GREENWOOD by Michael Christie

If you draw a line through the center of a tree stump, your trajectory will basically match the timeline of this book, from the present, then back by decades into the past, then coming back through those same time periods to the present again.  In this book, the “present” is actually our future—year 2038.  Deforestation and blight have left the world dustier than the Midwest was in the 1930s and almost uninhabitable.  Jacinda “Jake” Greenwood is a tour guide on an island off Canada’s western coast where an old-growth forest still stands.  A man she knew in college comes to tell her that she may not be as destitute as she thinks she is, nor may she actually be who she thinks she is.  Now we drop back several decades at a time to become acquainted with Jake’s grandmother, Willow, who also cherishes trees, despite the fact that her blind father, Harris Greenwood, runs a multi-million-dollar logging company.  My two favorite characters in this saga are Harris’s brother Everett, who spends half his life in prison, and Liam Feeney, Harris’s lover and “describer” of surroundings that Harris cannot see.  Both men sacrifice everything for their principles.  The subject matter is similar to that of Richard Powers’s The Overstory, but this novel is easier to follow, despite the V-shaped timeline.  The writing here has a calm and soothing quality, just as a quiet moment in an old-growth forest would.  This novel could have been suspenseful, but it really isn’t, despite a manhunt, a shootout, a frozen corpse, and a tragic fall.