by Dahl Botterill
Two things lie at the heart of Michael Christie's Greenwood: trees, and family. Jake Greenwood is a tremendously overqualified Forest Guide on Greenwood Island (no relation), one of the last bastions of truly ancient trees to survive a worldwide environmental collapse known as the Great Withering. She has no surviving family, no history, and an extensive education made largely useless in the face of ecological disaster. What she has, for as long as she can hold onto her tenuous position on the Island, are the trees she loves dearly.
When Jake discovers that the forest she loves may be dying, and a book surfaces that might provide her with the personal history she's never known, the story begins to unfold in generational layers, first introducing Jake's parents, and working its way backwards through time as though through the concentric rings of a tree. Upon reaching the influential core of Jake's past, the book shifts temporal direction and finds its way back to her present.
The story is beautifully written, and each generation not only adds to Jake's rich family history but provides a different approach to the persistent presence of trees. From timber barons to environmentalists, and touching on many attitudes in between, the reader finds themselves looking at the subject of trees from countless angles, all of which provide insight into Jake's own relationships with trees and family.
Multigenerational family dramas don't usually appeal to me as a reader, and I might very well not have picked this up if not for my previous experiences with Christie's writing, but I'm very glad that I did. The writing is top shelf, and the story drew me back again and again. Every one of Michael Christie's characters is fully realized, and their influence is felt even when you've moved on to a new generation's tale.
While each generation is revisited during the back half of the novel, these two segments—one on the journey towards the core and another on the way back to Jake and our near future—are the full extent of the reader's time spent with each generation. This format plays nicely with the concept of trees and their rings as you track the family across a tree's core, but it also leads to each tale feeling strong in and of itself; while there is a larger structure being built as you progress through Greenwood, each piece could stand on its own. The result is an elegant picture of family, made up of individuals, of generations, of history, and—in the end—somehow more.