With a blurb that suggested this book might nestle gently into my much enjoyed dystopian fiction genre I was first seduced by the beauty of the cover, with its shimmering green cross section of tree trunk on the front and a human palm on the back. Two images that actually say so much about this wonderful book but the full impact doesn’t hit you until you’ve finished reading. Funny - I’m not normally bothered by covers but somehow I just knew this one was important!
What can you say about a book that has you weeping inconsolably by page 438, limping wet eyed to the end having shared the lives of these diverse people through 130 years of their struggles, physical, and emotional? I’ll try my best for this is one of ‘those’ books. One of ‘those’ books that grabs your heart and soul and fills you up to overflowing with the immensity of all that’s contained within its pages.
Superficially, a family saga that spans several generations beginning in 1908 through to 2038. But using the tree as a sustained metaphor for life the book explores deeper aspects of what it is to be human. And how, whether we like it or not, place can determine, like fingers of fate, our futures.
With images that won’t be lost on bibliophiles the relationship between tree and book is also sustained throughout the novel even exploring the idioms of language that have us ‘leafing’ through pages. The genealogical family tree image is subtly perpetuated throughout.
‘What are families other than fictions? Stories told about a particular cluster of people for a particular reason? And like all stories, families are not born, they’re invented, pieced together from love and lies and nothing else. And through these messy means, so too might this poor, destitute child become – for good and for ill - a Greenwood.’
Of course where you’ve trees and reverence for trees you have environmental and ecological considerations, so pertinent today. This author loves trees but more importantly I believe he understands them. Christie lives in Canada where, if you’ve ever visited, you’ll have seen trees, with capital “T”s.
‘But those are really know trees know they’re also ruthless. They’ve been fighting a war for sunlight and sustenance since before we existed. And they’d gladly crash or poison every single one of us if it gave them any advantage.’
The book’s structure is clever. I was reminded of Eleanor Catton’s structuring of The Luminaries where the twelve parts of the novel decreased in length as the book progressed to indicate the passage of the moon though its lunar cycle and also of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas with its six interconnected stories. Here the age rings of the tree, 2038, 2008, 1974, 1934 and 1908 are used so that we go backwards and then forwards in time. I thought of ripples in a stream and the water trying to spread out its energy and comparing that image with the rings of growth in the tree trunk that also expand outwards indicating a life energy.
And the characters ? They jump off the pages at you - Jake, Willow, Temple, Harris, Everett, both the Liams and Lomax. You care about them. You want so much for them to succeed, to find the answers they’re all looking for, whether it’s confirmation of identity or origin, pain relief - physical and emotional, or the wider, deeper issues of lives and how they’re lived. They’re as flawed as we all are. driven to behave in ways that make perfect sense to themselves if not to those around them.
‘If life has taught him anything, it’s that you must be more secretive, more protective, and more pitiless than the next man. Either that or everything you are, everything you’ve built, and everyone you love, could be trampled in an instant.’
This is more than a work of dystopian fiction, it’s historic, its philosophic, its environmental, a multi layered work that does that rare thing. It tells a gripping and tightly plotted story yet demands that its reader dig a little deeper within the book, and themselves, to seek some fundamental truths.
‘….. Mother Nature’s is true aim is to convert us people back into the dust we came from, just as quick as possible.’
It’s a book written with intelligence and elegance, substantial, a flowing narrative with evocative detail that works in tandem with the reader’s own imagination. And if I wasn’t already sold, already in love with this book, both Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf were referenced within the story. ;) But there’s some lighter moments. I have two new endearing terms to fling at my oppressors when I have been sufficiently irritated - ‘Peckerwood’ and ‘Pisswidget’!
My thanks to New Books Magazine (Nudge Books) for a copy of this book which I feel will secure a place in my top ten reads of 2020. Reader, I loved it.
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