Around 80 pages into Eleanor Catton’s new novel, Birnam Wood, American tech billionaire Robert Lemoine, who is up to no good and working on ways to camouflage his crimes, grinds through an encounter with a New Zealand talk show host and his wife, who are considering setting up a right-wing media platform. Investing in their project might be one way to conceal his activities, Lemoine thinks. The couple, provincial bores, come out with a string of dull, Kiwi-themed truisms; there’s talk of Godzone, flat whites, being snobby about coffee, golf, Kiwi hospitality.
Lemoine listens until his fizzing disdain prompts him to do two things: he suddenly comes up with the idea that will frame the action of the novel, and he unleashes the kind of private tirade that would typically prompt my Californian daughter-in-law to say, in her dry, amused drawl, “Go off, King!”
He decides he will invest, not in the couple, but in the activities of Mira Bunting, a fascinating young woman he’s recently met. The media bores can go to hell: “These dime-a-dozen, grasping, self-important outrage-mongers, these obsequious non-entities, these small-time pseudo-pundits who traded in stupidity and called themselves subversive for shitting where they ate.”
The pithiness is enjoyable; the insults are nicely put. Go off, King! It’s all entertaining, if slightly easy, given that the Kiwi bores are a cliché of a cliché. Beyond this point, there’s an interesting divergence as the verbal exchanges get more sophisticated and the plot turns rugged and beefy. Lemoine steps up his activities, and sensitive people get involved in muscular action. Birnam Wood is a rollicking thriller involving eco-warriors, guns and guerrilla gardening – a skilfully plotted, slickly executed Nerd’s Dream.
Lemoine is a really bad guy, and his aims are wicked. He has devised a secret illegal plan to exploit resources in the fictional Korowai National Park, which is adjacent to land he’s looking to buy near the town of Thorndike. The natural setting, beautifully and vividly portrayed throughout the book, is reminiscent of Mt Aspiring, Aoraki and Arthur’s Pass National Parks.
No one must know what Lemoine is up to, which renders slightly problematic his decision to favour Mira over the right-wing bores. He decides that “she would be his acquisition. She would be his venture. She would be the final piece of camouflage.”
Mira and her close friend Shelley have founded Birnam Wood, a green-activist collective that plants crops where no one will notice and harvests the proceeds for philanthropic use. When Mira and Lemoine meet, she is checking out the Thorndike land for a possible covert planting operation.
This is what you are required to believe: that instead of kicking them off the property, the villain who’s carrying out nefarious, environment-wrecking activities would invite a group of green activists into the very area he’s defiling. His actions are explained in terms of his psychology – his risk-taking, his perverse sportiveness – but still, you’d think he might have spared himself the complication.
Even if you are a reader who believes (as all sane people must) that nothing is more important than green issues, you might find something slightly Monty Python in the idea of “guerrilla gardening”. But once you’ve quelled any scepticism, Birnam Wood can be enjoyed for its brilliantly intricate plot and relentless pace. It’s a matter of entering into the drama on Shakespearean terms. Will the environment move on the corrupted seat of power? Will the natural order be restored?
Adding to the portrait of middle-aged Kiwi dreariness and complacency – and complicating everything for Lemoine – is a married couple, owners of the Thorndike property. Sir Owen Darvish has recently, questionably, been given a knighthood, a title that is ersatz because all Kiwi titles are fake. (They can be contrasted with British titles that are real because their holders’ ancestors did their looting and pillaging hundreds of years ago.) Sir Owen and his Lady add a great deal to the entertainment. “‘Breathe out before you shoot,’ Lady Darvish heard Sir Owen say.”
The centre of the book, and perhaps its most interesting character, is Tony Gallo. His intelligence and moral conscience distinguish him. He will never sell out. He is 30, home from overseas, staying with his parents and plotting his next move.
Tony is chafing at being back in the “small, stagnant pond”. When he swears, his mother quaintly rebukes him: “Language.” And when he swears again, “Language!” (This doesn’t quite capture idiosyncratic developments in middle-class Kiwi vernacular. Here, by contrast, is an exchange overheard in Remuera, 2023. Mother, asking after an ailing cat: “Is Claudius back on his feet?” Son: “Indubitably. The c**t’s nimble as.”)
Things take an interesting turn, indubitably, when Tony attends a Birnam Wood hui and accuses the group of being trapped in the paradigm of the market. The long, salty exchange, in which Tony really goes off, arguing that intersectionality is just another kind of capitalism that promotes division and undermines the left-wing project, is a pleasure to read: diverting, rigorous, lively and gratifying. Tony is clever and impassioned, has things to say and isn’t afraid to give offence. (Language!)
From here, the story spreads into multiple threads, every element beautifully worked out. The action is relentless, with entertaining surprises and twists. Tony’s adventure is particularly absorbing, as he sets off into the back country, determined to find out what’s really going on.
When we learn about Lemoine’s personal history, there’s a sense that we’ve entered another paradigm: that of the contemporary “big ambitious novel”. With each added exotic detail, involving the CIA, possible assassins and so on, there’s a feeling of: Go on. Why not. Sure, throw that in too. You might say it’s what critic James Wood has called “an excess of storytelling”.
Hysterical Realism was the term Wood invented to describe a novel that dazzles with elaborate plotting while also dealing with real social phenomena, a book that “knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being”. The excess of storytelling shrouds, in Wood’s formulation, a lack of subtlety about “the human”.
The result is a genuine thriller that keeps you engaged right until the final, savage scene. The only irony, for hero Tony Gallo at least, is that he is trapped in precisely the type of book the capitalist market likes and wants, the kind of art the market has shaped to fit exactly within its paradigm.
Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38).
