Deception is buried deep in ‘Birnam Wood’
Eleanor Catton writes an ecological thriller that’s worth the wait
Eleanor Catton’s long-anticipated third novel, “Birnam Wood,” is an intellectual and ecological thriller that propels readers forward with a high-pitched plot while posing broad ideological questions about ambition, privacy, technology and the health of the planet. What makes the story so gripping and, ultimately, so affecting, is the small cast of expertly drawn characters whose motivations Catton mines with an almost intuitive precision. In the world of this book, small jealousies and slights, both real and imagined, have huge ramifications.
Birnam Wood is a guerrilla gardening collective in New Zealand that has spent five years planting sustainable organic crops in ignored or unattended areas, often on public lands and often without permission. The group, made up of progressives in their 20s, still isn’t solvent, and the tension between the grand social ideals of the enterprise and the nitty gritty of executing these ideals plays out in the relationship between Birnam Wood founder, Mira Bunting, and her erstwhile bestie and right-hand woman, Shelley Noakes. Theirs is the essential relationship of the book.
Mira is the visionary, whose ambition for Birnam Wood is “nothing less than radical, widespread and lasting social change, which would be entirely achievable, she was convinced, if only people could be made to see how much fertile land was going begging, all around them, every day — and how much more could be accomplished in the world if everybody simply pooled their knowledge and resources.” Shelley doesn’t necessarily disagree with this, but she’s tired of being the dependable bureaucrat who sends mass emails to group members, creates schedules for planting and watering, arranges for supplies, etc. Shelley wants out of her current role.
Soon, though, Birnam Wood’s entanglement with a billionaire seems to offer both young women some version of what they want. A landslide around the Korowai Pass, a verdant (and fictitious) area on New Zealand’s South Island, has cut off access to a swath of arable farmland. Mira makes the five-hour drive to check out the possibility of cultivating the area and meets on the property Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire who has made a fortune in drones. Mira tells Robert about Birnam Wood, and he signs on as a kind of secret benefactor. Soon, Mira and team decamp to the property to start planting.
But Robert has other interests in and around the area, some involving Sir Owen Darvish and his wife, Lady Jill Darvish. No one is more suspicious of Robert than Tony Gallo, a former Birnam Wood member who has just returned to New Zealand after several years away and has his heart set on reconnecting with Mira and pursuing a career as a hard-hitting investigative journalist. Initially, Tony imagines his story on Lemoine and company will be “a searing indictment of the super-rich.” As the plot unfurls, the naiveté of that plan becomes almost laughable.
The younger adults in “Birnam Wood” have reached a critical point in their personal and professional lives when defining choices are being made. Tony’s proselytizing about the “joyless” left — “No one’s having any fun, we’re all just sitting around scolding each other for doing too much or not enough… ” — rubs Birnam Wood the wrong way, even though the collective has its own issues. Like every well-meaning group that tries to be leaderless and horizontal, the truth is a lot more complicated. Acting as a foil to all this, of course, is Robert, whose unlimited access to money, resources and data allows him to cast himself as a kind of 21stcentury god, surveilling everything in his realm.
The web of lies in “Birnam Wood” grows as dense as the canopy of trees Tony Gallo finds himself running and hiding beneath. All the business endeavors in the book are based on some level of duplicity, and all the main characters lie, at least a little. Some bend the truth a bit, exaggerating or embellishing or omitting information to cast themselves in a more favorable light, while others lie deeply and consistently for their own personal gain. As the plot spins forward, “Birnam Wood” burrows into unresolvable tensions between democracy and anarchy, community and independence, idealism and foolhardiness.
Catton’s wordsmithing and broad appetite for story have earned her readers and acclaim from the start. Her first novel, “The Rehearsal” (2008), steeped itself in the world of teenage girls and the dramatic aftermath of a sex scandal at their school. It won the Betty Trask Award, which is given to writers under the age of 35 for a first novel. Her second book, “The Luminaries” (2013), an 800-page epic about the New Zealand gold rush, won Catton the Man Booker Prize when she was just 28 years old, making her the youngest author ever to receive this honor. Catton also wrote the screenplay to a 2020 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma,” starring actress Anya Taylor-Joy of “The Queen’s Gambit” fame.
Catton shares with Austen the ability to pack exquisitely balanced sentences with razor-sharp observations about society and character. After Robert catches Mira in a small lie, Catton offers this insight: “Lemoine loved to make a study of deceptions, no matter how insignificant or glancing they might seem; in fact, he had often found it was the inconsequential-seeming falsehoods that tended to betray the most about a person’s character, exposing their petty vanities, their hubris, their blind spots and soft spots and individual styles of self-mythology and self-exception, all of which could be gathered as intelligence and played to his advantage down the line.”
This passage shimmers with the same clear-headed acuity Austen packed into novels written 200-plus years ago. Paying attention to the small things is how people with big plans get ahead in the world, Catton suggests, a universal truth that would have resonated just as convincingly in the drawing rooms of early 19th-century England as it does in the forests of 21stcentury New Zealand.
Ultimately, “Birnam Wood” asks big questions that everyone on the planet must answer for themselves. As an individual, what do you owe the world? What does the world owe you? And what do you feel entitled to take from the world to achieve what you believe you are due?
If this sounds like high drama, even Shakespearean in scope, that’s because it is. In an epigraph to her novel, Catton shares a passage from “Macbeth” in which Birnam Wood appears. Readers will recall that the title character of Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy is a megalomaniac who lets nothing stand between him and his pursuit of the crown. Later in the play, a ghost appears before Macbeth, now King of Scotland, to say that he “shall never vanquish’d be until/ Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill/ Shall come against him.” Macbeth responds: “That will never be./ Who can impress the forest, bid the tree/ Unfix his earthbound root?”
We know how it turned out for Macbeth. The advancing army camouflaged itself with the branches of trees from Birnam wood, leading to Macbeth’s demise.
Centuries later, Catton’s “Birnam Wood” offers another answer to Macbeth’s seemingly rhetorical question.