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Loading... Birnam Wood (edition 2024)| 984 | 51 | 21,512 | 
(3.72) | 55 | Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes criminal, sometimes philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned. But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?… (more) |
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| Epigraph |
Third Apparition: Be lion-mettled, proud; and take no care
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are:
Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until
Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.
Macbeth: That will never be.
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earth-bound root?  | |
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| Dedication |
for Steven Toussaint | |
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| First words |
The Korowai Pass had been closed since the end of the summer, when a spate of shallow earthquakes triggered a landslide that buried a stretch of the highway in rubble, killing five, and sending a long-haul transport truck over a precipice where it skimmed a power line, ploughed a channel down the mountainside, and then exploded on a viaduct below. | |
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Chivalric titles had been abolished in New Zealand in the year 2000, only to be reinstated nine years later by a moneyed politician desirous of a knighthood of his own. It was embarrassing whichever way one felt about it: the monarchists could not celebrate, as the resurrection only proved the Crown could be politically compelled, and the republicans could not protest, because to do so would be to suggest that there was something sacred about a monarchic code of chivalry in the first place, that ought to be beyond a common politician's reach. Both parties felt disgruntled, and both received the twice-yearly Honours Lists with the same peevish cynicism, concluding, jointly, that all the knighted intellectuals were sell-outs, and all the knighted businessmen were bribes. Like all self-mythologising rebels, Mira preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo. On a dark and shameful level of her consciousness Shelley knew that the drastic course corrections in her life – her phases, to use the word that Mira so deplored – did not owe to any sudden clarities of vision or vocation, but to this smothered and ever-present sense of dread. She had tried to escape it by joining Birnam Wood, and she was trying to escape it now, but she would never escape it, because she could not feel the difference, could not understand the difference, between running towards something, and running away. She felt that it exposed a defect in her character – disloyalty to her own sex, first of all, but deeper than that, a vanity, an appetite, a capacity for manipulation that she would rather other people did not see; she knew, and was ashamed to know, that one of the reasons she had never taken Shelley's friendship all that seriously was that it lacked any sense of sexual possibility or contest. There was no danger between them, nothing fearsome or uncertain, no provocation, no romance; with Shelley, she always knew that she was safe. She wished that she could tell her friend the honest truth, which was not that she loved her because she needed her, but that she needed her because she loved her, and in her monumental stupidity and self-absorption, she had only just figured that out. ...simply a far-sighted, short-selling, risk- embracing kleptocrat, an incarnation of unapologetic zero-sum self-interest, a radical misfit, a ‘builder' in the Randian sense, a genius, a tyrant, an obsessive, a prophet, a status-symbol survivalist hedging his bets against any number of potential global catastrophes that he himself was doing absolutely nothing to prevent, and might even be taking active measures to encourage if there was a profit to be made, or an advantage to be gained, in the pursuit. ...while people were quick to form opinions, they were just as slow to change them, and – to rephrase the aphorism slightly – there were none so blind as those who had already decided what it was they saw. She would be the final piece of camouflage. Not these dime-a-dozen, grasping, self-important outrage-mongers, these obsequious nonentities, these small-time pseudo-pundits who traded in stupidity and called themselves subversive for shitting where they ate. ‘There's something so joyless about the left these days,' Tony continued, ‘so forbidding and self-denying. And policing. No one's having any fun, we're all just sitting around scolding each other for doing too much or not enough – and it's like, what kind of vision for the future is that? Where's the hope? Where's the humanity? We're all aspiring to be monks when we could be aspiring to be lovers.' ...the whole project of a genuine left-wing politics is fucked. How can we even get started on the project of creating and protecting public goods when within every interest group there's always a subgroup, and each one has their own particular agenda, and they're all in competition with each other for airtime and market share—' ‘I'm not telling you to shut up, I'm telling you to listen. There's a difference.' Democracy isn't about everyone voting the exact same way, it's about whether you agree to go along with the outcome of the vote even if it turns out you're in the minority. That's consensus.' the crypto-fascist dirty tricksters who pretended to be populists while defrauding and despising the people, who lied with impunity, who stole