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Eco-idealism and staggering wealth meet in 'Birnam Wood'

John Powers

Ever since Ursula K. Le Guin and Edward Abbey lit the fuse back in the 1970s, there's been an ever-growing explosion of political eco-fiction. From Octavia Butler and Richard Powers to Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood , novelists have gotten more and more fascinated with those who fight to save the environment.

One such group occupies the center of Birnam Wood , the whooshingly enjoyable new novel by Eleanor Catton , a New Zealander whose previous book, The Luminaries , made her, at 28, still the youngest person ever to win the Booker Prize. Where that 2013 novel was a wild-and-woolly beast, Birnam Wood — its title comes from Macbeth — is shapelier and more conventional. Filled with utopian hopes, personal betrayals, accidental deaths and profoundly unaccidental murders, this New Zealand-set book is a witty literary thriller about the collision between eco-idealism and staggering wealth.

The story begins by introducing three 20-something members of Birnam Wood, a guerrilla collective that seeks to fight capitalism and ecological devastation by, legally or not, growing things on unplanted land, public and private. There's Mira, the group's willful and charismatic founder. There's her burnt-out sidekick, Shelley, who does the grunt work and secretly wants to quit the group. And then there's Tony, the most radical thinker of the bunch who has returned to the group after several years abroad. He has romantic hopes for himself and Mira — hopes that Shelley quietly hopes to sink.

Mira hears about an unoccupied farm owned by Sir Owen Darvish and his wife Jill, who embody the solidity and complacency of well-off Kiwis. Mira thinks it perfect for a Birnam Wood project. But when she drives there from Christchurch, she discovers that it's been bought by Robert Lemoine, an elusive American billionaire/drone manufacturer who says he plans to build a survivalist bunker. Attracted to Mira, Lemoine offers to help finance Birnam Wood. Because her group badly needs money, she's interested. But will a rich benefactor's money help the group spread its message — or corrupt it?

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While Catton has sympathy for the grand idealism of the Birnam Wood collective, she also sees its fault lines. Indeed, the book's at its best taking us inside the characters' heads to lay bare the illusions, desires and petty motivations that often work against their dreams. For instance, Mira emerges as something of a modern-day version of Jane Austen 's Emma — Catton actually scripted a 2020 film adaptation of that novel. Mira's sense of political righteousness blinds her to her own motivations. The disaffected Shelley accuses her of "rebelling for the sake of it, like she had always done, acting as though the rules that bound the little people were just too tiresome and ordinary to apply to her."

Working in the tradition of the 19th-century novel — one hears echoes of George Eliot as well as Austen — Catton likes to confront her characters with choices and then lay bare the consequences, often unintended, of what they've chosen. There's a great, lacerating scene in which Tony, a world-class mansplainer, falls out of favor with the group by attacking identity politics and intersectionality. Because of this split, he will wind up spying on Lemoine — a move that sends the plot caroming in a wild new direction.

You see, while our heroes in the collective are muddling their way through ordinary human issues, they're faced with a villain from a 21st-century thriller. Lemoine isn't merely an amoral billionaire with all the compassion of one of his drones. He's a high-tech bad guy, complete with NSA-level spyware and mercenaries to do his bidding. Too bad to be true, he's so skillful at wielding his malignancy that, in spite of herself, Catton seems to hold him in a kind of awe.

Normally, it would be an artistic flaw that realistic characters like Mira, Shelley, Tony and the Darvishes must confront such a comic-book baddie, and I guess it is here: What starts off looking like a novel about character winds up in a climax out of a genre novel. Yet the story plays like gangbusters: I devoured all 400-plus pages in two days.

And in showing the collective's encounter with Lemoine, Catton taps into a feeling very much of our moment. We live at a time when many environmentalists feel helpless next to mega-rich forces who seem able to despoil the planet as they wish and to avoid any governmental attempts to check them. In Birnam Wood , we see the consequences of this gap in power, and the results are not pretty.

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Eleanor Catton Wants Plot to Matter Again

Toward the end of “Birnam Wood” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the latest novel from the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton, Rosie Demarney, an otherwise minor character, gets a moment in the spotlight. She has been presented with a series of facts that seem to add up to a humiliating conclusion: the guy she likes has blown her off to pursue an old flame. Her fears are only confirmed by the embarrassed gaze of her crush’s sister. At home, clinging to her self-respect by a thread, Rosie firmly tells herself that she “was not going to play the role that he had cast her in; she was not going to spend the evening in her sweatpants, getting drunk and stalking him pathetically online.” A beat, a line break, and then the inevitable: “But hell. Nobody was watching.”

By now, if readers of “Birnam Wood” have learned one thing, it’s that someone is always watching. Whether people are being spied on by the modern technologies of surveillance (Google, G.P.S., cell phones, drones, social media) or by the more ancient techniques of intimacy (marriage, friendship, family, gossip), they are never afforded the luxury of a purely private action, or of avoiding the roles that others have written for them.

“Birnam Wood” opens with a seemingly impersonal catastrophe: a landslide in New Zealand kills five people. From this disaster a complex and often shocking sequence of events unfolds. The Darvishes, the owners of a large farm near the accident, withdraw it from sale; this withdrawal comes to the attention of Mira Bunting, “aged twenty-nine, a horticulturalist by training, and the founder of an activist collective known among its members as Birnam Wood.” Mira had previously inquired about the listing under a false identity, and she decides to visit: Birnam Wood illegally plants gardens on unused land, and the farm seems an ideal target for expansion. While trespassing on the grounds, she meets a curt American stranger who knows too much about her, including her name. He is Robert Lemoine, the billionaire co-founder of Autonomo, a drone manufacturer.

He is also, as we quickly learn, though Mira does not, responsible for the landslide. It doesn’t trouble him much. “Five dead, in the scheme of things, was basically no dead at all,” he thinks. Lemoine is in New Zealand pretending to build a covert apocalypse bunker; to this end, he is purchasing the Darvish farm under conditions of total secrecy, so secret that the estate must seem not to be for sale at all. But his actual aims are much darker: Korowai, the national park that sits beside the farm, possesses rare-earth minerals, which if extracted will make Lemoine “the richest person who had ever lived.” In Mira, Lemoine sees a kindred spirit, but also a dupe. He can use Birnam Wood as another smoke screen, a way to launder his presence through a local, eco-friendly organization. He offers Mira access to the farm and a hundred thousand dollars, suspecting, correctly, that she’ll find both the financial security and his shadowy mystique irresistible.

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Much like the moment in pool when the cue ball breaks up the carefully assembled triangle, this encounter between Mira and Lemoine ends up affecting every other character in the book, even those who have no reason to know one another. The choices they make, to use and to be used, reverberate in ways you might expect only if the image of the five crushed landslide victims lingers as you read. All of the book’s major players get a chance to turn the tide of events in their favor. Shelley Noakes, Mira’s best friend and roommate, is stealthily seeking a way out of the collective, tired of playing the steady foil to her more volatile friend. The Darvishes—Sir Owen and his wife, Lady Darvish—view Lemoine’s incredible wealth with a mixture of disgust, awe, and desire, even as they conduct business with him. And, finally, there’s Tony Gallo, Rosie’s love interest, Mira’s ex- something , and a former member of Birnam Wood, who, in a paroxysm of barely sublimated sexual jealousy, has decided to write an exposé of Lemoine, and in so doing stumbles upon Lemoine’s mining operation.

All of these people think that, with a little luck, they can manipulate another party to their advantage—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. (When Shelley first encounters Tony, she thinks that he presents an easy way to end her friendship with Mira: she will simply seduce him. She does not succeed.) Like Rosie, they have no intention of merely playing a role that somebody else wrote for them. And, like Rosie, they end up doing it anyway.

We do not live in the golden age of plot, at least where literary fiction is concerned. Outside of what we might call high-genre books—the thrillers of Ruth Rendell, say, or the crime novels of Tana French—it’s rare for a literary novel to take its plot seriously. Instead, contemporary literary fiction largely concerns itself with other things: moods, problems, situations. Few people would dream of writing a novel without characters, but a novel without a plot is practically normal. When you speak of what a novel is about, you speak thematically—it’s about surveillance, or displacement, or heterosexuality, or something along these lines.

In a recent interview, Catton commented, somewhat blandly, that “the moral development of people in plotted novels where people make choices is fascinating and important. I’d like to see more books like that.” Her interest in plot as something that arises from human choice, and not just from the context in which those choices take place, means that her own plots take a sideways approach. Just as we are constantly summing up books as types, the characters in “Birnam Wood” are constantly summing up one another, often incorrectly. When Shelley tries to seduce Tony—who, after a sojourn in Mexico, had completely forgotten that she existed—he is overwhelmed by their similarities, “astonished that he could ever have forgotten someone so thoroughly simpatico as Shelley Noakes.” Catton adds, in a rare direct address to the audience:

It never crossed his mind that since she had not forgotten him , the personality that she revealed to him might very easily have been customised, the opinions tailored, the résumé adapted, to suit what she remembered of his interests and his taste; never dreaming that she might be flirting with him, he reflected only that there was something appealingly familiar in her candid warmth and air of frank and ready capability.

One of Catton’s favorite moves is to conclude a scene from one character’s perspective only to start the next scene from the perspective of an adjacent character—someone whom the first character got slightly wrong. Shelley’s frantic musing about how to confess to Mira her desire to leave Birnam Wood is undercut by our realization that Mira has divined this desire weeks earlier. Mira’s perception of their relationship is undercut when, worried that Shelley has already left, she gets out her phone to check a “location tracker app that they had both installed . . . and never used.” But Shelley, we happen to know, uses the app to keep tabs on Mira all the time. They share an understanding of their friendship—that Mira is the top dog and Shelley is the sidekick, and that Shelley is “smothered” by this dynamic—that may not be true at all, or not true in the way they think.

Unlike Donna Tartt, who uses plot as straightforwardly as Dickens, or Sally Rooney, who has remade the marriage plot for a post-marriage era, Catton lets her plots and their attendant stakes emerge from a general situation. Like her characters, we begin without a sense of what matters, and are often pointed in the wrong direction. Initially, “Birnam Wood” seems to have no aspirations beyond an exploration of young, white, left-wing radicalism and its accompanying guilt—the kind of book that is “about” the anxiety of being a good person under capitalism and/or climate change. Mira fantasizes about brutal deaths in order to punish herself for feeling insufficiently bad about them. (“She compelled herself to imagine being crushed and suffocated, holding the thought in her mind’s eye for several seconds.”) Tony wants to argue about identity politics. When Mira allies herself with Lemoine, agreeing, over Tony’s protests, to let him finance Birnam Wood, we think we know how this will go: some hand-wringing, followed by some form of sexual congress, followed by a shrug over the problems of selling out.

