It’s 2038. The World Is Dust and Forests Are Scarce.

GREENWOOD
By Michael Christie

Imagine that you’re a humble woodland guide, working for pitiful wages at an island resort northwest of Vancouver, British Columbia. The year is 2038, and Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral, as it’s called, is home to “one of the last remaining old-growth forests on Earth.”

Most of the world has succumbed to dust storms and “rib retch” (a new strain of tuberculosis) following a “Great Withering” from spreading “fungal blights and insect infestations.” So while you may be family-less, somewhat alcoholic and so mired in student debt that you can’t afford an internet connection, you’re well aware that there are worse things than living and working on Greenwood Island, a destination rich folks pay exorbitant sums to visit.

Then along comes a dubious ex-boyfriend, a lawyer, who tells you that you may actually own the island.

That’s the setup for the Canadian writer Michael Christie’s new novel, “Greenwood,” a time-hopping, globe-circling picaresque with apocalyptic themes. Its structure mirrors the cross section of a felled tree, with its outermost rings of narrative taking place 18 years in the future and its innermost chapter going all the way back to 1908. Its many twists and turns are implicitly summed up in a line that comes halfway through the book: “People aren’t always themselves.”

By the end of the novel, those four words look like a ridiculous understatement.

Jacinda “Jake” Greenwood, the engagingly skeptical heroine of Christie’s opening and closing chapters, is a forest guide (the only work she can get, despite holding advanced degrees in botany) who thinks she sees signs that the Great Withering has reached Greenwood Island. The value of old-growth forest is an article of faith for her. She believes that “even the impenetrable mysteries of time and family and death can be solved if only they are viewed through the green-tinted lens of this one gloriously complex organism.” She’ll do anything to save it.

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In this, she has a lot in common with her eco-activist grandmother, Willow, although she knows almost nothing about her. For the young Willow of the 1970s, the name Greenwood is “a shorthand for rapacious greed,” and her timber-magnate father, Harris, is the culprit who has been “chewing up the natural world and selling the spoils at great profit.” But even Willow can’t fathom the extent to which the Greenwood clan is “a house built of secrets, layers upon layers of them.”

As Christie touches down in 2008, 1974, 1934 and 1908, Greenwood bloodlines take increasingly confounding turns against the broad backdrop of a world being looted for its natural resources. The author broaches every kind of human valor, villainy and vulnerability: drug addiction, forbidden desires and laudable do-gooding, among others. He commands attention not through conservationist pieties but with the way his forest-killers and tree-loving zealots are equally off-kilter and contradiction-filled.

Christie’s description can be superb, whether he’s conjuring clear-cut devastation (“a black peppering of stumps arranged like seats in a coliseum”) or Depression-era Toronto (“where souls wander and collapse, damned either by something they’ve done or by something they’re unable to do”). His look ahead to the late 2030s is gloomily wry. It’s a world where the Canadian prime minister is “widely regarded as the most powerful human being on the planet” and resource-rich Canada itself has become “the global elite’s panic room.”

Christie can be over-obvious in setting up his end-of-chapter cliffhangers or drawing human/arboreal parallels (“Lomax reminds me of a tree that’s been sawn right through and still won’t fall”). But there are plenty of visionary moments laced into his shape-shifting narrative. “This tree,” it occurs to Jake at one point, “is older than the language I’m thinking in.”

Even the book’s most ruthless old-growth exploiter has his moments of epiphany — for instance, when he confides to his lover, “It’s strange, isn’t it … how one only needs to purchase the land on which such a thing is rooted, before one is permitted to destroy it forever?”

Contemplating the way generations experience the passage of time, Christie writes: “It simply accumulates — in the body, in the world — like wood does. Layer upon layer. … Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure.”

In passages like that, “Greenwood” penetrates to the core of things — or, as Christie puts it, the “heartwood.”