Eleanor Catton. Ten years since her Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is out. Photo / Ebony Lamb
Eleanor Catton, global literary star and winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Luminaries, talks with Kirsten McDougall about online misogyny, social media, morality and her hugely anticipated new novel, Birnam Wood.
In 2013 I was the new publicist at VUP when Eleanor Catton’s second novel, The Luminaries, won the much-coveted Man Booker Prize for Fiction. The prize made her a global star writer and for the next two years I was her glorified New Zealand bouncer, fielding endless requests. Many books were sold, many media stories were written. Writers might dream of this sort of success but be under no illusion, with it comes enormous pressure. We both learned a lot about our respective ends of the business very quickly.
I no longer work in publishing, so it was an immediate yes when I was offered an interview with Catton, now based in Cambridge, UK, and an advance copy of her much-anticipated third novel, Birnam Wood. I’d heard talk of the book being in the style of Lee Child, and that rumour doesn’t disappoint. Birnam Wood has such pace and tension that halfway through I skipped to the final page to see what happened, so great was the pressure that was building.
Don’t let the title fool you. While it is taken from Macbeth and the ending has elements of a Shakespearean tragedy, Catton is firm about it not being an adaptation.
“I wanted it to be inspired by Macbeth in that any one of the main characters could be Macbeth but none of them would think that they were. Each character has got a Lady Macbeth by their side, and each one of them has a Birnam Wood, a blind spot.”
As we speak, I’m reminded how whip-sharp and fun Catton is. It would never occur to me to call Karl Marx deceptive, as she does at one point in our conversation, but my favourite people are the ones who go straight to the big ideas. You can ask her things like: Does evil exist? What is morality? You can also ask her: Who is the coolest famous person you’ve ever met? (“Frances McDormand, I don’t even need to think about it.”) She’ll answer your questions with grace and smarts to spare.
But even for someone with her formidable intellect, speaking publicly can be a difficult task. She says she’s still learning how to speak in a world where everything is permanently attributable. Having been quoted many times since 2013 has made her realise how she thinks.
“I often say things that I don’t quite mean. I catch myself and I figure out what I mean because I’ve made a mistake, and obviously that’s very dangerous when you’re on the record.”
I watched her retreat from that record. Most of the time a book publicist works very hard to get their authors any possible media coverage they can. My job with Catton was to mostly say no, in the most gracious way possible. But every time she spoke at a festival, media reported it as a story anyway.
At a 2015 book event in Taipei, I happened to sit behind a journalist who had a sentence waiting on his laptop that read: “If Ellie says anything ...” This “anything” referred to a comment Catton had made a few weeks earlier at a festival in India, criticising the National-led government as being neo-liberal, shallow, with no interest in culture. A number of people got their noses very out-of-joint, including then-Prime Minister, John Key. How we cackled when he called Catton a “fictional writer”. The general outraged gist was – how dare a famous New Zealander criticise New Zealand! When Taika Waititi criticised New Zealand as being “racist as f***” a few years later, he also made headlines, but I wonder if he got less crap for it, being a man. The response to Catton had a definite misogynist flavour of “just who does this young woman think she is?”
Online misogyny has only increased since then. Catton says it sickens her to see some of the behaviour and believes that it’s a result of zero-sum thinking.
“I think it’s responsible for a lot of the hatred that is stoked online, particularly against women. It seems taken for granted these days that for every winner, there must be a loser – or a lot of losers – which stokes immense resentment against the people we perceive as having won. I think it’s significant that you don’t really see such zero-sum situations in nature. If a tree grows, it doesn’t mean that some other living thing has to die – in fact, the opposite: by growing, the tree will create all sorts of interesting new possibilities for growth in other living things, and while the plants around it might have to compete for sunlight or for water in the ground, that competition happens over time, so there’s plenty of scope for mutual adaptation – essentially, for conversation. We could learn from that model. I wish we would.”
I ask her if she’s nervous releasing a new book into such an environment and she says yes.
“But I stand by the book, and that gives me some courage.”
The Booker win and its accompanying attention forced her to put a fence around her private life. She gave up social media. In a world where celebrities and their aspirants are expected to make thrice weekly Insta updates advertising their latest “outputs”, an author without a social media profile is rare.
“Maybe in 2017, I decided to start treating social media like an addict treats their addiction. I made a pledge that I was not going to google myself ever and every year that passed I could say that I’d been sober for that long. It’s been about six years now, so I think I can say that’s been very necessary for my mental health. I don’t cheat either. I don’t have a periscope account on Twitter. I’ve never missed it also. I think they’re really poisonous environments.”
She’s aware enough to know that it’s a privilege in a world where many of us are expected, at the very least, to have a LinkedIn account for work.
“I was able to make that choice, I had a significant public profile. So I don’t feel snobby about other people using it. For me, it’s not a place where I can be happy.”
Our conversation naturally turns to the internet because much of the plot of Birnam Wood is woven around the sticky web of constant surveillance the internet has cast, as well as the environmental degradation caused by the mining of rare earth minerals needed to fuel our bottomless appetite for technology. The level of surveillance various characters use in the book made me feel paranoid.