We are wrong. “Birnam Wood” ’s biggest twist is not so much a particular event as the realization that this is a book in which everything that people choose to do matters, albeit not in ways they may have anticipated. Catton has a profound command of how perceptions lead to choice, and of how choice, for most of us, is an act of self-definition. Take Mira, whose determination not to be typecast lends her a stubbornness that’s easily mistaken for strength of character. Like some of her friends, Mira assumes that Lemoine’s interest in her is sexual: indeed, she spends time first imagining a scenario in which she’s propositioned and, ice-cold, turns him down, then an alternative, deflationary scenario in which she sleeps with him to prove that she’s not a prude. Her need to be unpredictable makes her easy to manipulate—it wouldn’t be unfair to say that she takes Lemoine’s money to show that she’s more than an idealist. But this choice is not, ultimately, about her. It invites violence, both symbolically—Birnam Wood now runs on “blood money,” as Tony puts it—and, as the book goes on, quite literally. The idea that her choices could affect something other than her internal narrative doesn’t occur to Mira, because it doesn’t often occur to anybody.

Meanwhile, “Birnam Wood” ’s true turns are all carefully set up, as long as you’re focussing on the right details. But none of the characters pay attention to the right things; they all think their snap impressions tell them what they need to know. Even Lemoine’s canny manipulation of others relies on the kind of lie that looks like the truth: a bunker is what people will expect him to be hiding, so that’s what he must be hiding. Discovering that they live in a world of consequence, with stakes bigger than self-image or self-respect, is as much of a shock to the characters as it is to us. Congratulations, Catton seems to say, on being just smart enough to play yourself.

Catton’s own choices are not without their critics. In a review of her second novel, the Booker Prize-winning “The Luminaries,” a critic for the Guardian wrote that the book was “a massive shaggy dog story; a great empty bag; an enormous, wicked, gleeful cheat.” But “The Luminaries” does tell a real story—a story of fated lovers—that it reveals only by inches. This romance, which appears to transcend the limits of space, is so heartfelt as to be, when put in plain view, almost embarrassing. For most of the book, it’s obscured, and we spend the first five or six hundred pages meeting the many characters whose various, complex, and sometimes tragic lives are, in the end, merely secondary. We discover what all of this is about at the same time they do.

Although “The Luminaries” stretches this form of emergent storytelling to the breaking point—it might not be a cheat, but several hundred pages is a long time to spend on misdirection—it’s clear that Catton is trying both to revive plot as a literary mode and to consider what a story line looks like in our real, unplotted life, in which things reveal themselves to have a shape only in retrospect. This project appears in a more subdued form in “The Rehearsal,” Catton’s début novel, which begins with a scandal: a student and a teacher have been discovered in a sexual affair. Everything in “The Rehearsal” takes place in a realm of high artifice, characterized by people who are so exact in their speech that you’re terrified to contemplate what they might not be saying. “A film of soured breast milk clutches at your daughter like a shroud,” a saxophone teacher informs the mother of a student. “Do you hear me, with your mouth like a thin scarlet thread and your deflated bosom and your stale mustard blouse?”

No saxophone teacher, or human being, for that matter, has ever spoken anything even approaching these words, but the arch, direct tone re-creates the unsettling world of adolescence, and the murky nature of adult expectation, more precisely than realism could. We expect the “story” of “The Rehearsal” to be about the fallout from the student-teacher affair. But this is really the backdrop for the novel’s true story, which is how the saxophone teacher tries—and fails—to use her students to reënact the story of her own frustrated love for another woman, with a different, happier ending. She fails because she cannot control the students’ choices any more than she could those of her onetime friend.

This willingness to let characters be mistaken—really, lastingly mistaken—is another quality that emerges from Catton’s privileging of human choice. When Tony uncovers proof of Lemoine’s rare-earth mining, he draws reasonable but slightly incorrect conclusions, assuming that Lemoine must be conspiring with Sir Darvish instead of deceiving him. The only people who would be in a position to correct him don’t—and so he carries on with this not false, but not true, version of events to the end. When Rosie Demarney, alone in her apartment, succumbs to an evening of Internet-stalking Tony, she stumbles across evidence that he could be in danger. In a Dickens novel, a character like Rosie might turn out to be pivotal; she’d connect the dots and save the day. Instead, she leaves the story for good. Would you, after all, go on a wild chase for someone you’d just been drunkenly Googling in your sweatpants? Someone you didn’t really know? Would it even matter if you tried?

One of the tragedies that plot brings to light is the degree to which our inner lives and intentions can simply come to nothing—unrealized despite our best efforts, misunderstood and fruitless, as the story we played our part in generating goes on without us. It is only by elevating human choice that we can see how often our choices don’t matter, after all. Or maybe it would be better to say that our choices matter only unpredictably. There’s no way of knowing what will really count until later, and by then it’s too late. Better choose.

In the course of “Birnam Wood,” Lemoine hacks phones, infiltrates e-mail accounts, operates drones with spy cameras, and employs a team of covert operatives. In his relentless surveillance, he is half critic, half author, and, in his own estimation, a kind of god. Like Catton, he tricks people into seeing what they expect to see.

But surveillance isn’t reading, much less writing; it’s data captured without interpretation. Instead of characters, we get types; instead of principles, revealed preferences. “A marketing algorithm doesn’t see you as a human being,” Tony says at one point, having lost his temper with another member of Birnam Wood:

It sees you purely as a matrix of categories: a person who’s female, and heterosexual . . . and white, and university-educated, and employed, who has these kinds of friends and shares these kinds of articles and posts these kinds of pictures and makes these kinds of searches . . . . Identity politics, intersectionality, whatever you call it—it’s the exact same thing.

It must be true that people often are what, on the surface, they seem to be; if it weren’t, algorithms wouldn’t have much use at all. There’s a certain pleasure in being a known type. At one point, Lemoine notes how “being a cliché can be very useful,” as it makes other people “think they’ve seen all there is to see.” Lady Darvish, musing on her marriage, thinks that her husband “took a certain pride in being so predictable . . . for the simple reason that he loved to see her demonstrate how well she understood him.”

Here, though, the implication is that we can read people without reducing them to a type. Owen Darvish loves to watch his wife “take that caricature and refine it, improving the likeness, adding depth and subtlety, shading it in.” Although not an optimistic book, “Birnam Wood” suggests that the greatest spook technology of all remains human love, with all its presumptive qualities, and that no external approximation will ever beat it at its game. There are things you just won’t know about other people, even if you intercept every text and every e-mail, unless you have loved them for a long time. There are gambles you are willing to take, acts of heroism and trust you are willing to commit to, because you know that you know them.

As for whether those acts matter, “Birnam Wood,” like all good books, doesn’t supply an answer. Reading it, I was drawn to the question of who represents Macbeth, the king who would be defeated only when “Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him.” Macbeth is a character severed from choice. Prophecy, like a mystical surveillance system, keeps him blameless and safe: he is simply the man who is going to be king, and he does what he must do in order to preserve himself. In studying how much this or that person resembled him, I thought about ambition, deceit, paranoia, and unscrupulous ascension to power. I wondered who would be one of the witches, or, for that matter, Macduff. I wondered a lot of things—and yet it didn’t occur to me until the book’s final pages that the most significant attribute Macbeth possesses is something much more straightforward, at least where plot is concerned. Because Macbeth doesn’t understand what he’s told, because he lets prophecy make his choices for him, because he is at heart a cowardly man, when he’s faced with a certain human ingenuity, he loses. ♦

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The Spinoff

Books February 9, 2023

Birnam wood review: an astounding analysis of human psychology.

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Books editor Claire Mabey reviews Birnam Wood, the long-awaited third novel from Booker Prize-winning Aotearoa writer Eleanor Catton. 

Crouching quietly at the heart of Birnam Wood is the real-world plight of a critically endangered New Zealand bird, the fairy tern/tara-iti. At the time of writing this review there are fewer than 40 fairy tern/tara-iti left, and just nine breeding pairs. The survival of the species depends on the sanctity of its breeding grounds, beaches North of Auckland: Mangawhai, Waipu, Pakiri, North Kaipara Head. Hovering over those strips of sand, where the birds employ camouflage to avoid predators and threats, are anxious volunteers and DOC workers: desperate to see chicks survive into adulthood and for the tiny population to swell with each breeding season. 

Just north of Mangawhai beach sits the private Tara Iti Golf Course and its adjacent luxury housing development. A 16-minute drive away is Mangawhai Village and chocolatiers Bennett’s , on whose website you can monitor the progress of fairy terns. I passed by the shop recently. It’s hard to miss: large, smart-looking, European in aesthetic, with enormous four-wheel drive car-creatures parked outside. Locals talk about the golf course and how the millionaires who built it also set up the Shorebirds Trust, ostensibly to boost the scrabble to protect the fairy terns, from whom the golf club took its name. A drone’s eye view may observe the golf course and associated properties as a nest: helicopters buzzing in and out, carrying flourishing animals to and fro, bedding in so close to the terns down there, hopelessly oblivious, in the sand. Between the mutterings of locals, the compromises and public-facing exchanges of money, land and grand gesture, the drama becomes complicated to the point of obfuscation: the fairy tern is there but not there.

Catton’s story burrows – enthrallingly, terrifyingly – into this precise entanglement. In her electrifying eco-thriller the New Zealand fairy tern becomes a conservation project that both connects and serves the interests of predatory billionaire Robert Lemoine and beknighted boomer, Thorndike local (via his wife, Jill) Owen Darvish. When their dealings are threatened by the ambitions of middle-class pseudo-activists Mira Bunting, Shelley Noakes and Tony Gallo, the cacophony of ego, ideals, sex, and politics becomes louder than the land upon which it all plays out. In short, Birnam Wood takes Shakespeare’s Macbeth for a tramp through New Zealand’s class and environmental battlegrounds and with those ingredients has produced a breathtaking analysis of human psychology in three acts – personal, political and public. Ultimately it asks whether we have, as a species at large, the survival instincts required to withstand an alarming new breed of technology-fuelled predation; whether we have the instincts to respond adequately to the warnings signs, environmental and political, that fight for our attention every day.

