Everything We Thought While Reading Eleanor Catton’s ‘Birnam Wood’

It’s here: a decade since the Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries was released, that intricately spun and weighty novel (an 832-pager) set in the 19th-century gold rush boom, which garnered its own six-part mini-series (starring an excellent Eve Hewson and a hero-esque Himesh Patel), there’s a new novel from Eleanor Catton.

Anticipation was high in the way that things that take years to make garner a special kind of magnetism. Then there was the plot involving, among other things, a guerilla gardening group that illegally plants gardens on unused land, and a billionaire seemingly in need of an apocalypse bunker.

Three of Viva’s resident bibliophiles convened for a book club, taking our time to read Birnam Wood. Did we like it? Who did we like (was there anybody to like)? What of its emergent storytelling? And who on earth saw that ending coming? Spoilers ahead.

Emma Gleason, commercial editor: Okay, this book is eerily prescient. I got my copy in the wake of our second cyclone and, with it, a front of climate anxieties, and questions around wealth, property and logistics all hot topics. The book delves into all of these with a plot that includes eco-activists, landslips, bureaucracy, intergenerational tension, media, millionaires, and other things that have been taking up an increasingly large part of our nation’s psyche — and the 24-hour news cycle. It was way easier to read than I expected. The narrative moves quickly, and while some big ideas are explored, it’s all very digestible — and funny (in parts). I read this in around a week.

Dan Ahwa, creative director: The satire and the confronting way Eleanor depicts her characters ― from right-wing media types to surface-level do-gooders — is cutting entertainment.

EG: It’s cutting, but not cruel. It’s also very rooted in New Zealand (felt akin, sometimes, to the equally fine-tuned cultural observations of Greta and Valdin).

Julia Gessler, digital editor: Yet it doesn’t reduce New Zealand to a type; this isn’t a “clean, green” narrative. The characters aren’t exactly caricatures either, though there’s something satisfying about their approximations to people you do know.

DA: I know people who are like the characters in the book from both political and economical perspectives, so it’s kind of hilarious to have those tensions painted out like this. But at the heart of it is a theme that I find interesting, which is this desire to be a good person to the point of being sometimes insufferable. Can we be ideologically consistent all the time? No. Are people addicted to martyrdom? Yes.

EG: I’ve definitely met most, if not all, of these people. Am I some of these people? I think I even met a Lemoine once. He had several passports and wouldn’t reveal what he did for a living.

JG: Now let’s talk about Tony Gallo, the poor boob...

DA: The chapter where Tony goes on a rant is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while. The “trust-fund” dilettante freelance journalist making a spectacle of himself is comic gold.

JG: His scream at the end got me. I was really drawn to the fact that there are baddies here (Lemoine the psychopath) but that the goodies, and what makes something inherently good, are morally complicated as well.

EG: It got me thinking about which version of us is the real us. Eleanor is very clever in how she twists and unpicks cliches; no one is who they seem, everyone is presenting and projecting and putting on a front. She plays with stereotypes, and the judgments and assumptions we form so easily when presented with them. She leads the reader to default to our biases, then catches us in the act as the text shifts and we realise we were set up. She also explores the protection offered by stereotypes (discussed explicitly by one of the main characters) and how we self-censor and engage in behaviour modification, addressing the disconnect between interiority and our outward expression. Everyone has pretensions. We are all guilty of creating personal and collective mythologies.

JG: I felt the same! What does it mean to know someone, and how well do we know ourselves?

EG: And what does it mean to pick a side? More subtle than the critique of stereotypes, though not insignificant, is the commentary on groupthink and consensus. Even dissidents agree with something, right? With an eco-activist group at the core of its narrative, alongside other ideologies and factions, Birnam Wood questions binary thinking and partisanship, holding a mirror up to our extremes and the lines we’ve drawn. It’s easy to cast villains, and much harder to see the grey areas — the complexities of ourselves and situations.

DA: Despite their good intentions, the corporatisation of Birnam Wood is an interesting observation into how philanthropic organisations at some point in their lifespan have to evolve in order to survive, and it can often be met with some inevitable compromising that is true for many things in life.

JG: What did everyone think about the novel’s presentation of big tech?

DA: The reliance on our smartphones and the strange behaviours we’ve inherited and how that impacts our real-life relationships is included subtly in the book. Eleanor does a brilliant job at holding a mirror up to something we’re all guilty of.

JG: Finally, the ending: mass murder a la rat poison, and the end of basically everybody.

EG: The ending pulls the rug out from under you.

DA: It’s basically begging to be adapted into a film. It’s a thriller to the bitter end — and an ending that is completely bonkers but a crescendo with a much deeper meaning.

‘Birnam Wood’ by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $50) is out now.