Read This: Greener Than Eden
Fiction by Michael Kohn (Cormorant Books)
REVIEW BY Holland Gidney
Blackflies. Tedium. Remote locations. Tree-planting might not appeal as a summer job, but it proves a fertile subject for Michael Kohn, who’s harvested a quintessentially Canadian Bildungsroman from his own six summers in the bush.
Twentysomething Noah Abramson is a recently arrested eco-activist university student who finds himself learning the ropes of this physically demanding job alongside other misfits and rebels in Northern Ontario. An experienced planter tells Noah the key to becoming a “highballer” and cracking 4,000 trees a day is in finding your own rhythm; the same advice applies equally to storytelling. Like any “green” planter, Kohn, a first-time novelist, takes a while to get up to speed. Nothing much happens for the first 100 pages, and then the boy-meets-girl storyline is fairly predictable.
That said, his poetic descriptions capture wonderfully the logged landscapes where Noah’s crew does its reforestation work, and even the most urban reader will become aware of the Zen aspect of replanting forests by hand: “And so we continue our crazed dance across the sphagnum, the hours blurring by with bag-outs, as if in the cycle of our motions we’ve lost every split second between action and perception, being and seeing.”
Tree-planting is jargon-heavy, and with words like “greener,” “lowballer,” “scuzpile,” “cream block,” “smeg” and “crummies,” Greener Than Eden serves as a lexicon for potential planters, though Kohn’s descriptions of the gruelling work and inevitable personality clashes may convince even the most committed to reconsider their plans before ever using such expressions.