Catton’s battle ground is the fictional but familiar Korowai National Park and a slice of private farmland that abuts it, on the fringes of the town of Thorndike. Like every great drama, every player harbours a strong desire: Mira Bunting wants her stealthy, radical gardening collective, Birnam Wood, to have a shot at being solvent by extending their operation to growing food on the expansive piece of dormant Darvish farmland; Billionaire drone-making tech-CEO Lemoine wants the Darvish land so that he can camouflage his more sinister money-making intentions in the mineral-rich National Park; Sir Owen and Lady Jill Darvish want to keep their public profile sweet and money offered for the farm by Lemoine means a conservation profile to achieve it. And Tony Gallo, well Tony wants to be Nicky Hager: “Aloud he said, ‘Jesus Christ,’ and then again, ‘Jesus Christ ,’ and then, hushed in wonderment, he said, ‘I am going to be so fucking famous.’” 

On the macro level, the loyalties and intentions of the players in Birnam Wood appear obvious, almost archetypal. However, one of the many exquisite thrills of this book is the way the narrator drops in, like a new breed of drone, to surveil with at times horrifying accuracy and precision the inner workings of every character and the contradictions therein. Catton is astounding in her ability to, on one level, turn our attentions to alarms, blaring loud as the witches warning in Macbeth; and on another level, investigate the complex, human preoccupations that blur and dull those glaring signposts like the buffets of a helicopter’s whirr. 

Take, for example, this slice of Shelley Noakes, the administrative engine of the collective Birnam Wood, who burns quietly along Mira’s side, the picture of a middle-class millennial stuck between her tentative nature and her desire to transcend it: “For the first few months of their friendship, all that Shelley had known about Mira’s parents had been that they were former hippies who had each stood for their local constituency – her mother for the Green Party, her father for Labour – in subsequent elections, without success; and that Mira’s mother had a son from a previous relationship, Mira’s half-brother Rufus, who was the lead guitarist in a touring rock band and whom Mira’s father apparently adored. They sounded wonderfully enlightened, and the fact that Mira saw them only intermittently Shelley took as further proof of the psychological maturity that Mira found wanting in everybody else. She began to feel embarrassed that her own family convened each week for their parochial Sunday lunch, where invariably the conversation centred on, and was directed at, the dog – and she was even more embarrassed whenever Mira asked to tag along.”

Catton’s gift for interiority is mind-bending. There were many times reading the novel that I felt, with a mix of wonder and pure squirm, that my very outline was being traced with Catton’s subtle knife. 

It is important to state at this point that Birnam Wood is working within a Pākehā framework: the characters are educated, middle-class Pākehā with progressive aspirations and the clunky frustrations born from that same thing. There is a particularly potent, soul-shrinking yet hysterically funny scene early in the novel where members of Birnam Wood gather for a meeting. Returning former member Tony Gallo makes himself unwelcome with unstoppered tirades on the many hypocrisies of the progressive left: “‘There’s something so joyless about the left these days,’ Tony continued, ‘so forbidding and self-denying. And policing. No one’s having any fun, we’re all just sitting around scolding each other for doing too much or not enough – and it’s like, what kind of vision for the future is that? Where’s the hope? Where’s the humanity? We’re all aspiring to be monks where we could be aspiring to be lovers.’” The unbridled irritation and mansplaining continues onward to cover polyamory and then eventually identity politics, where Tony says, “‘Everybody here is white. Am I wrong? Everybody here at this ‘hui’ –  he put exaggerated quotes around the word – ‘is white and middle class, just like Amber, and just like me.’”

Later in the meeting, Mira (Tony’s love interest as well as lead protagonist) tells the collective that billionaire Robert Lemoine wants to invest in them. Mira does her best to justify the exchange in a familiarly awkward spill of doubt and hope: “There are, like twenty-five red flags. I get it. But again, for what it’s worth, I’ve done a bit of reading about Autonomo online, and it honestly doesn’t seem like they⸺”

It’s Tony of course who interjects with deep disgust and distrust, saying that a billionaire who makes surveillance drones and who is building a bolthole in New Zealand is “literally the opposite of everything we stand for.” The action of Birnam Wood, the real battle, begins here. With a departure from socialist values and the attempt to wed the devil (cold-hearted, calculating, psychopath predator, Lemoine). Tony’s instincts take him down the investigative path alone, tramping through the bush, gathering information. For all his rage, and accurate suspicions, he becomes like the fairy tern, a frail creature who tries to use camouflage to hide from Lemoine’s endlessly resourced weaponry: predatory drones and hired guns. 

Camouflage is a crucial motif in the novel. It of course takes its cue from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the famous play about loyalty and guilt, and innocence and ruthless ambition. In the play, the witches tell Macbeth that he can only be killed when Great Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. Macbeth, considering the movement of a forest impossible, rests easy. In the end, branches from trees in Birnam Wood are used by English soldiers to camouflage their advance, giving them the upper-hand enough to kill the King. 

The inability to imagine the worst, to anticipate the twisted ends of human ambition to bend the planet to our will, is the downfall in both epic stories. It would be too much, here, to reveal who falls, and precisely why, in Catton’s tale of misapplied instinct and frail humanity, but I look forward to every reader’s breathless horror as they reach the final chapters in the riveting, racy third act. 

Because Catton is an immersion artist. The deftness with which Catton’s third book – coming 10 years after The Luminaries won the Booker Prize – plunges us into the calamitous depths of our nature is freshly astonishing. When I began reading Birnam Wood I started to asterisk sentences that stood out to me as leggy, multi-parenthetic, joyrides of perfection. After the first few pages I realised that the book would soon become a constellation of blazing stars. Catton’s prose brings to mind Austen and Woolf and Mantel. She is among that echelon of literary mastery. Her sentences are the stuff of dreams: of ten-course degustations that give you the satisfaction of home cooking at its finest. In Catton’s hands the descent into character is so complete, so startlingly multi-dimensional, that the ride cannot help but be exhilarating and entirely consuming. 

This, from Tony on page 157, is among one of my favourite examples:

“He imagined them spreading tarpaulins in the fields, weighting the middles and staking down the corners so the canvas wouldn’t fly away, perhaps setting out rainwater butts under drainpipes, and fashioning catchments in run-off ditches beside the road, and then piling back into Mira’s van, drenched and laughing, to drive back to the shearing shed where they’d set up their base of operations; he imagined them stringing a clothesline among the ancient wooden huts to hang their wet jackets up to dry, and he conjured in his mind a lofted space beyond the chutes where, in a happy hubbub of cross-pollinating chatter, they would all gather round to help prepare the evening meal, chopping vegetables for curry, and washing rice, and rolling out chapatis with an empty wine bottle dusted with flour, and someone would be strumming a guitar, or reading out Listener crossword clues, or narrating the gist of some recent article that had done the rounds online, and someone would be making an inventory of their progress to date, or delegating tasks for the coming day, or labelling seed sets for planting, and someone would be knitting, and someone would be poking irrigation holes in the bottoms of empty yogurt pots with a heated needle, and from time to time a snatch of melody from the guitar would cut through their conversation and they would all sing along in unison for a phrase or two – and then dissolve into embarrassed laughter, for at Birnam Wood such instances of unprompted and unaffected concord were always followed, Tony remembered, by a discomfiting, self-consciousness, for a moment everybody feeling, squeamishly, just a tiny bit like members of a cult.”

Catton has set her novel in 2017: the year that marked the beginning of Jacinda Ardern’s term as prime minister; when severe flooding affected the South Island’s West Coast; when wildfires tore through the Port Hills in Christchurch. There were a number of reported deaths that year too. Among them prominent men in business and philanthropy, honoured with groups of capital letters and titles from the Crown; and Paddles, Ardern’s cat. All of this to say that, looking back, the patchwork of events is familiar, even ordinary, despite the collection of disasters and the oddities of what we chose to mark down as important – on the Internet, in our media, sealed there for collective memory.  

This, to me, is what Birnam Wood is getting at. The earth is moving around us all the time. We are approaching Dunsinane, inevitably: Forests are shifting, land is slipping, water is flooding. Predators are moving, camouflaged in plain sight. What is it that is tying so many of us in knots, rendering us incapable of doing anything about it? At the end of the novel there is a rip-roaring, last-gasp plea for attention. The question that remains is who will respond and what will be done? Is there a chance for the collective to move against the new Kings of this world? Or, as in the case of the fairy tern, does it feel uncomfortably like too little, too late? 

Apparently, the Shorebirds Trust has invested $300,000 in the conservation of the fairy tern (the most recent figure I could find was from this NZ Geographic article , 2020). The amount required to become a member of the Tara Iti Golf Club is not disclosed, though membership is invitation only and is said to require six-figures. I’m dazzled by Catton’s brilliance. And terrified too. This is fiction that rubs very close to the bone. 

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $50, hardback) can be purchased from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland .

The Spinoff Review of Books is proudly brought to you by Unity Books and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books online today. 

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Eleanor Catton on ‘Birnam Wood’

The new zealand writer, who won the man booker prize in 2013 for her novel “the luminaries,” discusses her latest book..

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Eleanor Catton’s new novel, “ Birnam Wood ,” is a rollicking eco-thriller that juggles a lot of heady themes with a big plot and a heedless sense of play — no surprise, really, from a writer who won Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for her previous novel, “The Luminaries,” and promptly established herself as a leading light in New Zealand’s literary community.

On this week’s podcast, Catton tells the host Gilbert Cruz how that early success affected her writing life (not much) as well as her life outside of writing (her marriage made local headlines, for one thing). She also discusses her aims for the new book and grapples with the slippery nature of New Zealand’s national identity.

“You very often hear New Zealanders defining their country in the negative rather than in the positive,” she says. “If you ask somebody about New Zealand culture, they’ll begin by describing something overseas and then they’ll just say, Oh, well, we’re just not like that. … I think that that’s solidified over time into this kind of very odd sense of supremacy, actually. It’s born out of an inferiority complex, but like many inferiority complexes, it manifests as a superiority complex.”

A word of warning, for listeners who care about plot spoilers: Toward the end of their conversation, Catton and Cruz talk about the novel’s climactic scene and some of the questions it raises. So if you’re a reader who prefers to be taken by surprise, you may want to finish “Birnam Wood” before you finish this episode.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected] .

