Canadian book. It’s all about trees, both as individual living organisms, and as the timber they can become. Each generation is tied to trees – either as timber, beautiful and powerful presences in need of protection, or as wood to be reclaimed, understood, and worked into something beautiful. Logging and wood processing (and protests surrounding how this is carried out) is an industry central to Canada’s history and economy, and forests, in my part of the country, are the landscape. A large chunk of the story is set right where I live, and there are landmarks in it that I can nearly see from my window. The connection I felt with this book was in no small part affected by this familiarity. Which is in no way a bad thing, but it won’t feel the same for readers who don’t know what trees mean to those of us on the west coast of Canada.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the book itself is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen in a long time. The publishers really outdid themselves on this one. Not only is the cover simply gorgeous, but the paper is great quality – this is a book with some heft to it. But the best part is the tree-ring pattern printed on the edges of the pages and each odd numbered page. It brought the theme of the book to life, and was extremely satisfying to handle. If you have the opportunity to get this edition of the book, I’d highly recommend doing so.
Though Greenwood hasn’t managed to unseat If I Fall, If I Die on my list of top favourites of all time, it’s edging into my favourites of the year. Despite having very little that would normally appeal to me, this book had me fully immersed and invested. I even learned a few things along the way. I’d recommend this to anyone who is looking for a big story to lose themselves in, particularly anyone who is Canadian or interested in getting a feel for the place. This book evoked my home country better than any book I’ve read in a long time. A great read, and one that is calling for you to spend a rainy Saturday or two with it and a hot cup of tea!
From the award-winning author of If I Fall, If I Die comes a propulsive, multigenerational family story, in which the unexpected legacies of a remote island off the coast of British Columbia will link the fates of five people over a hundred years. Cloud Atlas meets The Overstory in this ingenious nested-ring epic set against the devastation of the natural world.
They come for the trees. It is 2038. As the rest of humanity struggles through the environmental collapse known as the Great Withering, scientist Jake Greenwood is working as an overqualified tour guide on Greenwood Island, a remote oasis of thousand-year-old trees. Jake had thought the island’s connection to her family name just a coincidence, until someone from her past reappears with a book that might give her the family history she’s long craved. From here, we gradually move backwards in time to the years before the First World War, encountering along the way the men and women who came before Jake: an injured carpenter facing the possibility of his own death, an eco-warrior trying to atone for the sins of her father’s rapacious timber empire, a blind tycoon with a secret he will pay a terrible price to protect, and a Depression-era drifter who saves an abandoned infant from certain death, only to find himself the subject of a country-wide manhunt. At the very centre of the book is a tragedy that will bind the fates of two boys together, setting in motion events whose reverberations we see unfold over generations, as the novel moves forward into the future once more.
A magnificent novel of inheritance, sacrifice, nature, and love that takes its structure from the nested growth rings of a tree, Greenwood spans generations to tell the story of a family living and dying in the shadows cast by its own secrets. With this breathtaking feat of storytelling, Michael Christie masterfully reveals the tangled knot of lies, omissions, and half-truths that exists at the root of every family’s origin story. – Goodreads
Book Title: Greenwood
Author: Michael Christie
Series: No
Edition: Hardback
Published By: McClelland & Stewart
Released: September 24, 2019
Genre: Fiction, Family, Multi-Generational, Nature, Canadian
Pages: 512
Date Read: September 25-October 5, 2019
Rating: 9/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.61/5 (28 ratings)