Greenwood by Michael Christie, the last of the five shortlisted Canada Reads books I am reviewing before the event starts on March 27, highlights the devastating inevitability of time. Examining the fraught relationship between generations, author Michael Christie crafts a harrowing account of how every generation in the fictional Greenwood family try to define themselves in opposition to their parents before them.
Finding very strong people at their most vulnerable, this novel records how the Greenwoods’ impulses to distance themselves from the trauma they have inherited ultimately scatter them across place and time. Through this whole process, trees act as witnesses to these generations of lives trying to break free from the habits, patterns, and secrets of their parents. While trees come to have a variety of meanings in this novel, the ways that time, trauma, and family legacy accumulate in the bodies of the Greenwoods rather than being linear and processable events make trees a strong metaphor for the Greenwood family.
Rather than a family being a tree with a solid origin and branches that grow across time, as we are often taught to conceptualise our own families in school, Christie introduces the idea of a family as the severed trunk of a tree, with rings upon rings of time exposed in an instant. This metaphor soon turns devastating as a new fungal blight appears in the 2030s that grows between the rings of trees, eventually rotting them from the inside out.
Greenwood lends itself to an almost choose your own adventure quality. You can imagine reading the novel as exploring the rings of a tree, starting at the outer edge in 2038, and travelling inwards. Christie’s story carries its readers back in time through the 2008 financial crisis, then to 1974, then through The Great Depression, and finally reaching the bleeding heart at the centre of the Greenwood family in 1908 before drawing right back outwards again through The Great Depression, the 70s, the 2000s, and ending back in the future.
Focusing on moments in time where the world was unlivable for the Greenwoods, this format also lends itself to a more reader-lead experience. If you don’t like science fiction, you can start in 2008 and the book would be a complete entity regardless. If you love historical fiction, you can start and finish this book in the 70s and possibly be more happy with this book than if you’d read the whole thing. This aspect of play in its reader experience makes Greenwood come alive for me.
Within this novel, Michael Christie explores how the story of a family, its mythology, soon starts to eat away at genetic lines or “reality” of a family to create a new thing not previously possible, but organic nonetheless. “Like all stories,” Christie writes in Greenwood, “families are not born, they’re invented.” A haunting account of family, inevitability, and the ecological crisis created by this place now called Canada being a resource-based economy, Greenwood is a must-read.