Crisis Extraordinariness : Vibrant Relations in Michael Christie’s Greenwood

This article draws on Lauren Berlant’s work to explore the notion of crisis and the critical nature of relations in Michael Christie’s novel Greenwood. I use Berlant’s approach broadly, transcending their specific temporal framework and reading their ideas alongside other theories in the fields of settler colonialism, affect, and ecology. I argue that settler and extractive colonialisms operate in tandem in the novel, installing a critical continuum that permeates the narrative and is often mediated through affective structures. The characters are entangled with one another in a kind of narrative relay that structures the novel’s multitemporal framework, fluctuating between the exceptionality of crisis and its ordinariness. I further claim that underneath this complex structure of interconnections, Christie highlights the power of the relations between human and non-human beings as well as the extraordinary potential of literature to articulate those relationships, echoing Berlant, in terms of intimacy and reciprocity.