Birnam Wood

By Eleanor Catton, 2023

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 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.

Wide Sargasso Sea

by Jean Rhys, 1966

I’m not completely sure what I think of this novel. It didn’t grab my interest particularly, although I’m interested in the themes around colonialist influence on England and English literature and I can enjoy a novel that explores grand passions. But the storytelling here is a bit abstracted, leaving a lot to be inferred. And the shifting narrators – it sometimes takes pages to identify who is telling the story – further distances the reader.

The novel explores the way racism and colonialism destroy the possibilities of a loving relationship between the Caribbean heiress Antoinette Cosway and the English landowner Edward Rochester. Both seem to have lost the money that supports them: Antoinette’s family lost its wealth when slavery was abolished in the British Empire; Rochester’s English estate is agricultural and his family has not caught on to the industrial revolution. Antoinette’s mother marries the wealthy Mason, who arranges her marriage to Rochester with presumably a rich dowry. Antoinette initially refuses Rochester, but comes to love him after he reveals his vulnerability. He hates the colonial isles and their history, but comes to accept Antoinette’s beauty and spirit and wants to resettle her in England. Rochester’s mistrust of islanders and his inherent racism lead him to jealous resentment when Antoinette’s mixed-race half-brother tries to undermine her. In her frustration at his growing coldness, she turns to rum and magic potions. This goes badly and leads to violence. Eventually Rochester convinces Antoinette to come to his estate in England. She hates the unfamiliar land and the cold, and he has her confined to an attic suite. And this is where Antoinette becomes Rochester’s mad wife Bertha in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

The somewhat disjointed narrative reflects the disorientation that Antoinette and Rochester feel. They are pulled by emotional, social and economic forces that they can’t withstand or even recognize. Antoinette loves the sensuous richness of the islands, but the racist and colonial tensions isolate her from the divided island communities, except for a few long-time Black family servants. In the end she has no one except the husband who has been poisoned against her. Rochester is drawn to the beauty of the Jamaican country, but fearful of the forest he doesn’t know and people he doesn’t trust. He thinks the England he knows will be a refuge, but his wife cannot live there and becomes increasingly delusional. This makes sense of the book’s title, which I didn’t entirely understand until I looked it up. The Sargasso sea is a patch of the Atlantic between the Caribbean and Britain that forms a gyre driven by four Atlantic currents. It’s actually clear and productive, but has a reputation for tying ships up in pools of seaweed. Like the Sargasso Sea, Antoinette and Rochester are pushed in different directions by forces beyond them, which pull them under and drown them.

Rhys doesn’t fill in the details of these stories. Instead, she leaves it to the reader to imagine the confusion, misunderstanding and resentment that Antoinette and Rochester feel, in spite of a love that seems to develop between them. But the love is short-lived when Rochester feels uncomfortable in Antoinette’s Jamaican household, especially when dealing with black servants whom he does not trust. His isolation and discomfort make him easy to manipulate by Antoinette’s half-brother. Her intimacy with her black servants, her love of the tropical forest that he finds foreign, and her inability to meet the English social customs that he knows play into his mistrust. His English reserve increasingly turns into a cold distance, which she does not understand. When she turns to her black servant Christophine for extra-normal help, he thinks she is trying to poison him. And it’s not entirely clear whether Christophine is trying to help or hinder their relationship.

Because so much of the novel is left to inference and interpretation, I found that I did not feel for the characters and their evident tragedy. Perhaps I’m just not drawn to the plight of the slave-owning colonists and their inability to find emotional satisfaction. I may be more sympathetic to the fires that the Jamaicans set to Antoinette’s family home and to the one she later sets to Rochester’s home.

Vienna

by Eva Menasse, 2004

I liked Menasse’s Darkenbloom earlier this year, but I was less taken by this novel. The characters in Vienna seemed less vivid, less dramatic and they don’t come together to form a compelling story.

My sense at first was that the story wasn’t coming together because there were too many characters and no clear focus. But Darkenbloom also dealt with a wide variety of characters – a whole village rather than a family – meandered through their stories and ended in an inconclusive note. However, Darkenbloom had an underlying mystery, and the stories all bring some light to the mystery. It also had a sardonic tone from the narrator which added another layer of interest to the novel.

Vienna, in my reading, has none of these. The characters are mostly dull, they exist in a static society, and the narrator has a flatter tone. The characters make up a complex family dynamic, but there’s nothing especially interesting in the staid middle-class family.

Objectively, some of the characters should be more interesting. Father’s curious trading business, Uncle Ferdinand’s criminal enterprises, Aunt Gustl’s eccentricities could be elements in a colourful family epic. The way the Jewish side of the family survived the Nazi regime by using its ambiguous German relations is an intriguing line, although an undeveloped one. Their later lives in a marginal country on the edge of the Soviet sphere has an interest, but not much of a story. The family tells its stories from the past, but they are tired anecdotes and even the family finds their retelling a bore.

When Father returns to England where he spent the war, he seems to want to connect to his memories, but at the same time treats them as practically insignificant. And when the narrator’s brother causes a sensation by exposing the Nazi past of a national football star, the family – and the country – react by questioning the value of the story. Some members of the family question whether their Jewish past is even relevant in modern Austria.

Is this the point of Menasse’s novel? She seems to be saying that families have plenty of stories that they tell and argue about because they define the family members’ roles to each other and to the broader society, but the stories are a bit boring to outsiders. The narrator tries to bring the family together over its shared histories, but the final family meeting breaks into a fight as different factions within the family identify with different religious and national identities, stories, legends, what-ifs, with no solution, no way out. In the end, the narrator says, everyone talks with circumspection to avoid upsetting anyone else, and the younger generation finds it all irrelevant. This is probably the way with most families, especially large families with diverse branches.

And perhaps this is a metaphor for Austria, a small not-very-important country that has been part of some key histories, with branches and ties into other countries. But to avoid upsetting its more powerful neighbours, it deliberately downplays both its left- and right-wing political factions, its religious and cultural divisions, and strives to present a bland picture of itself.

This may all be an insightful presentation of a contemporary Austrian identity, but I don’t find that it makes a compelling story.