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.