70 pages • 2 hours read
Michael ChristieGreenwood
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Fate’s Influence on Nature Versus Nurture
Greenwood explores the relationship between nature, nurture, and fate. In the earliest chronological narrative, Harris and Everett Greenwood are equalized by the train accident that turns them into adoptive brothers. The unnamed town that raises them determines that of the two boys, Harris is more deserving of an education because of his entrepreneurial spirit. The split in their upbringing establishes a dichotomy between nature and nurture. Harris, because of his natural aptitude, is seen as the better child to nurture. Everett, on the other hand, is left to his own devices, representing the unmediated effects of nature. However, this divide alone does not shape the characters’ narratives—luck, too, interacts with nature and nurture, forcing characters to adhere to their true natures when faced with unexpected fates.
Faced with misfortune, Harris nonetheless achieves financial success due to his brother’s generous nature, illustrating how external factors shape an individual’s narrative. Though fortunate in his early education, Harris’s life is forever altered when he loses his eyesight the week before his deployment in the First World War, he loses his eyesight; blindness would virtually guarantee his death on the frontlines. Everett takes the opportunity to save his brother by going to war in his place. This decision leaves Everett struggling with shell shock, now considered a type of post-traumatic stress disorder, while his brother finds success as a lumber tycoon in the process. Harris’s entrepreneurial success is therefore due not only to his innate competitive nature and the town’s decision to nurture him through education but also to both misfortune and his brother’s love. Reflecting the nuanced nature of his success, Harris remains the town’s well-to-do son, but he takes on an ornery and materialistic character. Everett, on the other hand, displays compassion toward the young Willow, which grows into parental love. As the townspeople admit with regard to Harris and Everett, “[I]t could’ve gone either way” (252), suggesting the outsized influence of chance on the brothers’ lives. Harris’s betrayal of his brother reveals that fate's impact can overshadow both nature and nurture, highlighting how unforeseen events and circumstances can fundamentally alter an individual's path and character.
As Harris gives in to his ambition and self-interest, other characters find themselves rejecting their upbringing and obeying their better natures when confronted with fate. Because of her father’s absence, Jake has always rejected her link to the Greenwood legacy, looking to move beyond the family in which she was nurtured to build a future that better aligns with her nature. When Silas tells her that she may be entitled to a fortune, he stresses that it is because she isn’t a Greenwood, indicating that multiple twists of fate led to her current position—fate both placed her in the Greenwood family and brought her to work on the island to which she has a material claim. In deciding how to approach her newfound circumstances, Jake leans on her nature, making an environmentally-focused decision even though it puts her job at risk. Similarly, Willow decides that it would run against her nature to assume the material wealth and the lifestyle in which she had been raised. To live according to her truest self, she donates her inheritance to environmentalist organizations. Both Jake and Willow, then, rebel against the environment in which they were nurtured, leaning on their inner natures to guide their actions when faced with fate’s surprises.
The True Value of Family Legacies
At the end of Greenwood, Christie revises the conventional metaphor of the family tree by comparing families to forests. In the same way that separate trees work together to sustain one another, Christie stresses that families are often found among disparate individuals. They perform acts of love that are as invisible as the bonds that tie their collective together. Viewed from this lens, legacy depends less on one’s ability to pass on material wealth and more on the hopes and dreams families collectively espouse for the people they love.
Greenwood literalizes the idea of “found family,” suggesting that family is rooted as much in intention and even circumstance as it is in biology. Everett and Harris become adoptive brothers by virtue of having been found together after a train accident. Similarly, the novel’s inciting incident is Everett’s discovery of a baby abandoned in the woods. Though he initially wants to discard the baby, he grows attached to her, and he decides that the baby would be better off with him than with her biological father, R.J. Holt. The more he spends time with the baby, the stronger his attachment becomes, eventually resembling that of a parent: He feeds her, names her, and imagines her future. The inevitability of his arrest forces him to hide Pod away, entrusting her to Harris. This last act mirrors Euphemia Baxter’s decision to hide the baby in the forest, entrusting her to the man she sees in the woods, Everett; that this act is performed by both biological mother and unofficial adoptive father suggests that Everett, too, has become part of Euphemia’s legacy, replicating and extending her original act of love for the baby. Similarly, generations later, Jake considers how she can pass on her own values not just to the child she may be carrying but to the scavenger child she comes across upon her return to the mainland. For the Greenwoods, then, the act of becoming a family, whether through birth, accident, or discovery, is one that alters all parties involved, leading to a multidirectional exchange of values that becomes its own legacy.
