Eleanor Catton's thriller about late capitalism gone rogue
Set between fictional locations Thorndike and Korowai National Park, with glancing side trips to Wellington and Christchurch, Birnam Wood features a plot that makes surprisingly short work of its 400-plus pages. Half the length of her Booker-winning The Luminaries, the sentence-craft of Eleanor Catton’s lesser juggernaut is lucid, not overly fancy, and studded with pleasingly contrary insight. On the second night of a binge-read, my brain woke at 3am to demand I finish the closing 30 pages. By 4am my heart was pumping, and I was shattered. Did the writer know she was going to do that when she started?
In Catton’s ecothriller, a collective of millennial guerrilla gardeners fall under the patronage of an American billionaire with psychopathic levels of charm, a bunker-building survivalist cover story, and unclear motives. A boomer couple, recently knighted as conversationists for their service to pest control (!), make the back-country land sale. (Privately Lord and Lady Darvish think the Honours List is a joke, too). None of the New Zealanders bar Tony, a hothead outcast of the titular collective, have any idea who they are getting in bed with. Thanks to an alternating set of protagonists and stream of consciousness point-of-view the reader, however, has just enough narrative privilege to enjoy worrying and fearing for them.
Early on we learn that the fly-in fly-out, 1%er has caused the catastrophic landslide and subsequent fatalities that open the story with illicit mining of rare-earth metals. Mere collateral damage, in his chilling books. Sound creepily familiar? In the time of another Tony—State Empire Building magnate Tony Malkin’s burning a hill down with his private firework display this New Year’s Eve gone on his Queenstown ‘Redemption Song’ property—it is. In Catton’s novel, the fictional billionaire’s transgressions are much, much bigger, however. Crimes of another scale.
Birnam Wood is an articulate, ironically entertaining, ultimately ferocious investigation of late capitalism personified and gone rogue. Turning its pages, you may also be tempted to read the gardeners working to create a fairer, greener human habitat as her people. They are resourceful and daringly imaginative members of the novelist’s own generation, after all. Alliances are not, however, that simple in this psychologically nuanced novel. Everyone is flawed, contradictory and driven by disruptive desires. Even the bush-bashing Tony, tracking Robert Lemoire’s covert enterprise at great personal risk, has his eye on his future journalistic byline as well as saving the planet.
The need to be dominate, to be liked, to wreak revenge, all will out with devastating consequences in Birnam Wood
Catton is a brainbox who elegantly captures contemporary arguments about intersectionality versus feminism-as-revenge, or the populist trivialisation of real social justice and survival issues as ‘identity politics’ in the back and forth of her characters. Even more compelling is the way she turns these positions in the light to reveal their underside—the primitive mechanisms that shadow our actions. The need to be dominate, to be liked, to wreak revenge, all will out with devastating consequences in Birnam Wood. And even as the reader is busily frowning on the self-interested motives of, say, the two most-likely heroes Mira Bunting and Shelley Noakes, she will catch a sidelong glimpse of herself in the mirror. Read—myself, yourself. Setting her sights on the implicit or internal politics of her characters, the private drives that belie their explicit, stated ones, Catton is at her most mordant and crafty as a writer.
Interestingly the many shades of Catton’s contemporaries on the Left are cross-examined more thoroughly than the politically complacent, landed gentry Boomer couple that provide B-character support to the plot. Why? I think Catton judges the former more interesting in their social engagement. And, in self-fulfilling prophesy, this is so. The only time my engagement faltered was crash-landing in the complacent-seeming heads of Lord and Lady Darvish in the opening of section II. It can be rude changing characters midstream. Happily, there is more to the Lady than meets the eye. Cliché as cover is, in fact, one of the novel’s express themes.
Early in Birnam Wood, on the announcement of her husband’s knighthood, the couple tell one of their jolly-hockey-sticks funnies to the local rag, Lady Darvish finishing his sentences as is their habit. Officialdom has ruined his shot by phoning with the honour just as Mr Darvish had a rabbit in his sights. From the novel:
"And bunny got away," his wife put in. "So she owes me a dollar." "The Queen?" "The Queen herself. She owes me a dollar, a carcass, and a pelt."
I found myself jotting down, "And bunny got away". With that line, I could hear her, hear the character’s tone-deaf class privilege. I always jot down weird things when I am hired to make sense of a book. Redolant phrases, clues, anything that takes my magpie fancy. In this phrase I hit gold. In a finale that is both more and less satisfying, the Lady makes sure bunny doesn’t get away. Just not the bunny you might imagine.
I found myself occasionally thinking, could you unpack less and leave more to the reader's imagination?