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The Best Fiction Books » Thrillers (Books)

Birnam wood: a novel, by eleanor catton & saskia maarleveld (narrator).

☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

🏆 An AudioFile Best Mystery/Suspense Audiobook of 2023

Recommendations from our site

“One of the biggest books of the season must be Eleanor Catton’s hotly anticipated third novel Birnam Wood . Pitched (somewhat unexpectedly) as a psychological thriller, it follows the members of a guerilla gardening group as they take over an abandoned farm in cautious partnership with a paranoid American billionaire with plans to build his own survivalist bunker.” Read more...

The Notable Novels of Spring 2023

Cal Flyn , Five Books Editor

“Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize for her novel, The Luminaries . This is very different. It’s also set in her native New Zealand, but it’s a kind of environmentalist thriller. It’s extremely witty, extremely pacey, and incredibly well crafted. It’s about the fight over a particular patch of threatened ground in rural New Zealand. A group of guerrilla gardeners wants to use it for their organic ecological project but it’s also in the sights of miners and developers. The clash between them is executed with incredible panache, wit, surprise and suspense.

This is a book which on its back cover has an endorsement from none other than Stephen King , which I think tells you about the narrative drive that Eleanor Catton achieves here. It’s enormously enjoyable and, of course, it raises all of these profound questions about who should control the land and how it can be protected from environmental degradation.”

Best Political Novels of 2023, recommended by Boyd Tonkin

Other books by Eleanor Catton and Saskia Maarleveld (narrator)

First lie wins by ashley elston & saskia maarleveld (narrator), our most recommended books, the talented mr ripley by patricia highsmith, eye of the needle by ken follett, fatherland by robert harris, the day of the jackal by frederick forsyth, the thirty-nine steps by john buchan, rebecca by daphne du maurier.

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A New Zealand Eco-Thriller Where No One Gets Off Scot-Free

Eleanor catton, the youngest-ever booker winner, confirms her promise with the taut, satirical birnam wood..

The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton’s breakthrough, was a clockwork marvel, a pastiche of the Victorian sensation novel set in the gold fields of 19 th -century New Zealand and elaborately patterned after the astrological configuration of the time—while at the same time a credible replication of the pleasure of reading Wilkie Collins. The book was dazzling enough to make her the youngest winner of the Booker Prize in 2013, and the fame it brought caused her quite a bit of grief at home, after she criticized New Zealand’s ruling class for being “neoliberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money-hungry politicians.”

Birnam Wood , Catton’s long-awaited follow-up, is set in the present day and expands upon that concern for the fate of her nation. The novel is a tightly plotted thriller enriched with tartly satirical depictions of an assortment of elements that outsiders casually associate with New Zealand: natural splendor, earnestly decent white people carefully borrowing ideas from Māori culture, environmental threats, and creepy American tech billionaires setting up boltholes in which to ride out the apocalypse they’re doing nothing to prevent. The title comes from the name of a guerrilla gardening collective that reclaims unused land to grow food, which in turn is named after the Scottish forest that figures in the witches’ prophecy to Macbeth that he shall go unvanquished until its trees come to Dunsinane.

Birnam Wood

By Eleanor Catton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Mira Bunting, the charismatic 29-year-old founder of Birnam Wood, learns of an abandoned plan to subdivide a former sheep farm near a national park on the South Island. A landslide has buried part of the main highway and scuttled the project; to Mira, this sounds like the perfect site to expand her illicit farming operation. It doesn’t hurt that the land’s boomer owner, Owen Darvish, deeply annoys her because of his prominent involvement with conservation projects. It irks her 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.”

As the novel moves smoothly through a half-dozen points of view—Darvish himself is revealed to have only a cosmetic interest in environmentalism and is absurdly pleased to receive a knighthood for his work—Catton nevertheless reserves her sharpest darts for a certain flavor of lefty activism whose foibles are both peculiar to Mira’s generation and not. Anyone who’s belonged to a group like Birnam Wood will instantly recognize some familiar figures: the member who quietly does all the work (Mira’s best friend, Shelley), the guy who angrily expounds on the failures of the contemporary left to live up to the precepts of socialism (an aspiring journalist named Tony, with whom Mira had a one-night stand years ago), 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.

This exchange (“Um, just so I’m clear … you’re saying that intersectionality is bullshit ?”) takes place at a “hui”—the Māori word for meeting—at which Mira announces that Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire in the process of buying the farmland from Darvish, has offered to invest handsomely in the collective. The money will be enough to let Birnam Wood “break good” and become a full-fledged, self-sustaining nonprofit. Yes, Lemoine made his fortune in drones and surveillance technology, but “not the military kind,” Mira assures the other members. Tony objects—“Mass surveillance is totalitarian and oppressive. The billionaire class undermines solidarity by its very existence”—but he has so alienated the rest of the collective that his points don’t register.

Birnam Wood is an enjoyably piquant blend of fictional modes. Early on, there’s plenty of Sally Rooney-esque dissections of the intricacies of millennial relationships. Shelley, who wants to leave Birnam Wood but can’t quite summon the nerve to do so outright, contemplates sleeping with Tony because she knows that this will force a break with Mira, who still carries a torch for him. When the novel swerves to Lemoine’s point of view, it plunges the reader into a thrillerish world of intrigue for its own sake as well as for profit. Lemoine’s persona is a series of poses designed to play to other people’s fondness for stereotypes and lull them into underestimating him. With every twist of the plot, he swiftly and ruthlessly recalculates his tactics to maximize his own advantage and minimize his liability. “Are you a psychopath?” Mira asks Lemoine outright when he catches her during her reconnaissance trip to the farm. “Now, how would a psychopath respond?” is his coy reply.

Is Lemoine a bit of a Bond villain? Well, yes. But in his manipulation of the other characters, his ability to arrange them like chessmen to act out the scenarios of his choosing, he’s also a lot like a novelist. Observing his endless, ingenious calculations is one of the many pleasures of Birnam Wood. He’s also not completely pragmatic. Lemoine’s interest in Mira is spurred not by her idealism but by her transgression—trespassing, using false identities to get the goods on possible farming sites, and other gambits that make her a “little criminal,” in his eyes. Inviting Mira and her posse of do-gooders to the farm may not further the smooth functioning of Lemoine’s covert operation, but it appeals to the billionaire’s imp of the perverse. It also sets the novel’s story in motion.

Almost all of the pieces of Birnam Wood fit together as intricately and operate as pleasingly as Lemoine’s stratagems, with the notable exception of the group’s name, which is never properly explained. Why would such an earnest lefty Kiwi group pick a moniker from a Shakespeare play? (Tentatively, Shelley suggests a Māori alternative.) Here, Catton tips her hand. She has a penchant for schema herself, and with Birnam Wood , as with The Luminaries , she began the project not with a plot but with a chart . Every character is, in his or her way, Macbeth; every character is susceptible to ambition in one way or another, and therefore temptable. Darvish has a provincial’s desire to impress the American big shot. Mira wants Birnam Wood to achieve “nothing less than radical, widespread, and lasting social change.” When Tony, an impressive bushwhacker, takes to the bush and discovers the secret behind Lemoine’s interest in the South Island, his first thought is “I am going to be so fucking famous.” Even the diabolical Lemoine falls afoul of his own delight in playing the puppet master.

Macbeth is a tragedy, which hints that Birnam Wood will not end as reassuringly as the typical thriller. If Catton has a weakness as a novelist—and she doesn’t have many—it’s that her fondness for comprehensive patterning is not very novelistic. In essence, the novel is about individuals, how they feel and think and change and in doing so shape the world they live in, even if they only do so in small ways. But Catton’s characters resemble the figures in Greek tragedy, people enmeshed in systems whose attempts to commandeer their own fates inevitably end in tears and blood. It may upset readers who were certain they knew what kind of resolution was coming, but that is surely Catton’s point. Hubris will always get you in the end.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton: A big, brash cerebral snapshot of the modern world

Catton blends literary and commercial fiction in her latest masterful display of storytelling and character set in new zealand.

How do you follow a novel that made you the youngest winner in the history of the Booker Prize? Answer: with another exceptional read. Eleanor Catton’s latest book, Birnam Wood, is literary fiction with the propulsive pace of a thriller, a masterful display of omniscient storytelling, a cautionary tale of friendship soured, a shrewd take on environmental activism and the global existentialist threat, and undoubtedly one of the books of the year.

Everything about Birnam Wood is taut and tightly wound, from the title and epigraph that reference Macbeth, to the carefully curated list of characters, to a plot that unfolds over a relatively short timeframe, to the chosen setting in an isolated region of New Zealand’s south island, the fictional Korowai Pass, where a landslide has closed the roads, meaning that “the town was now contained in all directions but one”. Catton takes such hallmarks of the suspense genre and makes them her own in a story that never flags in over 400 pages, buoyed along by the author’s gift for narrative tension and her fluid, elegant prose.

Birnam Wood opens with an establishing, panoramic shot of the region, like a classic 19th-century novel, before tapering to the perspective of Mira Bunting, head of the anarchist gardening collective Birnam Wood. After the landslide, Mira plans to occupy an abandoned farm – owned by wealthy local couple Sir Owen and Lady Darvish (another nod to Macbeth) – but unbeknown to her, an American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, has got there before her, making a bid for the land under the pretense of building a survivalist bunker to see out the apocalypse. What follows is a tense, thrilling story that puts a small cast of highly contemporary characters under extreme pressure to explosive results.

[  Eleanor Catton: a luminous new star in the literary constellation Opens in new window  ]

The omniscient third perspective suits this type of narrative. Catton deploys the authorial voice with aplomb, allowing the reader to see more than the characters’ limited viewpoints, to appreciate their weaknesses, to anticipate how such traits might be exploited. It also leaves room for plenty of sharp comic asides. Birnam Wood is a tragedy, but like all good tragedies, it contains bitter flashes of humour.

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Mira and her second-in-command, Shelley, have bonded over Shelley’s mother’s reticence about their work: “At Birnam Wood ‘Shelley’s mum’ had become a kind of shorthand for the many evils of the baby-boomer generation.” Elsewhere, returning traveller Tony gives a PhD-length summary of his backpacking adventures. Billionaire Robert thinks about replying “unsubscribe” to the long-winded emails of a colleague. A wonderful set piece around a homemade bowl of soup sees two equally correct, and equally annoying, factions of the collective get into an argument about identity politics. Throughout these brightly evocative scenes, Catton is busy setting up more twists, tightening the screws.

