Eleanor Catton's new novel Birnam Wood is a gripping literary eco-thriller. Photo / Ebony Lamb
Eleanor Catton's new novel Birnam Wood is a gripping literary eco-thriller. Photo / Ebony Lamb
Birnam Wood
by Eleanor Catton
(Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38)
Reviewed by Kiran Dass
Eleanor Catton made history in 2013 when, aged 28, she became the then-youngest winner of the Booker Prize for her bracingly original novel The Luminaries. Ten years later comes her third book, the hotly anticipatedBirnam Wood, which firmly reinforces her place as a remarkable and singular talent who has now written three strikingly different yet each meticulously crafted novels. Birnam Wood is a gripping literary eco-thriller.
Founded by the seditious and independent-minded Mira Bunting, the daughter of former hippies, Birnam Wood is on the surface an apolitical grassroots community initiative whose members plant sustainable organic gardens to foster a commitment to helping those in need. Abandoned parks, neglected roadsides and hidden liminal spaces are home to their sometimes illegally cultivated crops. They muddle along, barely breaking even. In reality, it’s an internally bickering, activist guerrilla gardening collective divided into two factions: the ideologues who are combative and self-conscious, and the reliably hardworking do-gooders.
Mira’s offsider is the simpatico Shelley, a peace-maker with an innate gift for service. The two share a love of John Wyndham and Ursula Le Guin but Shelley has become weary. While Birnam Wood remains a non-profit and direct-action group focused on botanical vandalism in a rejection of boomer’s capitalism, Shelley recognises that it is heading in an increasingly more business-driven “bureaucratic” direction.
When Mira is out covertly scoping land for a planting mission in fictional South Canterbury town, Thorndike, she has an encounter with slick American serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist tech billionaire Robert Lemoine, eyeing up land owned by Sir Owen Darvish.
Sir Owen has recently been knighted for services to conservation ( but is actually ambivalent about environmental concerns and was simply in the pest control trade). Co-founder of drone manufacturer Autonomo, Robert is in Aotearoa under the guise of securing an end-of-times bolthole at the bottom of the world, but his true intentions are far more malevolent and destructive. Robert is a glossy poster boy for late capitalism and all of its exploitative evils. An Ayn Randian status-symbol survivalist, he sees every crisis as an opportunity. After Thorndike became isolated after a landslide, Robert instantly browsed property listings in the area. He hedges his bets against global catastrophes while never using his position of wealth and power for prevention or aid. When Mira accepts Robert’s loaded and manipulative offer of funding the Birnam Wood collective, Shakespearean dynamics come into play. Fair is foul, and foul is fair. From the push-pull of plants versus power, false hope, and a clenched dauntlessness emerges a murky morality.
Catton’s writing is always poised and polished, and with Birnam Wood she has carefully crafted a nuanced psychological thriller, deftly pulling together multiple threads for a majestically adrenalised pacey epic that is taut and chilling. While this is a pacey page-turner, it is multi-dimensional, with intelligence gleaming on every page. And it’s also bitingly funny.
Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton
With his judiciousness and clemency, Tony Gallos - a former flash flame of Mira’s - is a great character. Anxious to not be seen as just another white middle-class male Marxist intellectual, he’s an aspiring journalist who wants to get into long-form investigative writing, “not that personal essay travelogue s***”. Catton is brilliant at characterisation. Tony’s felt overlooked all his life and wants to write a searing indictment of the super-rich. “I’m going to be so f***ing famous,” he says to himself. Catton has a finely tuned ear for convincing dialogue, and the inner world of each character is vividly evoked. As is a strong sense of place and world-building. The Korowai ranges here “glow peach and ochre” with mauve and violet shadows. Each setting is described with a careful attention to detail that puts the reader right there.
With Birnam Wood, Catton has hit that sweet spot between smart but accessible and it’s easy to imagine it being adapted for the big screen. And like an action thriller you’d see in a cinema, it accelerates towards a blockbusting conclusion, leaving the reader’s head spinning.