with impunity, who murdered with impunity, who invented scapegoats, who incited suicides, who encouraged violence and provoked unrest, and who then retreated into a private sphere of luxury so well insulated from the lives of ordinary people, and so well defended against them, that it basically amounted to a form of secession. anyway, between the two of them, wasn't he the one who was more guilty of propping up the status quo by shooting her ideas down and dropping names of dead philosophers as if that was in any way a legitimate response to anything any more – and why was it that people on the left were always talking about who was actually on the left – wasn't that kind of out of date? And if it wasn't, then maybe it should be, because it was pretty bloody off-putting to be treated like a double-dealer all the time. the last thing that crossed his mind before he drifted off to sleep was a quotation that he'd heard someplace, whose attribution he'd forgotten – that only something that a person didn't want to see in print was news, and everything else was advertising. You want the apocalypse to happen, because that will prove that you were right never to have trusted anybody. Whereas if things actually get better, not worse, if people actually start working together, and putting aside their differences for the sake of the common good and so on, if that happens, then you're just going to look like a stupid paranoid dick. Right?' You want me to kneel down before you, and bow and scrape, and ask for your forgiveness for all the bad and greedy things I've done, and you want me to say that I repent, and then you want me to give away all my money, because at long last, after all these years, finally, I met you, and I saw the light. Is that it?' ‘Sounds pretty good,' Mira said. ‘For a start.' ‘So in other words,' he said, ‘you want to be a god as well.' the thought that had filled her consciousness was not it's like he knew what I was thinking, but it's like he wanted me to think that he knew what I was thinking, which had felt both much more sinister and, strangely, much more impressive. She couldn't seriously believe she had a future with this guy! She knew what he was. She knew that he was toying with her, just like she knew that she was toying with him back. She was just fucking around. She was just doing whatever the hell she wanted, like she had always done, taking everyone else for granted, like she had always done, rebelling for the sake of it, like she had always done, acting as though the rules that bound the little people were just too tiresome and too ordinary to apply to her. late capitalism would admit nothing ‘real' beyond the logic of late capitalism itself, having declared self-interest the only universal, and profit motive the only absolute, and deriding everything that did not serve its ends as either a contemptible weakness or a fantasy. Sure, there might be a bit of knuckle-rapping, a few warm words. Tribunals might be formed, activists might strut about, legislation might be passed, politicians might be voted in and out, et cetera; but so long as there was a phone in everybody's pocket, so long as there was a screen in front of every face, so long as there were batteries and satellites and cameras and GPS, so long as there was avarice, so long as there was loneliness and envy and ambition and boredom and addiction, he, Lemoine, would be untouchable. | |
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| Last words |
He pushed one of the nets into the evil-smelling hole and then pulled it out again, and then he drew a breath and held the trigger down with both his thumbs and thrust the lighted wand against the sopping fabric, praying that the flame would catch, praying that the fire would send up smoke and burn away the nets so that the scale of the destruction would be visible from overhead, so that somebody would see it, so that somebody would notice, so that somebody would care, and as the fire began to blaze and crackle up the ancient trees around him, Tony prayed that somebody would come to put it out. (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.) | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes criminal, sometimes philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned. But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other? ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description
| Haiku summary |
Ego, ergo, blind
Potted plunder, plot to plant
Boom and bust, for aye
(ericarenee) | |
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7
While I don't love Hollywood endings and I actively dislike reviewers who spoil endings - I have to say, I have some feelings about how Catton wrapped this one up. Always a problem with a Kindle in that it seems like there are way more pages left to go and then suddenly. Really, that's it? Hunh? Didn't see that coming...
I do think this is a worthy read. I like how she skewered the young liberals just as much as she did the callous GenX billionaire, and the sell-out rich Boomers. It resonated with me after just having read a non-fiction account of the different generations and their relationship to technology and how they see the world. I wish I could give a higher rating in some ways, but for me her two books I have read share structural flaws that make them just off the mark from greatness. This one is definitely disturbing. But it seems so fantastical that it was hard to feel real emotion even in the face of tragedy, and instead it was just black humor -- though I am not sure that was supposed to be what I take away... (