Tony, for all his self-mythologising, turns out to be a great foil to Robert’s machinations. Each of the main characters – Mira, Shelley, Tony, Robert, Lady Darvish – are intelligent, enterprising and physically strong, which raises the stakes considerably. There is the sense that anyone could win in the end. Unusually for a literary novel, the book is action-packed, which is to say full of compelling events and conflicts, but also in the literal sense of how the characters act, the choices they make when under pressure, the consequences of these choices at once surprising and fateful.

[  History Keeps Me Awake at Night: A voice-led debut about the trials of modern life Opens in new window  ]

Catton is the author of The Luminaries, winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize and a global bestseller. Her debut novel, The Rehearsal, won the Betty Trask Prize, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and longlisted for the Orange Prize. As a screenwriter, she has adapted The Luminaries for television, and Jane Austen’s Emma for feature film. Born in 1985 in Canada and raised in New Zealand, she now lives in Cambridge.

With each of her novels to date, Catton has been preternaturally good at finding the sweet spot between literary and commercial fiction, an heir to writers like Donna Tarrt and Jeffrey Eugenides. Her insight into character is similarly astute, the judgments swiftly rendered: “[Mira] preferred the company of men. Her favoured style of conversation was impassioned argument that bordered on seduction, and although it was distasteful, not to mention tactically unwise, to admit that one enjoyed flirtation, she never felt freer, or funnier, or more imaginatively potent than when she was the only woman in the room.”

Ultimately though, this is an unapologetically political novel, more concerned with the abuses of power of government and elite societies than the navel-gazing of any particular character. Catton has said that she wanted to explore the contemporary political moment without being partisan. She has more than achieved this with Birnam Wood, a big, brash cerebral novel of multiple perspectives, a snapshot of the modern world, to paraphrase Macbeth’s witches, where fair is foul and foul is fair.

Sarah Gilmartin

Sarah Gilmartin is a contributor to The Irish Times focusing on books and the wider arts

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StarTribune

Review: 'birnam wood,' by eleanor catton.

I'll start my review with the headline: Eleanor Catton's "Birnam Wood" is one of 2023's most sophisticated, stylish and searching literary works, a full-on triumph from a generational talent. Catton is best known for her Booker Prize-winning "The Luminaries," published a decade ago; at age 28 she was (and remains) the youngest laureate. Her new novel, titled after a ragtag team of ecological leftists, employs the thriller form to magnificent effect.

Set on New Zealand's rugged South Island before the pandemic, "Birnam Wood" follows Birnam Wood as they plant crops and flowers along highway medians and abandoned urban lots. Mira, their self-possessed, 20-something leader, pushes a rigid agenda, aided by her confidante Shelley, who sulks in the shadow of her friend.

After a landslide near the postcard-perfect town of Thorndike, abutting Kurowai, a national park, Mira scouts a former sheep station now owned by Owen Darvish, who has jetted off to London for a knighthood. While trespassing, Mira encounters a macho American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, who flies a private plane to and from Lord and Lady Darvish's airstrip. Mid-40s, he's deep into a secretive business deal with the couple. He visits their property frequently, for reasons that he's careful to hide.

Lemoine is the archetype of a sexy, sinister plutocrat. His swagger seduces Mira. In turn he's captivated by her assertiveness and guile: he offers her group fields and tools to farm. This strange-bedfellows partnership raises red flags for Tony, Mira's ex-boyfriend, who has just returned to New Zealand after a stint abroad. An aspiring journalist, Tony also stakes out the Darvish acreage, even slipping into Kurowai park, where he discovers a phalanx of drones and a creepy testing site. Something's amiss in the bush.

Till Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane / I cannot taint with fear. The author casts Lemoine as the egomaniacal, self-deluded Thane of Cawdor and Mira as Lady Macbeth, she of questionable ethics and Out-damned-spot fame.

Catton writes languid sentences that fold back on themselves amid a lift of conjunctions and prepositional phrases, much like Lemoine's cockpit skills: "Nothing in the world compared to the liquid thrill of piloting a craft through three axes of movement, feeling the vertical, the lateral and the longitudinal as divergent possibilities curving away from him through air that was tactile and elastic and textured with a warp and a woof."

Climate crisis, late-stage capitalism, and male predation: "Birnam Wood" traverses narrative territory similar to Stephen Markley's "The Deluge" and Rebecca Makkai's "I Have Some Questions for You."

But in its scope and execution it moves beyond these novels just as smoothly as Lemoine's plane glides upward. Catton deftly fleshes out her characters' back stories; as a child Lemoine taught himself chess, archvillain as embryo: "His goal had been to become so ambidextrous when it came to action and reaction, move and countermove, that he would reach the point where half the games he played were won by white, and half by black: only then, he'd told himself, could he really call himself a master." He can't control each piece on the board, though, and the author keeps us guessing until the startling crescendo.

I'll end my review with the headline: Eleanor Catton's "Birnam Wood" is one of this year's most sophisticated, stylish, and searching works, a full-on triumph from a once-in-a-generation talent.

Hamilton Cain reviews fiction and nonfiction for a range of venues, including the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Brooklyn.

Birnam Wood By: Eleanor Catton. Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 432 pages, $28.

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A Biting Satire About the Idealistic Left

Eleanor Catton’s new novel, Birnam Wood , pokes at the pieties of those who want to change the world.

Ask me how much time and money I have devoted, in my adult life, to conscious efforts to be a good person, and I would struggle to quantify it. Of course, I would also struggle to tell you what “being good” means. My ideas seem to change constantly, which means the target shifts. Besides, the world I inhabit does not make goodness easy, for me or anyone else. I put clothes I no longer wear in giveaway bins run by a profoundly inefficient nonprofit ; I assiduously recycle despite reports that my plastic is likely “ headed to landfills, or worse ”; I sign up for shifts at a food bank, then cancel because I have to work. If I were giving away more money, or more of my time, my efforts would surely be wobblier or more questionable still.

Birnam Wood , the third novel by the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton, picks up on the instability of trying to be good, a pursuit the book views quite bleakly. Loosely about the idealistic antics of a guerrilla gardening group, it has no hero but rather an ensemble of antiheroes whose foibles Catton uses to poke, quite hard, at the dreams and pieties of people who believe they can change the world. Such an impulse is a major shift from Catton’s Man Booker Prize–winning second novel, The Luminaries , an intricate, glowing love story set during New Zealand’s gold rush. Birnam Wood , in contrast, is dark in both its outlook and its omnipresent humor.

Catton is especially sharp in her portrayal of Mira Bunting, Birnam Wood’s charismatic founder. Day to day, the group plants legal gardens in donated yards and illegal ones on unmonitored land across New Zealand. Mira feels sure this project will someday generate “radical, widespread, and lasting social change” by showing people “how much fertile land was going begging, all around them, every day … and how arbitrary and absurdly prejudicial the entire concept of land ownership, when divorced from use or habitation, really was!” She is so confident, in fact, that when an American billionaire—who, to the reader, is plainly menacing—offers her a major donation and access to a large swath of land to cultivate, she barely blinks before making the executive decision that the group should accept.

Catton swiftly reveals Robert Lemoine, the billionaire in question, to be a James Bond–style bad guy, a 100-percent-evil evildoer who supports Birnam Wood only because he can use its garden to help conceal his scheme to illegally mine rare-earth minerals from a protected nature reserve next to land he has recently, secretly bought. Simply by linking Birnam Wood to him, Mira puts herself and the group in great danger. Catton draws Lemoine in great detail, but he is less a three-dimensional character than a wall for her to project her other characters against. His static, reliable badness allows—and occasionally causes—everyone else’s degree of goodness to flicker and change.

That concept of goodness gets put to the test first with the group’s debates over whether it’s right to take Lemoine’s money. Before long, though, the novel begins questioning the nature of do-gooding in a compromised and compromising world. It gradually transforms into a sincere interrogation of the relationship between morality and the ability to bring about positive change. Birnam Wood wants to know if a person has to be good to do good—and how to identify what goodness is in the first place.

If Birnam Wood is an exploration of idealism, its characters are the different lenses through which Catton wants us to consider it. Mira is a classic founder, charismatic and self-confident to the point of rashness. She attracts rapt audiences, which means that no one questions her Lemoine plan but Tony, a Bernie-bro type whose strident opposition has the effect of actually pushing the group toward accepting the billionaire’s money. Mira’s loyal sidekick, Shelley, is reliable and slightly gullible in the way that the unimaginative sometimes are. As the two lead a ragtag group of volunteers to camp on Lemoine’s land, their dynamic underscores the extent to which different sorts of idealists, acting in concert, can create chaos instead of change.

Mira cares only for dramatic transformation. Indeed, her minor impulses are not good at all. On the solo trip that leads to her first encounter with Lemoine, she pitches her tent at a campsite with “an honesty box for camp fees that Mira pretended not to see.” Pretended is key here: Alone, Mira has no motivation to do the little right thing; indeed, she feels herself to be above it. Meanwhile, Shelley, who would never walk by an honesty box, feels that she could do more overall good if she could be more like Mira. In this contrast, Catton captures a broader tension: between minor purists like Shelley, unable to compromise on the small stuff yet glad to go along with Mira on bigger decisions, and leaders like Mira, whose ambition leads her far past pragmatism into a dangerous dirtying of her hands.

Read: What we gain from a good-enough life

Tony is another sort of purist entirely. He cares about purity on a big scale, and he’s more than willing to fight for it. While the group builds hoop houses and plants seedlings, and Shelley, in the “stout belief that there was nothing more beneficial to group harmony than to ensure the food was plentiful and good,” spends too much of Lemoine’s donation on “cured meats, and hard cheeses, and decent coffee, and kombucha cultures,” Tony marches into the nature reserve near Birnam Wood’s new project, having declared himself an investigative journalist—he has a blog—and decided to expose the Bad Thing he feels sure Lemoine is up to.

Catton balances constantly on the razor’s edge between writing Tony as a comic pest and making him so irritating that he is nearly unreadable. Often, he is redeemed by the fact that he is correct. Tony worships “intellectual rigour;” his signature insult is “You’re not being rational here.” But as he tramps around the reserve, he begins to see that reason is not the only lens for viewing the world, even as his rational powers tell him that Lemoine (whose illegal mining, by this stage in the novel, is well under way) cannot possibly mean either Birnam Wood or the nation of New Zealand well. Tony’s willingness to take on a Goliath such as Lemoine makes him the novel’s only character with a prayer of actually changing things in a major sort of way—unlike Mira, whose attraction to power undoes many of her dreams.