It’s awkward writing a glowing review of Birnam Wood. Perhaps feeling icky after a surfeit of critical hyperbole in response to her previous novels, Catton takes aim at reviewers whose praise hides a lining of intellectual laziness or failure to plumb what they really think or feel. She does so via her favourite Doubting Thomas, Shelley Noakes. Here’s Shelley idly reviewing her own varsity mag book reviews: "The stakes had never been particularly high, of course; but even so, she still felt pained sometimes when she leafed through the back issues of the magazine and saw that all her most lavishly complimentary reviews had been of books whose authors frightened her, books she never finished, or books she’d been too cowardly to admit she didn’t understand."
Praise can glide over or gild any amount of unformulated discomfort or disbelief. And if you are the kind of person who has resorted to the former in the service of the latter, you may feel busted. I did. Full confession, I didn’t read The Luminaries. It didn’t attract me, and I found the dialogue and interior narration of the characters in her first book The Rehearsal several shades too arch. In Birnam Wood the novelist explicitly and implicitly challenges our failure to engage, to talk back, to work at the work of being intellectually honest. Reading it, you glean that Catton is a great believer in work, in its beauties, and she doesn’t disappoint in this regard. She’s a dazzling worker as a writer. Tireless, rigorous, clever. And I think she would recognise that compliment for what it is. In the socialist economy, worker is the core value, after all. Except when it is not, and the economy is corrupt. In case you didn’t get the importance of Shelley’s challenge, Catton repeats the recipe for intellectual cowardice twice in as many paragraphs as she is wont to do. If there is any criticism to be made it is that the novelist can be prolix in her analytic reiterations. I found myself occasionally thinking, could you unpack less and leave more to this reader’s irritable imagination?
Occasionally Birnam Wood also reads like a how-to-manual for climate activists and other creative insurrectionists. But in a good way. There are trenchant procedurals on how to sartorially outwit infrared camera-fitted drones or make a splint for your broken ankle out of a plastic barbecue lighter and the arch of a busted boot, reserving the bootlace for a sling, whilst evading pursuit by a psychopath in dense bushland. Handy, you say? Absolutely.
This wonderful specificity reminded me of the Christchurch woman who survived abduction by a violent husband, followed by weeks lost eluding him in dry high country by sucking on pebbles for moisture. Just something she had learned from watching westerns on Sunday afternoon TV, she told the national press. I found this salutary as a young woman growing up in the 1980s who less by choice than by dearth of choice was watching those same westerns on the one national broadcast channel. It showed me how germane stories were to our survival, literally. Even Westerns. How different we were then from the protagonists of Birnam Wood enmeshed or enmeshing, captured or capturing via a digital surveillance web of terrifying post-Orwellian proportions.
One last thing. Straining to avoid spoilers, I will say that the finale reminded me of a Hollywood script doctor I once encountered. "Murder is not the thing. It is the murderer’s decision to commit it," he said. Meaning the drama is in the latter not the former as we more usually imagine. Catton enacts this canny tenet to the letter. Her decision to give us access to the climactic decision-making but not the decisive act itself is suspenseful—and frustrating. In Birnam Wood’s unfolding climax, writer protects reader from gratuitous voyeurism. The cost is a brutal severing of some key reader-narrator attachments. Shockingly abrupt. In compensation, the novelist cashes in one of the novel’s most powerful stock-in-trades and takes an alternative route via an unexpected change of point-of-view. In doing so, she brings a strategically underestimated support character (female, of course) to the brief and blazing fore, thumbing her nose at genre cliché as she does so.
What is most stark about the end, however, is that despite its vituperative view of market forces and those that wield them, hope for the opposition is not something that Catton ultimately entertains despite some cosying up along the way. Why? Shakespeare first authored the Birnam Wood image in a forest that moved toward Macbeth as a camouflaged army come to enact the prophesy of the murderer king’s death. A magical moving wood, then, just as cultivated in junkyard and by railway siding, the guerrilla-gardeners’ plots are roving and on-the-fly. “Te Māra Neke”, the moving garden, Shelley proposes by way of salient name change (and is ignored). With this Birnam Wood, Catton is making the point that failure is less about might or resources, the loaded dice of extreme wealth and technological recourse, than you might think and more about fatal flaws in the way we know ourselves. Very Shakespearean. She doesn’t take prisoners either. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $40) is in every single bookstore in New Zealand. As the biggest literary event in New Zealand for a long, long time, the only sane response to it is to go completely overboard, and so ReadingRoom is devoting four reviews to Catton's long-awaited follow-up to The Luminaries. Thursday: Rachael King, who loved it. Yesterday: Steve Braunias, who sort of loved it up to a point. Tomorrow, to conclude the series, is Dunedin writer David Eggleton, who has won the book reviewer of the year award more than anyone in NZ literature.
