“Barkskins”

Annie Proulx

Scribner, $32

Like the Lorax, Annie Proulx speaks for the trees. Her new novel, “Barkskins,” is a clamorous epic of environmental despoliation. It plays out across 717 pages and more than 300 years, from the arrival of woodcutting French settlers in Canada in 1693 through an eyewitness account of melting glaciers in 2013.

In between, there is clear-cutting and more clear-cutting, with the occasional sidebar about eating or scheming or killing or rutting. This is a jeremiad about the loss of North America’s “monstrous pine finery,” in the author’s resonant phrase, and thus its weird, old pagan soul.

“Barkskins” — the title refers to woodcutters — is a Baedeker of doom. Characters die from cholera and measles and smallpox, from shipwrecks and scalpings and botched amputations and occult tortures. More often, they perish in grisly logging mishaps.

Proulx is adept at this culling. She has a lesser knack for first bringing her men and women to life. In “Barkskins,” Proulx favors “characters” rather than character.

Proulx’s many readers will note, too, how often logging leads her characters to take to the sea. “Barkskins” can be read, to some degree, as a many-angled precursor to the author’s novel, “The Shipping News” (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

“Barkskins” begins when two penniless Frenchmen, Charles Duquet and René Sel, arrive in Canada as indentured servants. Duquet soon manages to escape. He changes his surname to Duke, and a logging dynasty is born.

Sel doesn’t escape. He is forced to marry an older woman, a native of the Mi’kmaw tribe. We follow the Dukes and the Sels across many generations.

The larger story “Barkskins” has to tell is about arrogant white Christian men coming to subdue the “evil” wilderness, raping the land and culturally annihilating the Native Americans as they march along.

It is possible to utterly share Proulx’s environmental views while noting how this book’s homilies fall, like a succession of cut trees, into your path. From the start, trees shiver and inhale and help humans heal. Lives are filled with “leafy meaning.”

A character who is something of a stand-in for the author says: “I am sure that wild natural woodlands are the only true forests. The entire atmosphere — the surrounding air, the intertwined roots, the humble ferns and lichens, insects and diseases, the soil and water, weather. All these parts seem to play together in a kind of wild grand orchestra.”

Op-ed sound bites like this one light the way toward this novel’s truly abysmal ending, in which a modern scientist solemnly warns about global warming — “a great crisis is just ahead” — and a woman wants to cry out, “The forests, the trees, they can change everything!” You feel your synapses, as did the forests, turn to pulp.