Part of what seems to intrigue Catton is the question of whether it is better to aspire to what could be called Big Good—for Tony, exposing Lemoine’s mining scheme; for Mira and her volunteers, shifting public opinion on land ownership—or Small Good. Before Lemoine came on the scene, Birnam Wood did quite a lot of the latter by growing vegetables on fallow land and donating a large chunk of their yield to the hungry. Mira, plainly, was never content with this work: She wouldn’t even accept Shelley’s repeated suggestion that they launch a community-supported agriculture program, which would have given the group more financial and logistical stability and allowed them to expand their good works. Stability is undramatic, and to a person who sees herself as a mover and shaker, drama is inherently desirable. For much of Birnam Wood , it is tempting to wish Mira had stuck to her small gardens—but Tony is as big a drama lover as Mira, and Catton pushes the reader to hope against hope that he will pull his exposé off.

Tony is not a fun character to root for. Birnam Wood would be, in some sense, a more enjoyable book if Catton made it possible to imagine that Mira and Shelley could somehow band together to prevent the ecological destruction Lemoine’s mining plan will wreak, and then grow the greatest garden of all time. But from the moment the group sets up camp near the reserve, it is clear that Mira is too taken with Lemoine—or, worse still, with the oblique and exaggerated reflection of herself that she sees in him—to resist him in any way. Her infatuation and Shelley’s credulity undermine the usefulness of Birnam Wood’s work and send the novel skidding toward tragedy and disaster.

Ultimately, Birnam Wood suggests that usefulness is the only reliable metric for either Big or Small Good, imperfect though it may be. It would be useful for Tony to expose Lemoine; it is useful for Birnam Wood to feed the hungry. Quite often, Catton seems to be searching among her flawed protagonists for the bits of usefulness they produce, and to take those bits of value seriously without ignoring the ways that each character’s flaws prevent them from doing better. But she also suggests that in the face of badness—or, frankly, in the quotidian, compromising situations that do-gooders less flamboyant than Mira still find themselves in every day—caution grows more necessary, not less. As Mira never quite learns,  you get nowhere by going too fast.

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BookBrowse Reviews Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

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Birnam Wood

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In Birnam Wood , her first novel since the Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries , Eleanor Catton delivers a literary thriller that's also a blistering rebuttal of late-stage capitalism.

Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries , which won the Booker Prize in 2013, was notable not only for being the longest book to be awarded the prize (at 800+ pages) but also for its author, just 28 at the time, being the youngest winner ever. More subjectively, The Luminaries is that rare novel that's both exquisitely crafted and a real literary tour de force, while also being a ripping good yarn. It's taken Catton ten years to publish a subsequent novel, but have no fear— Birnam Wood offers the same combination of rollicking storytelling undergirded by genuine intellectual engagement (and don't worry—this one's only about half the length). Catton's new novel is set in New Zealand in 2017, in the wake of a massive landslide that has almost entirely cut off access to a tract of land, known as Thorndike, adjacent to a national park. The Thorndike estate, owned by recently knighted Sir Owen Darvish (who made his fortune in pest control), had been slated to be divided into individual plots of land for a subdivision. Due to the landslide, though, which will supposedly take years to clear, the property has become significantly less valuable to would-be suburban homeowners. It has, however, caught the attention of Mira Bunting, an activist horticulturist in her late 20s. Mira is the founder of a collective known as Birnam Wood, who—at least on their website—are a group of idealistic young volunteers who gladly turn underused backyards and office park lawns into flourishing gardens, sharing the harvest with the landowners generous enough to lend their plot of earth. Unbeknownst to the public, however (and even to many of the group's members), Birnam Wood is also engaged in guerilla farming on public lands, and on properties that are too vast for their owners to adequately monitor for any unapproved activity. When Mira hears about the abandonment of real estate development plans in Thorndike, the seed of an idea plants itself in her imagination. Mira is not the only one with her eye on Thorndike's potential. American billionaire Robert Lemoine is CEO of the company Autonomo, maker of surveillance drones. According to his initial conversations with the Darvishes, Lemoine is just the latest member of the super-rich to identify rural New Zealand as the perfect place to build a luxury bunker to ride out the coming apocalypse—and Thorndike seems like the ideal location. However, he has other reasons for wanting a presence in Thorndike, reasons he'd like to keep secret. So when his drones (naturally) spot Mira poking about Thorndike's perimeter, he decides to make her an offer she can't refuse—even if it's not really his place to make it. Mira and Lemoine are a delightfully mismatched pair, and readers will relish seeing the ways in which they dance around one another while also using one another. Mira, although ostensibly the selfless do-gooder, is in many ways just as conniving and calculating as Lemoine, who comes off, as the story progresses, as ethically bankrupt but at least honest about it. Theirs is just one of the richly complicated relationships at play as Catton's drama unfolds—there's Mira's old flame Tony, newly returned from several years teaching abroad and eager both to impress her with his ideological purity and, in his new role as investigative blogger, to get to the bottom of the highly secretive Darvish/Lemoine land deal. And there's the push and pull of Mira's long-time collaboration with her friend, roommate and business partner Shelley, who longs to escape from Mira's thrall but keeps getting pulled back in—perhaps with disastrous results. Birnam Wood unfolds quickly—even the political and ideological debates proceed at a snappy clip—and is frequently extremely funny, even after tragedy ensues. But it's also deeply engaged with political and economic concerns, pointing out at every turn the borderline absurdities of where the current climate of inequality and monetization has gotten us, and then using those absurdities to further the plot. Once again, Catton has constructed a novel that succeeds both intellectually and emotionally.

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'birnam wood' by eleanor catton.

The Folger Spotlight

Folger Book Club returns on Thursday, August 1  with a discussion of Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. To get ready for the conversation, we’ve compiled some introductory information on this “eco-thriller” exploring questions of ambition.

What is Birnam Wood about?

The Booker Prize–winning author of  The Luminaries  brings us  Birnam Wood , a gripping thriller of high drama and kaleido scopic insight into what drives us to survive. Birnam Wood is on the move . . . A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last.

But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place: he has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam’s founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He’s intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although they’re poles apart politically, it seems Lemoine and the group might have enemies in common. But can Birnam trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize–winning author of  The Luminaries , Eleanor Catton’s  Birnam Wood  is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed study of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, unflinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.

Critical Reception

” . . . thrilling. “Birnam Wood” nearly made me laugh with pleasure. The whole thing crackles, like hair drawn through a pocket comb.” — The New York Times

“. . . another virtuoso performance: elaborately plotted, richly conceived, enormously readable.” — The Guardian

“. . .whooshingly enjoyable. . .Filled with utopian hopes, personal betrayals, accidental deaths and profoundly unaccidental murders, this New Zealand-set book is a witty literary thriller about the collision between eco-idealism and staggering wealth.”— NPR

Why did we choose this book?

The Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection explores not only Shakespeare’s life and works, but also the plays’ historical context, source material, critical and performance histories, and the ways in which they inspire and are adapted by contemporary novelists.

Kicking off our “Whose Democracy?” season,  Birnam Wood  asks questions about who truly holds power and how personal boundaries are continuously redrawn by ambition and opportunity, inspired by themes and relationships in Shakespeare’s  Macbeth.

About the author: Eleanor Catton

From Macmillan Publishers

Eleanor Catton  is the author of the international bestseller  The Luminaries , winner of the Man Booker Prize and a Governor General’s Literary Award. Her debut novel,  The Rehearsal , won the Betty Trask Award, was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and was long-listed for the Orange Prize. She is also the screenwriter of  Emma , a 2020 feature film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. Born in Canada and raised in New Zealand, she now lives in Cambridge, England.

Content Transparency

Birnam Wood includes references to potentially sensitive subjects. Expand below for a list of content (may include spoilers).

• Physical/gun violence
• Vehicular manslaughter
• Suicide (referenced)

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This month, we are thrilled to partner again with  Politics and Prose,  DC’s premiere independent bookstore devoted to cultivating community and strengthening the common good through books, programs, and a respectful exchange of ideas.

Orders can be placed  online , or at any of the  locations throughout DC —Connecticut Avenue NW, The Wharf, and Union Market.

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Birnam Wood: A Novel Hardcover – March 7, 2023

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A Best Book of the Year : The New York Times Book Review, NPR , The New Yorker , The Washington Post , The Atlantic, Time, Financial Times, Slate, The Chicago Public Library, Kirkus, The Telegraph A Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick “[A] savagely satirical thriller.” ― People The Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries brings us Birnam Wood , a gripping thriller of high drama and kaleido scopic insight into what drives us to survive. Birnam Wood is on the move . . . A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place: he has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam’s founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He’s intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although they’re poles apart politically, it seems Lemoine and the group might have enemies in common. But can Birnam trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another? A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries , Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed study of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, unflinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.

• Print length 432 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date March 7, 2023
• Dimensions 6.31 x 1.38 x 9.31 inches
• ISBN-10 0374110336
• ISBN-13 978-0374110338
• See all details

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What's it about, amazon editors say....

Danger, intrigue, double-crossing, scheming billionaires and idealists collide in this pacey and brilliantly crafted novel.

