A modern take on ‘Macbeth’
Ten years ago, Eleanor Catton became the youngest person to win the prestigious Booker Prize, earning it for “The Luminaries,” her second novel.
In the years since, the New Zealander, who now lives in England, wrote screenplays (including “Emma”), got married and had a child. But it took years before she felt ready to write another book.
“I did feel a lot of uncertainty after winning the prize,” Catton, 37, said in a recent video interview. “I worried that people would not be reliable about telling me if something I wrote was no good. After a prize like that, you become a commodity, so anything you write will make people money. That’s selling my publishers short, but I was wary of launching into something and getting it published and then hating myself for it.”
She hasn’t disappeared from the limelight, though. In 2015, Catton generated media controversy at home when she slammed the leaders of New Zealand at the time as greedy, uncaring about culture and willing to see the planet destroyed, and last month criticized the country’s outgoing prime minister for failing to quell income inequality.
Now she’s back with “Birnam Wood,” an ambitious book that is part social satire and part psychological thriller that builds toward an explosive climax. It also owes a debt to Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” in which the forest of Birnam Wood plays an important part.
The destinies of the six characters are on a collision course and, given that looming reference to “Macbeth,” you can bet this is not a story where all’s well that ends well.
The book is an attack on greed and capitalism and a cry in the wilderness about the climate crisis, yet she also savages those on her side politically: Tony, the character whose words most echo Catton’s political statements, comes across as an obnoxious egomaniac.
“New Zealand as a country has been incredibly hospitable to wealthy people, who are often quite sinister figures,” Catton says, “and the Darvishes knew from the beginning that Robert was a bad guy, but it doesn’t matter because they wanted to bask vicariously in his fame.
“The environmental damage caused by the lifestyles of the ultrarich so dwarfs the environmental damage done by you and I,” she adds, “but there’s a way that strident environmentalism can veer into misanthropy and treat human beings as hopeless polluting machines and destroyers of worlds and the whole point of human life should be to minimize everything in every way. I can’t believe that.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q
In Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are consumed by greed and ambition that cause them to compromise any morals. Was that a driving force for you in shaping the characters?
AThe quality I thought most about when I was thinking about how I wanted to use “Macbeth” in the book is the quality of certainty. The sense of having certainty about a future outcome — Macbeth hears these prophecies and becomes so convinced he knows exactly how things will turn out that his creative mind shuts down and he fails to see how these prophecies could be interpreted differently.
I was interested in how my characters’ certainties and convictions lead them into blindness. Each one has a fatal blindness — there’s some part of the plot they overlook because of their certainty.
Q
That certainty leads to impatience and taking shortcuts without thinking things through.
A
That’s probably a reflection of the terror I feel about accelerated social change. The book is set in 2017 but I wrote most of it from lockdown onwards, and so much had changed in such a short time. I think social media has done that.
Q
You’ve likened social media algorithms to fictional villains. Robert Lemoine never means what he says; he is feeding people what they want to hear and getting people to bend toward his will.
A
The algorithm flatters you; it sees who it thinks you are and will give you the answers it thinks you want. It’s making us less and less tolerant because we’re so used to these frictionless encounters with the world.