This is the third book by New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton, and it was published just this year, a whole decade after The Luminaries, her Booker Prize-winner.

My audio-version was brilliantly narrated by Saskia Maarleveld (really -- bravo -- this was a tour de force, with the different voices and accents superbly rendered).

And it was a riveting story.


The New Zealand landscape that impressed us so much on our first visit in 1992. Definitely worth conserving...

The book is set in 2017, which puts us in "the last days of the John Key and Bill English government, before foreign ownership laws were amended and long before the pandemic and lockdowns made fiction difficult".

There are two major forces propelling the narrative. Firstly, we have Birnam Wood, an activist collective that works as a guerrilla gardening group. Staying as far off the radar as possible, and occasionally brushing the edges of criminality, this group of young idealists, helmed by founder Mira Bunting, fights capitalism and promotes green practice by planting and harvesting food on land no-one is using. Secondly, we have Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire, who is ostensibly buying land next to a South Island national park in order to build a survivalist bunker, but is actually busy sucking rare earth minerals out of the ground beneath the park (to protect which operation he has brought along his own mercenaries plus a swarm of surveillance drones).

The fun begins when these apparently polar opposites team up... Lemoine thinks Birnam Wood will burnish his cover story, and add a little environmental gloss to his reputation; Birnam Wood thinks Lemoine will be their ticket to doing more than limping along, barely staving off financial collapse.

It's hardly a spoiler to say that this partnership doesn't exactly work out well...

Occupying the middle ground, meanwhile, are Sir Owen Darvish and his wife, Jill, who own the park-adjacent former sheep farm that Lemoine intends to buy. Bluff, decent, salt-of-the-earth New Zealanders, they are also archetypally smug and complacent boomers...



In terms of characters, pretty much everyone is flawed. Mira is arrogant and opportunistic. Shelley, her right-hand woman, is devious and secretive. Both, when push comes to shove, are willing to go way off the path of responsible citizenship to save their own skin. Tony, a would-be environmental journalist, who splits from Birnam Wood to pursue his own scoop about Lemoine, is courageous and resourceful, but insufferably self-righteous and vain. Lemoine, meanwhile, is one of the creepiest fictional characters I've encountered in a long while. Surely a psychopath... Outwardly charming and plausible, he's not only preternaturally manipulative, but also utterly ruthless. Definitely not the kind of guy you ever want to come up against.

But I don't think it's fair to say the book exemplifies "the same old, same old: billionaires bad, leftwing radicals good". Certainly, we have more sympathy for the flailing gardeners than we do for the evil genius Lemoine. But it's depressing to think of our future being in the hands of Birnam Wood...

For Laura Miller, Catton's "sharpest darts" are aimed at some of the features of left-wing activism: "Anyone who’s belonged to a group like Birnam Wood will instantly recognize some familiar figures: the member who quietly does all the work..., the guy who angrily expounds on the failures of the contemporary left to live up to the precepts of socialism..., and the inevitable woman everyone has to tiptoe around because she’s a 'walking list of grievances.' The latter two get into a big and painfully spot-on argument at the beginning of the novel. All he can do is lecture and all she can do is take offense."

Lisa Allardice agrees: "While Catton shares her generation’s anger at the boomers -- for presiding over a period that has seen the introduction of university tuition fees, the financial crisis and an acceleration of the climate crisis for starters -- the novel’s sharpest satire is directed at her own tribe: well-meaning, left-leaning millennials... 'Millennials are quite willing to cosy up to the tech gen-Xers,' [Catton] says. 'These minerals are in the phones that are around us all the time. I want my iPhone. I want to be able to have the freedoms that it brings. We are all complicit.'"

Catton specifically says in this interview that she "wanted to stop readers playing 'the polarised blame game we are all used to in contemporary politics... [so that] you wouldn’t be able to say: "These are my people so they are obviously the good guys. These are the people that I despise so they are obviously the bad guys."' ... Catton wanted to satirise the toxicity of so much public discourse, particularly on the left, which she feels has become 'a kind of purity test' in which you are judged on using the right language or not."



