Review: Birnam Wood
A gripping thriller from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama and immersion in character.
It’s now ten years since Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries appeared as a genuine phenomenon in New Zealand fiction – the first local Man Booker winner since Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, storming to more than a hundred thousand copies sold locally and almost one and a half million worldwide. For a while in the mid-2010s, it felt like the reading population of New Zealand divided neatly into those who’d read The Luminaries and those who still had it at the top of their next holiday list. No wonder its follow-up, announced in early 2017, was so keenly anticipated.
It's now here, and for all the ways that Birnam Wood departs from its predecessor – including halving its length at a still-ample four hundred pages – it brings a familiar pattern of intrigue and misdirection into a contemporary setting. When the fictional town of Thorndike, and a chunk of prime farmland owned by a well-known businessman, are cut off from the rest of the country by a landslip, horticulturalist and guerrilla gardener Mira Bunting sees a golden opportunity for her activist collective Birnam Wood to vault ahead of its usual borrowing of suburban lots and roadsides. Mira is a practised trespasser but is immediately interrupted by an American billionaire visiting the isolated property who calls her bluff before offering an unexpected olive branch.
The offer, and Mira’s response, both come as a total surprise to the rest of Birnam Wood, several of whom are appalled and none of whom have more than a passing familiarity with the person they’re now entangled with, beyond what the Internet reveals about his background. A decisive hui quickly opens up ideological and personal rifts between impulsive and confident Mira, her hardworking but increasingly resentful second fiddle Shelley Noakes, and Tony Gallo, who left the group (and the country) under dubious circumstances and has returned with fences to mend and something to prove.
Catton pulls off an impressive balancing act in building these characters and establishing the internal currents pulling them along. Some of the lush psychological description that was so prominent in The Luminaries returns here, with the modern setting lending a sharper satirical edge to Catton’s character portrayals without spilling over into caricature. Fittingly for members of a decentralised collective, none of the key players in the Birnam Wood camp qualify as outright protagonists, but they do have a convincingly human tendency to see themselves at the centre of their story, enough to earn readers’ empathy even when they’ve mistaken enlightened self-interest for more straightforward ambition or the chance to make good on past failures.
It's also difficult not to feel for them in the face of Birnam Wood’s antagonist. No time is wasted in establishing the resources at the disposal of Robert Lemoine, billionaire surveillance mogul, not least of which is a near-hypnotic charm that works in defiance of every objective warning sign that the activists encounter along the way. Catton plays this up for humour as well as suspense, at times almost taunting the reader with the prospect of the Birnam Wood crew placing their heads in the lion’s mouth. It’s a spell that works effortlessly on the reader too – Lemoine is a gloriously complete bastard, disturbingly relatable even at his worst.
In fact, Lemoine seems an almost unstoppable force, and only his fascination with testing other people’s skills and limitations gives some scope for his plans to be slowed or unravelled. Much of the novel’s suspense and foreboding is built on this power imbalance. Birnam Wood’s activists could hardly have settled on a more ambiguous or ill-omened name for their group (although they eventually adopt an alternative in te reo Māori, well after the die has been cast); Shakespeare’s Macbeth was undone by a wood that ‘marched’ on human feet to a violent confrontation, and no prophecy guarantees its namesake’s victory.
The inciting elements of Birnam Wood’s plot include several touchstone political debates of the last decade, from control over farmland and natural resources to New Zealand’s perceived value as a doomsday ark for the wealthy. The evolution of those debates since 2017, and the appearance of some significant existential threats this decade, works in Birnam Wood’s favour rather than against it, turning it into a metaphor for our country’s relationship to larger forces in general – one that happens to be delivered as a wrenchingly effective, darkly funny and flawlessly crafted single-sitting thriller. Not every great book becomes a cultural moment, but after all there’s nothing to stop lightning striking twice, and Birnam Wood puts Catton in a strong position to pull it off all over again.
Reviewed by Sam Finnemore