While future Greenwoods participate, often unknowingly, in this values-based legacy that emerged from Euphemia’s decision to hide her daughter, they have more complicated interpersonal relationships with their forebears and their material legacies. Willow grows up resentful of Harris and his material legacy, which causes their estrangement up to the point of his death. She is surprised to learn that Harris has named her the primary beneficiary of his will, but she decides that she would rather live her life living true to her beliefs. Her decision to give up her father’s wealth, as well as the island, is not done out of spite but out of hope for the values she hopes to pass on to her son, Liam. The pattern of her life repeats itself when Liam grows up resenting Willow, but he starts to reconcile with her after meeting Everett and Temple, likewise unaware of the things they did to ensure Willow’s survival as an infant. The cycle recurs once more when Jake grows up believing that her father abandoned her. She shirks her relation to the Greenwood family and is largely unaware of how Liam spent his last moments, entrusting his meager inheritance to her as a sign of hope that he could make things right with her in the end. While material wealth and inheritance in the novel often mark difficult family relationships for the Greenwoods, shared hope and values bind them together across generations. Their true family legacy is found not in biological ties or financial assets but in their collective commitment to ushering their values forward into a new future.
Humanity’s Interdependent Relationship with the Environment
Though Greenwood tracks a speculative future in which climate change has wiped out many of the world’s forests, the novel goes beyond a simple appeal for environmental preservation. Instead, the narrative acknowledges both trees’ intrinsic value and humanity’s material needs for the resources trees provide. Ultimately, Greenwood suggests that trees similarly depend on humanity to survive, making humankind’s relationship with the environment more interdependent than symbiotic.
Harris’s, Everett’s, Liam’s, and Jake’s livelihoods are all dependent in some way upon trees, serving as a point of connection for the Greenwood family across generations. For Liam, this connection is explicit: He is inspired to enter a career in carpentry after meeting his great-uncle, Everett. His mother, Willow, a staunch environmentalist who engages in direct action against logging companies, takes this as an act of rebellion against her. She doesn’t realize, however, that his inspiration comes from seeing how Everett treats wood with care and respect. Everett’s deep relationship with the trees is also inextricably linked to a familial bond: His relationship with his brother emerged as a result of the time they spent in the woodlot where they were raised. As an adult, Everett taps maple trees to harvest their sap and sell maple syrup. When he meets Temple Van Horne, he leverages his knowledge of maple trees to convince her to let him and Pod stay on her farm. The time he spends planting the saplings with her becomes the cornerstone of their relationship, and the trees remain untouched until Temple’s death. Everett introduces Liam to the world of carpentry when he teaches him to build a coffin for Temple. The impact of this first lesson lasts well throughout Liam’s career as Willow eventually acknowledges that he transforms the wood into beautiful and useful things, honoring the trees’ sacrifice.
Just as the characters rely on the trees to help them survive, the trees depend on them in return, as evidenced by Jake’s narrative. Jake is convinced that the only way to save the forest on Greenwood Island is to cut down its sick trees, including its oldest and tallest fir, God’s Middle Finger. Jake’s boss, Davidoff, needs the trees to survive to sustain his career as long as he can, suggesting that he does not care for the sickness that threatens their existence. Jake takes matters into her own hands to ensure the forest’s survival, which the trees seem to acknowledge by spreading their pollen as she leaves. The trees’ sickness, a result of a lack of care for the environment, can only be resolved through human intervention, indicating the extent to which their survival necessitates an interdependent relationship between humanity and the environment.
