Our fourth and final review of Birnam Wood Eleanor Catton's new novel Birnam Wood is an eco-thriller that begins as it means to go on, launching its disaster-capitalism narrative with a spectacular action-packed sentence that must be amongst the most memorable opening lines in the sedate subdivision that is New Zealand literature: ""The Korowai Pass had been closed since the end of the summer, when a spate of shallow earthquakes triggered a landslide that buried a stretch of the highway in rubble, killing five, and sending a long-haul transport truck over a precipice where it skimmed a power line, ploughed a channel down the mountainside, and then exploded on a viaduct below."
You might be tempted to call her book a potboiler, but actually it's a kind of cautionary-moral-tract of a chassis, welded to a racing-car engine of a plot, that zooms towards a bloody denouement and a pile-up of bodies in high satirical style. And while her characters are mostly richly nuanced, subjected to the author's forensic gaze, it's also fascinating to see how seamlessly and relentlessly she maps a Lee Child crime-novel pastiche onto New Zealand's cultural topography. In a world where Bob Dylan protest lyrics have been co-opted for corporate cosplay team-bonding exercises by a tech-bro edgelord, who you gonna call? Go ahead, dial ghostbuster Eleanor Catton; she knows where the bodies are buried. And the deeper you drill, the more you uncover.
While seemingly quite different to her previous two outings as a novelist, The Rehearsal and The Luminaries, there are a number of echoes and correspondences. As in The Rehearsal, the novelist plays with scenarios like a poker cardsharp, shuffling deceptions, misdirections and points of view. And in The Luminaries colonial frontier desperadoes are caught up in the West Coast gold rush; while in Birnam Wood the extractive industry at the centre of dubious dealings by an American corporation requires "leaching rare-earth elements in situ" on conservation land, namely "Korowai National Park", a location that's a "five-hour car journey" from Christchurch. This motherlode of minerals once mined, we learn, are worth "a trillion dollars" and destined to be used for "batteries and satellites and cameras and GPS".
In climate-crisis fiction, we're all implicated by our actions, our purchases, our choices. Birnam Wood is set in 2017, right in the middle of the age of outrage, the age of terror, the age of constant surveillance. 'Birnam Wood' is the collective name for a group of righteous eco-activists, millennials constantly squabbling amongst themselves but seeking to make a political statement about environmental sustainability. As their spokesperson Mira Bunting puts it, they "plant things on other people's properties without them knowing ... and then harvest the produce at the end".
So far, so harmless, so very Kiwi. Enter the North American billionaire Robert Lemoine, touting himself as a doomsday prepper in search of a bolthole. In short, Lemoine is one of those blow-in billionaires queuing up wanting to construct an apocalypse-ready bunker in the South Island high country, or so he tells Sir Owen Darvish, as he seeks to purchase the Darvish farm which borders Korowai National Park.
Lemoine, a venture capitalist, founded an aviation technology company called Autonomo, specialising in surveillance drones. His superpower, then, is ubiquitous surveillance. He's always accompanied by a shadowy, near-invisible factotum, his bodyguard, adding to his creepiness as an ultra-high-net-worth individual. An alpha male with a knack for twisted mind games that wrong-foot opponents, he looms over the Lilliput that is New Zealand like a malign version of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver: "Sir Owen Darvish had never felt more acutely conscious of his nationality than he did when he was with Lemoine, and in the brief time that he had known the billionaire he had experienced two quite different forms of patriotic feeling. He was intensely proud of their association, and felt he had fulfilled a lofty duty to his country, not just in having courted foreign wealth, but in proving – in being proof – that New Zealanders could hold their own among the world’s elite ... "
Encountering Mira Bunting nosing around the Darvish farm as a possible outpost for her clandestine gardening group, Lemoine offers to fund Birnam Wood, planning to use the collective as a decoy for his own nefarious purposes, greenwashing as it were the environmental damage he's secretly wreaking on the landscape.
Tracking software gives him his edge. He has for example the power to alter the future at a micro-level by re-setting date stamps on electronic communications, and Mira is oblivious to the fact that he is monitoring her phone in real-time all the time. Nowadays, of course, everyone seems to be conducting surveillance on everyone else, if not quite stalking them, then certainly Googling anyone of interest. Lemoine's data-capture is several orders of magnitude above that.
