Birnam Wood

I didn't manage to finish reading Catton's last book The Luminaries but this book is sold as a thriller and I love thrillers and I like eco-lit, which this is, and so thought it might be more readable/accessible. It was.

I can't quite make up my mind if Catton was parodying thrillers or eco-lit because we have all the characters here that you might expect. A billionaire that is a baddie right from the start, an older man who has just been awarded a Knighthood for services to conservation when he owns a pest control company (she is having a laugh here), a wanna-be journalist who has a rant at the last meeting and leaves the group, and Shelley who is always second, does all the work and gets none of the praise for it.

Birnam Wood is an eco show more group that grows fruit and vegetables on parcels of land they do not own - guerilla gardening on a slightly larger scale, in New Zealand. Mira, the leader of the group, spots a plot of land that seems to be abandonned, private and ripe for developing only when she gets there she meets the billionaire Lemoine. He has mining works going on that are illegal and needs to protect his investments at all costs.

I have tried to work out why Catton chose the name Birnam Wood and this article is helpful. If everyone can be a villain, then everyone can be a Macbeth with ambitions or be tempted and in this book they are. The journalist is tempted by the thought of getting an expose based on the mining that Lemoine's company is undertaking, Owen Darvish the owner of the land is tempted by the Knighthood, Shelley by being the leader of the group and so on. In fact just like in Macbeth, Birnam Wood does move because it is the name of the group and they move about a five hour drive from Christchurch to get to the tract of land they will grow on as trespassers.

The thriller part really gets going about two thirds of the way into the book. I found myself reading faster and faster to find out how things ended and it is pretty explosive.

The whole book reads as if it is a last gasp at trying to get people to take notice of what is happening around us and tries to explain why it feels like nothing is changing or being done about it. No one comes out of this well. We have landslides, fires and floods and yet people sit around arguing about whether 'intersectionality is bullshit'. (I don't even know what that really means!) The book is fun way of letting us know that we are marching towards the end, wondering if anyone will move against the 'Kings' of today or whether extinction is the next step.

Catton's writing is very good, particularly her sentences. I always marvel at those who can control long sentences and there are many in this book.

This business about the radiometric survey, for instance: Sir Owen should have been relieved to learn that this so-called journalist - a blogger and a nobody, for goodness' sake - had plainly begun his investigations well before they'd hosted the Mulloys, which meant that they couldn't possibly bear any responsibility for whatever it was that he might or might not have found out about their agreement with Lemoine.
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One of the big themes in Macbeth is betrayal, alongside loyalty, and there is a fair amount of it in show less

I liked this book and unlike many of the reviewers below, did not have a problem with the pacing at the beginning. I was drawn into the inner thoughts and motivations of the characters. I think that's why I didn't like the ending. It seemed out of place in a book which, up until then, had been exploring relationships and motivations. Then bang! We've gone from a character-driven drama to an action thriller in no time flat.

I loved the writing. It is perhaps the best illustration of stream of thought writing I've seen. It flows well despite very, very long sentences and sentence fragments. There are so many thoughtful insights, including "the real choices you make in your life, the really difficult, defining choices, are never between show more what's right and what's easy. They're between what's wrong and what's hard." And "while people were quick to form opinions, they were just as show to change them, and -- to rephrase the aphorism slightly -- there are none so blind as those who had already decided what it was they saw."

I liked the way the author poked at young liberals who, in the midst of climate disasters, spend time arguing whether "intersectionality is bullshit". And at billionaires who have no social conscience at all. And at boomers who sell out by being knighted for conservation while running a pest control company. show less

Birnam Wood is Catton's (winner of the 2013 Booker Prize for her The Luminaries) third novel, and is a very different work to her earlier novels.

I did not 'get' her 800+ page prize winner which I regarded as very much a 'shaggy dog story', where the story was ok but not superlative, and the structure of the book (with the chapter lengths mimicking the passage of the phases of the moon) and the references to zodiac and other runes, doing little for me.

Birnam Wood adopts a much more traditional structure and no particular 'tricks' . The story itself combines contemporary themes:
- ecological action
- the internet and its merits and perils
- the electronic tracking of people by the private sector and government
- left vs right politics (and show more whether traditional manifestations or each are themselves outmoded)
- billionaires, and whether they 'live' outside the 'real' world
- trust in government
- doomsday preparations (including the purchase of 'safe spaces' in New Zealand (where the book is set)

All of that may seem a little heavy but the plot moves along at a good pace, a Jason Bourne like pace (though there are no JB super heroes), with readers left guessing until the very end "what is going to happen next?". One technique adopted by Catton to give this effect is to end one episode (being told from the perspective of one character) only for the next episode (being told from the perspective of another character) commencing at a time either before or after the end of the previous episode, leaving readers to speculate how to bring the 2 episodes together, and with Catton bringing of the various episodes together.

There are some bad people (not surprisingly, the billionaire included), but indeed virtually all if not all of the characters have flaws (eg Tony, a freelance journalist, who sensing something is wrong, stealthily investigates and discovers the dark secrets at the heart of the book, at one stage wallows in the thought that his disclosure of the truth will make his career and indeed may bring him glory and awards.

Said by some to be a 'literary thriller', I agree it is a (decent) thriller and 'literary' in the sense that PD James' crime novels are thought of as 'a literary crime/mystery.

The fact that I am encouraged to go back and read Catton's first novel (The Rehearsal) is the best indication that I am intrigued by Catton's work, and that perhaps you should be also.

