Greenwood (Christie)

Greenwood 
Michael Christie, 2020
Random House
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781984822000


Summary


A magnificent generational saga that charts a family’s rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes, from one of Canada’s most acclaimed novelists.

It’s 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world’s last remaining forests.

It’s 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion.

It’s 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father’s once vast and violent timber empire.

It’s 1934 and Everett Greenwood is alone, as usual, in his maple-syrup camp squat, when he hears the cries of an abandoned infant and gets tangled up in the web of a crime, secrets, and betrayal that will cling to his family for decades.

And throughout, there are trees: a steady, silent pulse thrumming beneath Christie’s effortless sentences, working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival.

A shining, intricate clockwork of a novel, Greenwood is a rain-soaked and sun-dappled story of the bonds and breaking points of money and love, wood, and blood—and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1976
• Where—Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada
• Education—Simon Fraser University
• Awards—
• Currently—lives in Victoria and on Galiano Island, British Columbia


Michael Christie is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. He was born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario, later moving to San Francisco and traveling the world as a professional skateboarder. Eventually, Christie landed in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he studied psychology at Simon Fraser University. After earning his degree, he spent several years working in social services.

In 2008 Christie enrolled in the University of British Columbia's creative writing program. Less than years later, in early 2011, Christie published his first story collection, The Beggar's Garden, which was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Prize.

Christie's first novel, If I Fall, If I Die, came out 2015, and Greenwood, his second, came out in 2019 it. Both novels received nominations for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Today, Christie divides his time between Victoria, BC's capital, located on Vancouver Island, and Galiano Island, some two hours north, where he lives with his wife and two sons in a timber-frame house he built himself. (Adapted from Wikipedia and the publisher. Retrieved 3/1/2020.)

Read a more indepth (and much more interesting!) bio in the Quill & Quire.

Book Reviews
(Starred review) A rugged, riveting novel.… This superb family saga will satisfy fans of Richard Powers’s The Overstory while offering a convincing vision of potential ecological destruction.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) Celebrated Canadian author Christie dazzles with this richly woven historical tracking five generations of the "trouble-plagued" Greenwood clan and the environmental devastation wrought by its lucrative timber empire. —Annalisa Pesek
Library Journal


(Starred review)  Christie takes us to the end of the world and shows how we got there. … [The author] skillfully teases out the details in a page-turner…. Beguilingly structured, elegantly written: eco-apocalyptic but with hope that somehow we’ll make it.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
 1. Greenwood is part of a new genre of novels known as CliFi (climate fiction). What makes it fall under that category? Do any of the novel’s environmental themes resonate with you?

2. At its heart, Greenwood is a family saga. How did the boyhoods of brothers Everett and Harris make them into the men they became? How do you think Willow’s nomadic life affected her son Liam? How did Jake’s orphaning influence the person she became?

3. The Great Withering began with the trees—“the wave of fungal blights and insect infestations, to which old growth was particularly defenseless.” What environmental stresses do you see in your life today? How do you personally address these issues?

4. “The best sacrifices, Willow knows, are always made in solitude, with not a camera in sight.” Characters make many sacrifices in Greenwood—Everett for his brother during the war, Temple for the downtrodden, Feeney out of love for his principles. What other sacrifices did you notice in the novel? Which character’s sacrifice moved you most and why?

5. How did you feel about Meena’s reaction to Liam’s painstakingly created gift, a homemade viola that replicated the Stradivarius Meena so loved? Were her actions necessary? Cruel? What did her reaction say about their relationship?

6. The word “roots” has many meanings in Greenwood—a tree’s stability, a family’s ancestry, a person’s connection to place. Which meaning resonated most with you and why?

7. “Time, Liam has learned, is not an arrow.” Greenwood travels back and forth through time—deepening characters and their backstories, connecting characters in unforeseen ways, twisting the plot like roots. In fact, the book’s timeline, starting and ending with the most recent years, and with the earliest events tucked into the middle, is structured like the rings of a tree. How did this structure affect your reading experience? How would the reading experience have changed if the story was told linearly?

8. Why do you think author Michael Christie chose to write the center section—1908—in the voice of a Greek chorus of townspeople? How does this perspective enhance our understanding of the Greenwood boys’ upbringing?

9. Christie writes that nature has taught Temple “things she’d never speak in polite conversation. Like the fact that Mother Nature’s true aim is to convert us people back into the dust we came from, just as quick as possible.” Like Temple, people tend to view Mother Nature as either the great destroyer (earthquakes, floods, the Dust Bowl), or the great nurturer (providing food, shelter, oxygen, and more). Which view did each character take? Which do you lean toward? Do you think both can be true? Why or why not?

10. What do you think of Jake’s final actions at the end of the book? Did she make the right decisions? How would you have handled the revelations?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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