Catton is an extraordinarily concise writer, an almost epigrammatic writer; her writing instrument is a kind of scalpel, paring away layers and establishing distinctions neatly and sharply between characters as she probes their motivations and reveals their thoughts. With Lemoine, she has taken the stereotypical 'bad' billionaire and given him a plausible backstory, flushing him from his fortress of solitude and granting us access to aspects of his childhood, growing up as part of a US military family.
Partly, he's modelled on Peter Thiel, the German-born smiling contrarian with pearly white fangs and a sense of privilege that's off the scale. Chronologically belonging to the demographic known as Generation X, Lemoine's actions show him to be a technopath, a toxic vampire, a conjuror at large. He wants to be the master of revels; he's a Macbeth who dreams of being a Shakespeare. In fact, his seraphic smile is Luciferian as he moves in on Mira and then in on Shelley Noakes, Mira's associate and friend, to establish and manipulate a relationship triangle that counterpoints another relationship triangle between Mira, Shelley and Tony Gallo, a disaffected member of the millennial gardening collective who has gone bush as an investigative journalist, intent on discovering what Lemoine is really up to.
Tony, brought up in a strict Catholic family and given to hyper-articulate moralising, becomes Birnam Wood's heretical antagonist and Lemoine's nemesis, protesting to the collective: "The billionaire class undermines solidarity by its very existence; it’s fundamentally unsustainable, it’s regressive, and it’s unjust. Citizenship should not be able to be bought and sold. Protest action should not be able to be commissioned."
And so, the novel turns to questions of power, class, money and gender. The members of Birnam Wood are mostly university graduates and precariat by choice, taking a break from their real jobs as budding stalwarts of the middle-classes and doing it the hard way, in terms of "struggling every day to get our message out". The intensity of their idealism provides a kind of inner glow, in their own eyes at least, but as the novel progresses so do the character flaws of these do-gooders, wreathed in their beatific smiles.
Ultimately, curdled idealism is everywhere: Birnam Wood itself might be emblematic of downsized liberation movements of the 60a and 70s, absorbed into the ethos of wealth and power and privilege. But while Kiwi baby-boomers are mocked for their pretentions, so are too millennials, who are simultaneously self-flagellating martyrs and calculating schemers.
You could also say there's a preachy, muttery subtext going on in the way Catton's intergenerational types perform their polemical diatribes, putting down those outside their identifying group and applying petty snobberies. Catton does a fine line in invective and one of her particular targets is what she identifies as New Zealand's platitudinous and smug complacencies, as uttered by right-wingers anxious to get Lemoine to back their projected new media platform. But other accepted orthodoxies, too, are turned into antagonisms and come in for a tongue-lashing. To Tony, the contemporary feminist left "seemed to have abandoned the worthy goal of equality between the sexes in pursuit of either naked self-interest or revenge".
Catton grabs the zeitgeist by the tail and rides that tiger. If she is scathing about her characters, we might find ourselves reflected in them, while they get their comeuppance. We are all mired in the reveals of ever-accelerating technology and the way it plays on our virtues and vices, so that we find ourselves 'performing', even as we denounce or celebrate one another. Pointedly, Catton has set her novel at the end of the John Key years as Prime Minister. These, then, are the legacies of neo-liberalism, granting billionaires deity-like status as omnipotent, apocalypse-a-go-go hipsters, maxing their profit margins and minimising their ethical responsibilities, even as events unfold to confirm their gleeful cartoon-like view of the world as there for exploiting.
Catton asks the question, what is the good global citizen when corruption and complicity are bedfellows in the form of self-interested nihilist and self-satisfied do-gooder? Here, New Zealand is her test-case and laboratory. The wild is totally overrun and "crawling with drones", so there is no wild, just territory to be monetised, while indigeneity is minimalised. We pay lip-service to the sublime, while we estimate how much it is worth in American dollars when loaded up in containers, ready to be shipped out at the port of Lyttelton. 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; today's review by David Eggleton marks the fourth and final in a series these past four days by Rachael King (who loved it), Steve Braunias (sort of loved it up to a point), and Miro Bilbrough (admired it while remaining shattered at the ending).