One of the earliest signs that our gardeners are not being lionized is a little riff about Mira. Owen Darvish irks her because she finds it unacceptable that "anyone of this man’s age, race, gender, wealth, and associated privilege should have used his power -- allegedly -- for good, should have built his business -- allegedly -- up from the ground, from nothing, and should possess -- allegedly -- the very kind of rural authenticity that she herself most envied and pursued". And flawed judgements have important consequences. Despising Darvish, Mira is more willing to ally herself with Lemoine to put one over on him.

As Lily Meyer indicates, the characters in the novel are lenses through which we can explore the dynamics of idealism, and "the extent to which different sorts of idealists, acting in concert, can create chaos instead of change".

Accordingly, neither sort of idealism ends up being endorsed. Do you compromise and cooperate with capitalism, which may well equate to selling out? Or do you implacably oppose capitalism, which may leave you stranded out on the chilly edge, yelling all by yourself? There are no good answers, Catton tells us. Neither of these factions, after all, ends up achieving its goals.

In fact, it's a bit of a hecatomb at the end, a real Armageddon... And if I have one criticism, it's that it all tumbles to a close a little too quickly. But it's hard to know, in fairness, how else this particular story could have been wrapped up. Intrinsic in the plot is the conviction that justice will NOT be done, the little guys will NOT triumph, the authorities will NOT come and put things right. If Tony's final distress call is actually answered -- and we don't know it will be -- what sense will the authorities be able to make of what they find? It's like an allegory of our burned-out planet. When we've wiped ourselves out, and the aliens arrive to assess the damage, will they be able to figure out -- amid all the greed and ambition and too-little-too-late -- what exactly went wrong?

In the case of our characters, it's ambition that is the key to the Macbeth-derived title. As Miller points out: "Every character is, in his or her way, Macbeth; every character is susceptible to ambition in one way or another, and therefore temptable." And every character has a touching faith in his/her invulnerability, and ability to out-manipulate others-- "even when they know that the others think the same of them, even when they are plotting betrayals on the fly, even when some of their plans are immediate and abject failures".



It is probably clear from the above discussion that this novel is political in a very different way from Sally Rooney's. In Birnam Wood, we certainly hear lots about the travails of the late capitalist period, but the discussion plays out among people who are specifically -- whether wisely or not is a different question -- working to make a difference. This is an important Catton theme. She tells Allardice: "I didn’t want to write a book where nothing happened... Where the book participated in any sort of apathy or nihilism by just kind of shrugging its shoulders and saying: 'Well, actually, nothing is going to change, the writing is on the wall already.' I wanted the book to show that actions do matter."

Communication is also an important theme in the novel:

-- What we say and don't say to each other (Catton's bird's eye view allows us to watch as characters leave bits out when they pass on information);
-- The way messages get scrambled because of our preconceived ideas (in an early scene, Shelley gains significant power over Tony simply because she remembers him, while he doesn't remember her; while Tony's resolute belief in conspiracy theory stops him accurately identifying the evil he is up against);
-- The way algorithms condition us to being flattered (leaving us less equipped to recognize and resist manipulation);
-- The way modern technology leaves us horribly open to control and surveillance (Lemoine uses his vast resources to create parallel realities right and left). And so on.



The communication of self-image also comes into this category. Catton found herself painfully in the spotlight after her Booker win in 2013, when she criticized New Zealand’s "neoliberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money-hungry politicians". There was a pretty brutal backlash, which, she says, "knocked the joy out of me for a really long time".

In another interview, Catton comments that "New Zealand culture in general is a culture that has a very strong expectation that its artists will flatter the country’s, frankly, quite naive self-image". She enlarges on that national self-perception -- which Philip Matthews describes as including "the failure to see darker agendas [and] the wallowing in an underdog status that can seem superior" -- like this: "We [Kiwis] can act quite self-satisfied sometimes. I was interested to explore that in the book. It’s in me as well. It’s not something I’m observing in people around me only."

I understand what she's saying. But I think this characteristic is shared by all "smaller" polities that live in the shadow of bigger ones, have had to put up with the jibes of those bigger ones for a really long time, and feel they need all the comforting expressions of approval they can get.

But she wrote herself round, as it were: "I had a lot of anger that I had to work through towards New Zealand culture, but I started to realise more and more that satire really depends on affection... It’s so important that there’s a bedrock of love below what it is you’re satirising. So you don’t end up being self-indulgent or blame other people for things you should confront in yourself."

Whatever depths it came from, and whatever catharsis it produced, Birnam Wood is a very worthwhile read.