“I wanted to be faithful to the degree to which technology saturates our lives; we’re conducting surveillance through our devices.”
She says she had a moment early on where one of her UK editors questioned the capability of some of the technology in the book.
“They said, ‘I think this is a little bit too sci-fi, do you think we should rope this back a little bit?’ And I wrote back and I said that it was very important to me to not use anything technological in the book that isn’t completely and utterly possible; those kinds of attacks happen all the time.”
She laughs and suggests that the research she did around surveillance has probably landed her on a list somewhere.
“When you write a book like this, all your Google searches are full of keywords.”
Writing Birnam Wood, she says, has also left her very much against algorithms. She gives the example of streaming services being incapable of offering up interesting film choices for her to watch, despite having data on what her “fairly predictable” film preferences are.
“It’s pushing you away from a more open-minded version of who you could be because it’s showing you things that are similar to what you’ve seen before, but maybe that’s not what you’re in the mood for; you might be wanting to move away from that. What’s interesting to you at age 25 shouldn’t be what’s interesting to you at 35.”
It’s 10 years since The Luminaries was published, which is a long stretch for an author. There were three years of touring the world talking about the book to large audiences. It all sounds very glamourous, but I attended a few of these events with her and it gets tiring ... all that smiling.
One event I attended with her was at a vineyard with investment bankers, people who worked for the Man Group, who then sponsored the Booker Prize. I remember very little of the meal apart from the bankers not being fond of a previous Booker winner, who had taken them to task for their hyper-capitalist ventures. Imagine! The cheek of an author biting the hand that feeds them. I wondered if any of them had read The Luminaries, which charts a 19th-century version of venture capitalism, goldmining. The novel leaves you in no doubt, this lust we have for gold is dangerous.
Birnam Wood comes down just as hard on our own late-stage capitalism. Catton is very clear on what she thinks about it.
“It rewards sociopaths and sociopathic behaviours, and we revere them in our culture, we’re obsessed. The idea that altruism could inspire that kind of fascination is almost funny. We tend to treat altruism as though it’s a lie, it’s suspect. We’re like – come on, tell me the whole story. Whereas sociopathy – when we hear about it, we’re just drawn to it, we want to know what made this person tick.”
This to me is one of the delights of reading Catton – each of her novels is deeply interested in the psychology of its characters. Plot is very important to her.
“I think it’s a kind of a pleasure that is incredibly important, that pleasure you have as a reader where you want to know what happens next, desperately wanting to be surprised and yet also not wanting to be surprised because you’re in this dance with the novel where you’re trying to second guess it and you want the novel to second-guess you.”
Of all the psychologically complicated characters in Birnam Wood, the one that takes the most second-guessing is a charismatic billionaire tech-bro, Robert Lemoine, come to the South Island to invest in an end-times bunker. Lemoine is a brilliantly drawn baddy, one who acts to type as a bluff, while also totally acting to type. Catton said it was important to her that he not be a caricature.
“I wanted him to have this sexual charisma about him that was attractive because it was so dangerous. We want to be around people who are capable of anything, there’s a charisma there. I wanted him to be a human being, which is in a funny kind of way, to let him off the hook, or to let human nature off the hook.”
When I ask her if she thinks that evil exists, she says yes.
“If you believe in good, you have to believe in evil. To say that you don’t believe in evil is inadvertently to say that you don’t believe in radical good.”
A big part of the 10 years between the two books was filled with writing a screenplay for The Luminaries, which Catton then went on to produce. This effort took twice as long as the novel took to write. She got married, moved to the UK and had a child. She also wrote a very witty screenplay for Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 adaptation of Emma and is working on other projects for screen. Not much of a slacker then.
Catton says she believes in difficulty.
“I do believe that people’s natures are forged out of being tested. I think that’s where you discover if you’re a courageous person or not.”
I suspect that she’s not someone ever to go easy on herself. When I ask her what she has learned from screenwriting, she says that it taught her to think structurally and respect the formal shape of a story.
“The things that you’re taught in school, that a plot has to have a beginning, middle and an end. It must have an arc, and it has to escalate – I never really understood that until I started working on a screenplay.”
This comment surprises me, given that The Luminaries was celebrated for its elaborate, formal structure. Perhaps this is what talent is though – an ability to work and learn, to inquire and grow from our mistakes.
Again, social media raises its ugly head. For Catton, the development of morality depends on us being able to make mistakes, something that social media has little tolerance for.
“We aren’t the person we were 30 seconds ago, except for on the internet we are - and that’s so strange. If you tweeted something two years ago that you’re embarrassed about now, you just go back and delete it – what a crazy way of dealing with your emotional and moral development as a person. You can’t do that to your life, you can’t go back into your own life and delete a memory from two years ago that embarrasses you now.”
Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, paperback $38/ hardback $50) is available now in New Zealand and worldwide in March.
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