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A Must Read at The New York Times , Los Angeles Times , The Washington Post , The Wall Street Journal , People , Vogue , Elle , Oprah Daily , The Philadelphia Inquirer , Bloomberg , The Economist , The Financial Times , Minneapolis Star Tribune , USA Today , The BBC, The Guardian , The Times (London), Buzzfeed , Literary Hub , Kirkus Reviews, The Christian Science Monitor, Condé Nast Traveler, and more Short-listed for the Giller Prize Named a Best Young British Novelist by Granta A Finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice “A generational cri de coeur . . . A sophisticated page-turner . . . Birnam Wood nearly made me laugh with pleasure. The whole thing crackles . . . Greta Gerwig could film this novel, but so could Quentin Tarantino.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times “ Birnam Wood is terrific. As a multilayered, character-driven thriller, it’s as good as it gets. Ruth Rendell would have loved it. A beautifully textured work―what a treat.” ―Stephen King “Whooshingly enjoyable . . . A witty literary thriller about the collision between eco-idealism and staggering wealth.” ―John Powers, NPR’s Fresh Air “Grand, chilling . . . [ Birnam Wood ] grips you by the throat.” ―Lauren LeBlanc, The Boston Globe “Gorgeous . . . [Catton is] a generational talent.” ― Oprah Daily “Kaleidoscopic . . . A gripping thriller.” ―Bill Goldstein, NBC Weekend Today in New York “A rollicking eco-thriller that juggles a lot of heady themes with a big plot and a heedless sense of play.” ― The New York Times Book Review “A sleek contemporary thriller . . . Delicious.” ―Ron Charles, The Washington Post “Sophisticated, stylish and searching . . . A full-on triumph from a generational talent.” ―Hamilton Cain, The Star Tribune (Minneapolis) “Complex and often shocking . . . Profound.” ―B.D. McClay, The New Yorker “The clash of principles with human nature is much at play in this excitingly complex novel . . . Breathtaking.” ―Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal “An eco-thriller of grand psychological and social ambitions.” ―Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times “An ecological thriller, a treatise about surveillance technology, and a lush meditation on friendship and desire.” ―Emma Alpern, Vulture “A rare accomplishment: an intelligent and elegant thriller that is also a damn fine read.” ― The Economist “Delicious . . . At once a highly inventive spin on a morality tale and a logical interpretation of contemporary ecological doom.” ―Sloane Crosley, Departures “[A] virtuoso performance: elaborately plotted, richly conceived, enormously readable.” ―Kevin Power, The Guardian “Dark in both its outlook and omnipresent humor . . . A sincere interrogation of the relationship between morality and the ability to bring about positive change.” ―Lily Meyer, The Atlantic “[A] page-turning thriller-slash-sneaky dystopian satire.” ―Patrick Rapa, The Philadelphia Inquirer “Will have you gnawing your knuckles.” ―Lisa Allardice, The Guardian “Part eco-thriller, part scathing social satire, and entirely unputdownable.” ―Emma Cooke, Buzzfeed

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (March 7, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374110336
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374110338
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.36 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.31 x 1.38 x 9.31 inches
• #426 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
• #1,288 in Psychological Thrillers (Books)
• #1,739 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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A thriller satire about gardening?!

About the author

Eleanor catton.

Eleanor Catton MNZM (born 24 September 1985) is a Canadian-born New Zealand author. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and was an international bestseller. As a screenwriter, she adapted The Luminaries for television and Jane Austen’s Emma for a feature film starring Anya Taylor-Joy and directed by Autumn de Wilde. She lives in Cambridge, England.

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Customers find the beginning slow and disappointing. They also have mixed opinions on the plot, characters, and content. Some find the plot exciting, exacting, intrepid, and compelling, while others say it completely misses its mark. Readers also have different opinions on content and writing style, with some finding it realistic and topical, while other find it difficult to follow.

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Customers find the book extremely creative, unique, and gutsy. They also say the story is captivating.

"...This book is gutsy with a unique story line, resulting in a creative story with New Zealand (my home country) as the source of wild landscape and..." Read more

"... Extremely creative !!!!" Read more

"...Wonderful writing, characters, plot, setting, theme . It was the final pages 419 to 423 that soured me on this book...." Read more

"...While the basic premise of the book is interesting and original , it is hard to read easily...." Read more

Customers are mixed about the plot. Some find it exciting, gripping, and compelling, while others say it's unimaginative, unbelievable, and depressing. They also say the book fails to capture them as readers and completely misses its mark in fashioning a thriller.

"...complex; the pace and tempo are immaculate and powerful, and the plot is exciting , exacting, intrepid, and compelling. And satirical!..." Read more

"...The book simply ends abruptly in utter destruction . Gotta get take a big star off for that. Except for this glaring flaw, I liked it a lot." Read more

"...I’m half way and yet it has failed to capture me as a reader ...." Read more

Customers are mixed about the writing style. Some mention it's wonderful, amazing, and spot on truthful. They also say the plot is exciting, exacting, and compelling. However, some find the writing juvenile, not well explained, and lacking any appeal.

"...are immaculate and powerful, and the plot is exciting, exacting, intrepid , and compelling. And satirical!..." Read more

"...Part 1 was full of long preachy monologues . None of the characters were likable or particularly developed; I had no one to root for...." Read more

"...correct young woman who encounters a ruthless billionaire is very intelligent , completely up to date, and very well written...." Read more

"...The main thesis is creative and current but not well explained and not really believable ...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the characters in the book. Some find them complex and well written, while others say they lack appeal.

"...The plot opens up, is more expansive, and you can get behind all the characters . We know the stakes, most of the veiled plans and covert motivations...." Read more

"...The characters themselves are interesting , along with their individual arcs, but in the end a little too hard to tell apart because of my complaint..." Read more

"...Part 1 was full of long preachy monologues. None of the characters were likable or particularly developed; I had no one to root for...." Read more

"...found it to be well-written, with smart social commentary and well-drawn characters , hence the three stars, I also found it to be a total snooze plot..." Read more

Customers are mixed about the content. Some find it realistic, topical, and interesting. They also appreciate the great psychological insights and amazing relationship dynamics. However, others say it's not a piece of psychological realism, has no redeeming qualities, and lacks a moral message.

"...The airhead, pseudo-intellectual blather is hard to stomach . The author comes across as someone who has lived vocariously out of her phone." Read more

"...It’s realistic, topical , and manages to adhere to the true spirit of the source material while breaking new ground in the process." Read more

"...It’s not about gardening. It’s not a piece of psychological realism about a group of young radicals...." Read more

"...While I found it to be well-written, with smart social commentary and well-drawn characters, hence the three stars, I also found it to be a total..." Read more

Customers find the beginning of the book slow. They also say the story takes awhile to pick up.

"...I found it quite slow in the first 250 pages , focusing, as it does, on the relationships between and among characters that I found hard to like or..." Read more

"...Complex well crafted plot. Flushed out characters. Ending, however, felt rushed , unlikely and totally unsatisfying...." Read more

"...Her characters are precise and complex; the pace and tempo are immaculate and powerful, and the plot is exciting, exacting, intrepid, and compelling...." Read more

"The story takes awhile to pick up but when it does the characters and the plot keep on getting wilder and crazier...." Read more

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Theresa Smith Writes

Delighting in all things bookish, book review: birnam wood by eleanor catton, about the book:.

Birnam Wood is on the move…

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker – or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.

Published by Allen & Unwin

Released 28 February 2023

My Thoughts:

This is the first novel by Eleanor Catton I have read and my expectations going in were fairly open ended. At first, this felt like an eco-warrior/grass roots politics style of story, which I was enjoying from the outset. It shifted gears about a third of the way through into a tense thriller with a dash of corporate corruption. By the end, it had morphed into a horror story that I did not see coming. This is very much a story of actions equalling consequences.

The writing is incredible: engaging, sharp and smart, witty and sinister. Told from a variety of perspectives, it continually surprised me with its narrative turns and the boundaries it pushed with its characters. This novel was, for me, nothing short of sensational.

Lessons learned in the course of reading this one: never a trust a billionaire, it’s not easy to evade a drone, and your phone can be hacked into in all sorts of ways and used to monitor your every move without you ever knowing it. Birnam Wood is out of Macbeth. To end, I’ll leave you with this Macbeth quote, which feels thematically appropriate.

‘Or have we eaten on the insane root That takes the reason prisoner?’ Banquo (Act 1 Scene 3) – Macbeth – Shakespeare

Highly recommended with a solid five-star rating.

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23 thoughts on “ book review: birnam wood by eleanor catton ”.

I’m still undecided about this. I think it’s one I might borrow from the library if I see it there, but not reserve it…

Like Liked by 1 person

It will surprise you! Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it since finishing it on Thursday evening.

I’m going to make more of an effort to read the NZ I already have, there are some beauties there and I should read them first.

I have some too I should read, bought on my last trip over there about 8 years ago.

They mount up, don’t they? Maybe next year we could co-host a Year of Reading NZ Lit?

Oooh! That’s an idea! I’d like that.

Well, if we make it a year, it’s no pressure, we can do as much or as little as we like whenever it fits in around anything else. I’ve got 27 on the TBR which is way more than I’d need…

I would have to count but I’d estimate 12 to 15 on my tbr.

Well, not setting anything as a target, that would give you plenty for one per month… yes, let’s do it.

Excellent! This is a great idea.

I’ve been waiting five months at the library. Meanwhile I’ve done the audible and read the ebook. I still like to see a hard copy

Five months?! You liked it?

Yes five months the London consortium has so many libraries and can be very slow with new titles. It’s a good read and much shorter than the luminaries

Like Liked by 2 people

Yes, the size of The Luminaries has always prevented me from starting it.

This has Booker vibes. I gave it four stars as felt it was a great read but she mixed up too many genres. The ending is devastating and has really divided readers.

I didn’t mind the mix of genres, I felt it was done well and innovative. The ending was certainly something else!

Oh ohhh, I really couldn’t get into this one at all, so I love that this was a sensational read for you 😃 Lisa’s NZ reading challenge sounds fun!

Had you read anything else by her? Wondering if it was a case of expectations or just the story (which I acknowledge wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea).

I’ve just started this so read your review carefully! Love Catton’s writing a lot, but I adored The Luminaries too which also divided readers. Love the sound of a NZ reading year – hope you & Lisa work something out 🙂

I’m very keen for it so I’m sure we’ll go ahead with it. I definitely will read The Luminaries as part of it.

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BEST BELIEVE

Rebekah Rochester

Birnam Wood review: why it’s fantastic + its ending explained

Eleanor catton, 2023.

This is the sort of novel that one finishes and then immediately Googles to see what everyone else thought about the shocking ending. Imagine my disappointment to find that the vast majority of reviews in the major newspapers were nothing more than overly detailed summaries of the book’s premise, with a couple of vague sentences tacked onto the end regarding their opinion.

If you haven’t read this book, you will be less interested in a premise summary and more interested in a persuasive list of reasons why you should read it – which I have provided below.

And if you have read this book, all you will care about is hearing the thoughts of someone – anyone – else who has survived the last two pages. Again, you can find this below – you’ll just have to scroll slightly further down.

Part 1: Why should I read this book? (Spoiler-free)

Goodreads reviewer Jessica Woodbury sums it up well:

“This is a book where you have no idea at the beginning where it will be at the end. It is a real ride. I love a real ride. Especially one that is this confident.”

