Ten years later, the youngest-ever Booker winner returns with a cast of mischievous millennial eco-warriors.
In 2013, aged 28, Eleanor Catton sprang to instant literary fame with The Luminaries. Set in the 19th-century goldfields of her native New Zealand, it provided a pitch-perfect impersonation of an 800-page Victorian novel, complete
Yet, for my money, this was precisely the problem. While there was no doubting the skill involved, one awkward question wouldn’t go away: what was the point? Wasn’t this just an effortful, somewhat airless simulacrum of a great novel rather than the real thing? Weirdly, though, the world didn’t seem to agree with me. The Luminaries not only won the Booker Prize, but it also broke two Booker records - the longest-ever winning novel and the youngest-ever winning author. So, how do you follow that?
Ten years later, we have our unexpected answer: with a wildly exciting contemporary thriller that also casts a winningly satirical eye on millennials and their paradoxical taste for self-satisfied angst.
The Birnam Wood of the title is a group of New Zealand eco-activists who plant crops on neglected patches of land so as to show how much land is wasted. Their founder is Mira Bunting, who, in a less cunning (and more boring) novel might be a straightforward goodie. After all, she says - and probably even believes - all the correct Left-wing things. She’s willing to take on powerful people, including Sir Owen Darvish, whose swathes of rural farmland are lying unused while he’s at his Wellington pied-à-terre raking in the money from his pest-control business. Surely, Mira suggests to the group, they should invade his farm with as many seeds as they can muster.
But already the book is casting a beady comic eye on Mira and her fellow “self-mythologising rebels”. As Catton sees it, the trouble is not that they’re wrong to have the concerns they do, just that the supposed altruism is not always distinguishable from egotism. They also take a distinct pleasure in the sense of piety and martyrdom that comes with “feeling oneself and one’s entire generation to have been wronged by those in power”.
On a more sympathetic (but still mischievously comic) note, Catton shows, too, how ferociously these people police each other - and themselves. Poor Mira, for example, is “a remorseless critic of her own emotions”, which sadly fail to match the impossibly high standards she imagines she should be living by. (One of her dark secrets is that, despite her feminism, “she preferred the company of men”.)
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Advertise with NZME.Meanwhile, at the Darvish farm, events take a turn for the morally complicated as well. The land Birnam Wood had earmarked has since been bought by a shadowy American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, who couldn’t be more representative of what the group optimistically call “late capitalism”. His avowed motive for buying it is that faraway New Zealand is the ideal place to build a state-of-the-art bunker to protect him from any coming apocalypse. (New Zealand’s remoteness from the global action is another theme of the book - and another chance for Catton to have some satirical fun.) In reality, this
is a cover for illegally mining rare-earth elements used in smartphones. But maybe it would put people off the scent further if he bunged Birnam Wood a hundred thousand dollars to go about their noble work there...
After less agonising than you might think, the group agree to take Lemoine’s money. There is, however, one dissenting voice - in the form of Tony, a would-be investigative reporter who starts to dig deeper into Lemoine’s activities, partly for solid Leftist reasons and partly so that he can become incredibly famous for exposing the truth.
And it’s at this point that the thriller bit fully kicks in. Quite often when literary novelists have a go at the form, it’s to give a fairly perfunctory narrative framework to what they’re really interested in. Here, Catton embraces it with a whole-heartedness that extends to gun-carrying goons, a James Bond-style chase and a -prolonged series of cracking plot twists. Anybody who made it through The Luminaries might find this hard to believe - but you really do read the last 150 pages of Birnam Wood with your pulse racing and your heart thumping.
Reviewed by: James Walton
This story was originally published by The Sunday Telegraph.
Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, paperback $38, hardback $50) is available now in New Zealand and worldwide in March.