Big Ship

23 May 2023 show less

Surprisingly, a thriller. Deception, self-deception, psychopathy, timidity, cupidity, mistakes, fakes, and guerrilla gardening. Pacy, a twisty plot, and more character development and complex motivation than you usually get in a thriller. Its setting is that pivotal post-Trump, pre-Jacinda moment when we naively imagined all was lost. Catton's science is a little shaky; rare-earth element mining apparently involves digging up a lot of…earth. And trucking it away, and riches follow. A major plot event is murder by poisoning with 1080 rabbit bait. 1080 rabbit bait is brightly-coloured pellets rather than a subtle paste or powder, the human lethal dose is a LOT of pellets, and it takes hours for a mammal to die once poisoned—all bad show more news for Catton's denouement. show less

I read this book too recently and I've not really recovered yet. With clear inspiration from Macbeth, it's full of characters with strong personal goals and ambitions, and with obvious blind spots where their morality collides with their self-interest. I loved Mira and Shelley in particular, and getting to know them from inside their own heads. The shifting of perspective was really effective; even point-of-view characters I didn't much like, I felt like I recognized. With the shifting points of view including a detailed exploration of each character's willful self-deceit, the book was also often softly amusing, in a quiet, Kiwi way—until it was decidedly, brutally, not. I didn't need this novel to tell me billionaires are unethical show more in their very existence and thus have an extremely distant personal relationship with ethics, I have all of reality to tell me that—but I have the impression that other people, who have gotten very different messages from reality, might get something very different out of this book. show less

Some things in Eleanor Catton’s novel are clever and well observed, but I found that these broke down in the last third of the book, where it becomes an action-driven suspense story.
I felt that the first parts of the novel were like a contemporary Middlemarch (a literary allusion that makes more sense to me than Macbeth). In the first third of the book, we are introduced to a range of contemporary characters and their relations to each other and to their small society. Catton takes readers into their heads as they try to work out what they want from themselves and from each other. Shelley’s conflicted feelings toward Mira, Mira’s charismatic leadership undermined by self-doubt, Tony’s idealistic quest for ideological purity as show more well as personal recognition make an interesting setting for an examination of radical personal politics.
I especially liked the comic earnestness with which the characters in the Birnam Wood collective try to work together to create the social relationships that they want to see in an ideal society. Naturally, these conflict with their material conditions under capitalism, with their emotional lives and with their differing interpretations of their ideals. These scenes play with such authenticity that I imagine that Catton has lived through similar experiences herself (as I have, and recognize clearly). Catton’s wit in describing the scenes and the interactions brings a humour similar to that in Eliot’s asides in Middlemarch.
Catton goes into a few other characters, but with much less depth that suggest she is filling out a few stereotypes rather than creating living characters. Owen and Jill are plausible as good-hearted New Zealanders who have build up a small fortune in business, but we don’t know anything about their business practices, and that’s relevant here. Robert Lemoine as the socially charming, sociopathic billionaire is provided with childhood trauma to twist his psyche, but it doesn’t get him beyond stereotypes. Mira shares some of Robert’s manipulative traits, but not his skill or self-confidence. And the humorous insight that Catton brings to the Birnam Wood group is absent here.
So the suspense builds in the second third of the novel when ambitious, idealistic Tony works out Lemoine’s world-dominating plot. It goes full paranoid in the last third, and over the top in the last dozen pages. The suspense-movie plot takes over the psychosocial drama, although Catton makes a valiant effort to pull the characters’ psyches to the front. Mira is relieved when she realizes that if the Birnam Wood ideal blows up, it absolves her of responsibility. Jill goes back to her New Zealand self-reliance to protect her home from the evil (American) intruder. Does Catton intend it to be meaningful when the nouveau bourgeois has to defeat the superrich billionaire to save her world? Does Tony survive through his determination, idealism and backwoods skills? It’s all a bit confused by the end.
Catton gives realism and texture to the story in the details of everyday life, as she did with the details of frontier life in her historical novel, The Luminaries. She highlights the communications technology that has become both a tool and a trap in contemporary life. The useful, but slightly creepy, location tracking that Shelley uses to keep touch with Mira becomes a life-threatening danger in the hands of a malevolent techie. Yet it is central to plans of both the idealist and the sociopath. This, I would say, is a more likely threat to society than the private ambitions of one billionaire, although Catton doesn’t take the story in this direction.
I had a similar response to reading this novel as I did to The Luminaries – it started out interesting and intriguing, but become rushed and less interesting by the end. show less

Birnam Wood is a collective, one of those groups where all decisions are voted on and the chair of meetings rotates around the membership, at least half of whom are vegan. But really Mira is the driving force. This guerrilla gardening collective is her idea and it's her energy that drives in on. Shelley is the one who does all the administrative tasks and makes Mira's ideas work. But it's never been self-sustaining and now Shelley wants to leave. She hasn't told Mira yet, but Mira can see the cracks as well as anyone. And then Mira finds a perfect place to do some larger scale gardening and there's even a billionaire there who is talking about funding them in a way that could really get the project from a volunteer project to a viable show more concern. Of course, this means trusting the kind of person Mira had always considered the enemy and hiding a few details from the rest of [Birnam Wood], but this is far too good an opportunity to turn down, isn't it?

Eleanor Catton's book is one that begins as a character study of a diverse array of stock characters, to a sort of eco-thriller in its final third. Does it work as a novel? Yes and also I expected more from Catton, a superlatively gifted writer who gave us both the unsettling The Rehersal and the expansive and intricate The Luminaries. I do like what Catton attempted here, with all the many characters going in their many directions and the way she is poking gentle fun at the dynamics of groups and left-leaning individuals, and less gentle fun at the wealthy. Her plot was improbable, but she wrote it so well that I was able to go with it. It was ham-fisted at times, but within acceptable limits. Which is to say, had the author been anyone else, I would have had a more favorable opinion of it, but is it fair to hold Catton to a higher standard when even a great author is going to have less-than-great books? After all, I honestly enjoyed this novel. show less