Michael Christie's book Greenwood tackles climate change, forestry and family dysfunction

This story was originally published on Oct. 11, 2019. The Scotiabank Giller Prize went to Ian Williams for his novel Reproduction.

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You could categorize Michael Christie's new novel Greenwood as a sprawling work of historical fiction.

But it's also a thoroughly researched look at forestry practices, opium addiction, the Dust Bowl, rapacious capitalism, and the challenges of woodworking. Not to mention a page-turner about a cross-country chase, long-hidden family secrets, and forbidden love.

A big, gripping novel that's made of —  and makes much of —  trees.

Christie spoke with As It Happens host Carol Off about Greenwood, which was longlisted for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Here is part of their conversation.

You seem to have taken tree-hugging to the level of art in this book Greenwood.

You could say that. I mean, I didn't begin the book as a tree-hugger. But after I wrote the final page, I am now a card-carrying tree-hugger.

We don't normally start an interview talking about the structure of a book, except that it's so intriguing. So how did you come up with this book?

The structure of the narrative mirrors the rings of a tree — so the cross section of a tree. It begins in the near future, passes back in time to 2008, back and back to sort of the centre of the narrative tree, and the beginning of this particular family that I'm writing about. And then, the story comes back out through those same rings again to the near future.

I came up with the structure when I was cutting down a tree, I'm sorry to report. But it was a small tree on our property where we live on Galiano Island in British Columbia.

And I cut the tree down — it had to go because we were putting in a driveway, so it was a difficult decision — and then examined the rings of the tree and saw that, you know, a stump is a kind of record, and is almost a kind of narrative in itself.

I'm not a big believer of anyone when they say they had an epiphany, but I did. And I saw the structure of the story there.

I want to ask you about 2038. That's the outer ring of the tree, and Jake Greenwood, who is the character of that generation in this family saga, [works] at Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral. Tell us about her and her job.

Jake is a highly qualified scientist. She's studied the intercommunicative mechanisms of trees for most of her life.

But she's been reduced to being a forest guide in this last remaining old-growth forest that remains after something called The Great Withering has decimated forests and trees all across the world.

So her job is to guide wealthy tourists, essentially, through the trees, describe their wonder and majesty to them, and be paid very poorly to do so.

And these are extraordinary Douglas firs that anyone who's been out there has seen on the islands, like Cathedral Grove, which are in some cases 1,200, 1,500 years old, right?

Absolutely. And they're towering creatures. They're hundreds of feet high.… I called the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral a cathedral for a reason, and that is because they do feel like holy places.

I grew up in Thunder Bay, Ont., smelling the pulp mill smoke wafting past my house. And so I've always been quite connected to trees and to forests and to natural spaces.- Michael Christie

They have this sense of spirituality to them and awe that visits you when you are there.

[It's set in] 2038, and that isn't so far away. And this is where all the trees, or very few trees, are left on Earth after The Great Withering. Can you tell us what that is and to what degree is it an invention on your part?

I dearly wish that I could say it involved a lot more imagination than it did. I live on Galiano Island [and] the western red cedars, which are the provincial tree of British Columbia, many of them are browning and dying due to what people believe is drought stress.

So a series of droughts has rendered these trees unable to survive. And so, it's incredibly tragic.

My wife, who grew up on Galiano Island, her name is Cedar. So, you know, it's something that hits so close to home for me.

And so, I mean, The Great Withering is not a work of imagination.

You mentioned that you live on Galiano Island in British Columbia, and you obviously are surrounded by trees. What is your relationship with trees?

It's very close. I grew up in Thunder Bay, Ont., smelling the pulp mill smoke wafting past my house. And so I've always been quite connected to trees and to forests and to natural spaces.

And when we moved to Galiano, we got a little piece of land and decided we were gonna build a house. And I, in my infinite wisdom, decided that I was too cheap to pay someone to do that … and I was going to attempt to do this.

I think that books that traffic in sheer outright pessimism are false.- Michael Christie

So I did that. We brought some trees down on the property and we had them milled right there and we built a timber-frame little cabin and that's where we live now. It's lovely.

There is a Globe and Mail article by Marsha Lederman describing the role that art plays during the climate crisis that … artists are now looking at this environmental issue and incorporating it into their work. Did you feel some kind of artistic responsibility to incorporate what you're seeing with the trees into fiction?

I didn't at first. I mean, the idea for this novel began sort of in the way that all of my ideas begin, and that's: I want to write about a dysfunctional family! Most of my work centres around that basic kind of idea — functional and dysfunctional.

As I was writing it, and as I was doing research and becoming ... more interested in forests and carpentry, and the history of logging in Canada, I became more and more aware that I was writing what could be called an environmental novel, in the sense that there is a kind of evolution that takes place, a sort of a societal transformation that takes place throughout the course of the narrative with respect to how we look at trees.

What I really admire about this novel is that it's hopeful. It actually doesn't make you feel that dystopian despair works of fiction like this do elsewhere.

Did you consciously say, "No, I'm not going to infect people with the complete sense of suicidal despair after this book"?

Yeah, I think that books that sort of traffic in, you know, just sheer outright pessimism are false. I don't think that life is meaningless and we're all doomed and blah blah blah. I do see hope everywhere, and I see hope in the climate strikes and I see hope in all kinds of initiatives that are coming.

The most hopeful character I find is Everett, who is the man we meet during the Depression. And he is a hobo. He's illiterate. He's traveling the rails and has … a horrible life — everything that happens to him is... But he has such humanity. He doesn't ever lose his caring of others.

Yeah. I mean, Everett was a character who arrived on my desk as a kind of a gift. And he embodies so much of what I admire in people in this sort of, you know, quiet sort of stoicism, self-sacrifice, humbleness, humanity.

It is such a page-turner. I mean you have all those things that make the book so unputdownable.

At the same time ... it could have been didactic. It could have been preachy, given the thematic basis. How consciously did you try to avoid that?

Not too consciously. I kind of think of it as just a series of balancing acts, in the sense that you are trying to strike this perfect balance between doing it, and overdoing it, pretty much over and over and over again.

So you just hope that you can get that mix right, where things are believable and exciting — but at the same time human, and rooted in life and affecting.

But it is a book with a message, and perhaps we can all extract our own message from it, but what is yours?

It's so hard to sum up a book of this size to one message. I'm happy to try it.

The message of the book is the interconnectedness of all living things, which sounds grandiose and I apologize.

But it's the fact that we are intimately tied to one another, that we are intimately tied to our environment, and we ignore that fact at our peril.

Interview produced by Chris Howden. Written by Jonathan Ore. Q&A edited for length and clarity.