This is a tightly plotted thriller that starts slow and concludes at such a breakneck speed you’ll barely have time to breathe. I love a book with an exquisite plot. I love a book I can’t put down. It sounds so simple, but a truly gripping book is a rare and precious find. And as I will later show when analysing the ending, Catton mixes the thriller genre with the classical tragic form to great effect.

I also love a book whose characters are neither good nor bad. I have never understood people who say they like or dislike a book based on whether they like or dislike or ‘relate to’ the characters. To me there is nothing more irrelevant.

In Birnam Wood we meet activists and wannabe journalists and businessmen and billionaires and wives and friends and sisters. It’s an incredible feat that Catton manages to present these characters and their stories to us from a viewpoint that is at once intimate, allowing us privileged access into their psyches, and disinterested, impersonal and totally partisan, dancing lightly above anything so distasteful as an authorial opinion. We soar above the story; we are like an invisible ghost that walks among its characters, close enough to touch. We see them and understand them but we do not judge them. Instead, we know them. It was rather like reading the A Song of Ice and Fire series; every time the viewpoint shifted in proximity to a different character, I started rooting for them to win – even when they were plotting to kill each other.

Speaking about her inspirations, Catton cited Jane Austen as ‘the forebear’ of this book. “Her books are so exquisitely patterned; the ironies are so beautiful and complete, and yet you have such a sense that these characters are real, and that you know them and that you love them or you hate them and you’re so pleased when they get together or when they don’t get together.” Real people, moving freely inside an ‘exquisitely patterned’ plot, is what Catton does so well in both her earlier, Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries , and perhaps even better here.

Birnam Wood has a lot to say about politics and activism and capitalism and the climate crisis and surveillance and corruption – or rather, its characters do. The narrative voice remains coolly detached, at times gently poking fun or illuminating a key detail.

We are firmly planted in the world of an activist collective offered the tantalising opportunity to betray its anti-capitalist ethos in exchange for a billionaire’s funding – but we are not shoehorned into viewing this interesting scenario from one particular opinion or perspective.

Catton does a fantastic job of telling a story that features so many important current issues without coming across as preachy, idealistic or pessimistic. Everything is presented objectively and with a wry smile.

Dwight Garner in The New York Times puts it well:

Birnam Wood is an ardent ecological novel, but it’s not a softheaded one. That’s another reason it’s a rarity. I sometimes feel that if I must read even one more wet novel that argues courageously, in the teeth of its audience’s predilections, in favor of trees and moss and sunshine, I will pluck out my eyes.

(This made me think guiltily of Richard Powers’ The Overstory , sat forlornly on my did-not-finish pile).

In summary:

• The characters are three-dimensional.
• The plot is intricate and gripping.
• The story centres lots of important themes but it is told from a light-touch yet all-knowing perspective that never lands clumsily on one side or another.
• Though similar to ambition and intricacy to The Luminaries , this is a big shift in genre, setting and tone from Catton’s 2013 Booker winner. It’s taken her ten years to produce this, her third novel. I simply love when authors take decades to write books (see also Susanna Clarke’s three books, published in 2004, 2006 and 2020, or Donna Tartt’s 1992, 2002 and 2013). I love it even more when novelists refuse to be pigeon-holed, pivoting gloriously into new genres. If I believe one thing, it’s that good books come in all shapes and sizes. Catton’s work thus far has proved this.
• It has a phenomenal ending. An extremely good ending is an extremely rare thing, and as such it is worth its weight in gold.

I will finish this section with a few of my favourite passages from B. D. McClay’s review in The New Yorker, which sum up well what sets Birnam Wood apart.

Contemporary literary fiction largely concerns itself with other things: moods, problems, situations. Few people would dream of writing a novel without characters, but a novel without a plot is practically normal. When you speak of what a novel is about, you speak thematically—it’s about surveillance, or displacement, or heterosexuality, or something along these lines.

Initially, Birnam Wood seems to have no aspirations beyond an exploration of young, white, left-wing radicalism and its accompanying guilt—the kind of book that is “about” the anxiety of being a good person under capitalism and/or climate change.

Birnam Wood ’s biggest twist is not so much a particular event as the realization that this is a book in which everything that people choose to do matters, albeit not in ways they may have anticipated.

Discovering that they live in a world of consequence, with stakes bigger than self-image or self-respect, is as much of a shock to the characters as it is to us.

Emerging, shocked and stunned, into ‘the world of consequence’, is exactly what Shelley, Mira, Lemoine and the reader do together on page 274. And that is where things get interesting.

Part 2: The ending unpacked (CONTAINS LOTS AND LOTS OF SPOILERS)

Lemoine could feel himself becoming angry. It was pretty fucking irritating, he thought, that he was yet to go a single day of his existence without being reminded, at some point, that the only way of getting a job done to satisfaction was if he did every little part of it himself.

If you haven’t read this book yet, now is the moment at which you bookmark this review and return to it at a later date. You’ll thank me later!

In this section, I’ll cover:

• My understanding of what happens in the last 20 pages, which hopefully might be helpful to anyone who has frantically Googled ‘Birnam Wood ending explained’
• A couple of possible thematic interpretations of the ending
• Why I loved it all so much

Ron Charles writes in The Washington Post:

And once an accidental death upsets everyone’s competing machinations, readers are unlikely to notice anything except the story’s acceleration toward ever more toil and trouble. With terrifying intensity, Catton propels these characters to a finale that prefigures the very apocalypse they’re all trying to forestall. It’s a wry indictment of all the poor players who strut and fret their hours upon this stage and then are heard no more.

Birnam Wood was everything I wanted Donna Tartt’s The Secret History to be. That novel, so intoxicating in its first half, slowed to a crawl after a main character’s death. Here, we see the opposite. Carefully laid foundations give way to a pacey midsection. Then, to draw on Charles and McClay’s wording, the characters’ best-laid plans are rudely interrupted by an accidental death, catapulting them into the ‘world of consequence’. Because death matters, even if it was an accident. Even if it’s of a mildly irritating minor character. Perhaps I’m just very sentimental, but the paragraph in which Jill Darvish realises that Sir Owen may be dead and thinks, in wild, unfurling clauses, that ‘if she could do it over, she’d keep everything exactly as it was’, made me cry.

So I loved that Jill got to enact revenge on Lemoine. Enraged by grief, she flies straight to Christchurch after Sir Owen’s wake, determined to find out why he went to Thorndike, to find out what’s going on with Birnam Wood. She knows that there is something wrong, that something doesn’t add up. ‘This wasn’t done. She wasn’t done.’ We see her act in a calculated, almost manipulative way – almost reminiscent of Lemoine – as she deceives and persuades her children into leaving her alone after the wake.

Early in the morning, she drives to Thorndike. She sees ‘a great many heavy vehicles clustered in the field’ – evidence of Lemoine beginning his mining operation. She takes the back entrance into the farm, ‘taking her phone out of her pocket to check the time – but the battery was dead’. This is a nice touch, helping to explain why Lemoine does not realise she is on the property.

Entering the house, she sees ‘the glass jug from the coffee maker smashed across the floor. One of the dining chairs was on its back; looking down at it, she saw that the middle section of a jagged splash of coffee had been disturbed. Something ­– or someone – has been dragged through it towards the door.’ When we last saw Lemoine, Mira and Tony, they were having a breakfast coffee, Lemoine taunting Mira about her relationship with Tony, Tony arriving, exhausted and injured, saying to Mira, “Why are you still here?” Why hasn’t she run away? But Mira clearly feels powerless, out of options. Lemoine is now in control, with his driver in the house and other security on the property. It’s clear that a struggle took place, perhaps an argument as Tony tried to fight Lemoine one last time. Did Mira stand up to Lemoine, did she have to be forced? Did Lemoine use one to manipulate the other? We don’t know, but somehow, they were taken down to the Birnam Wood camp.

Jill discovers that the rabbit poison is missing, so when we later read that the activists are ‘contorted where they lay, as if they had discovered all at once that they’d been poisoned’, it’s obvious how Lemoine was able to kill them – after he said to Shelley the night before, “I’ll bring breakfast.” Earlier on, Lemoine pondered how he could frame Tony for the killings when his arm was in a sling, as all of Sir Owen’s guns need two hands to operate. During the following conversation, we read that ‘Lemoine was still thinking about rabbits’ – evidence of the plan forming.

Hearing a series of ‘full-throated, terror-stricken’ screams, Jill springs into action. She believes it is a girl screaming, but we later find out that it is Tony – which serves to paint a picture of this ‘ghastly’, unnatural sound. Jill takes the rifle and skinning knife and makes her way quietly to the camp.

She comes over the crest of the hill and sees below her all the bodies of the Birnam Wood members, poisoned. Tony and, we presume, Mira are handcuffed together to a truck. Mira is ‘dead, or at the very least, unconscious’ – the vomit down her chest suggesting that she too was poisoned, or perhaps sick with disgust at what she saw before being shot.

The vehicles are daubed with graffiti which will serve to frame Tony as the killer: JUSTICE and SHAME. Earlier, we read Lemoine’s plot: ‘A disaffected, sexually frustrated, isolated young man, socially downgraded and rejected from a group he once belonged to, tracks his old friends down to Thorndike, stalks them as they work, convinces himself they’d betrayed their very nature, and then massacres them all’, before killing himself.

The implication is that Tony and Mira were forcefully brought down to the camp and handcuffed while the other members were fed poisoned food and the vehicles were defaced. Exactly how this unfolded is, of course, unclear. Perhaps Tony and Mira were only restrained after the ‘breakfast’ had been served and eaten. Perhaps the breakfast was sent ahead. Perhaps the breakfast that Lemoine tells Tony and Mira to eat at the house was also poisoned, and it was Mira’s already-dead body that was dragged through the spilt coffee – spilt in Tony’s fury when he realises the plot.

Obviously, this is all absolutely horrific, but in the centre of the scene is Lemoine, his psychopathy revealed as he stands casually, ‘one hand in his pocket, scrolling through something on his phone’. Perhaps he is talking to Tony, taunting him further, explaining how he will be framed while he hacks into his phone or computer, perhaps to plant incriminating messages from Tony’s account.

In a triumphant moment of retribution, Jill shoots Lemoine ‘right between the eyes’. However, triumph is short-lived as she herself is shot by the driver after freeing Tony. How Tony is able to get away without also being shot is unclear. We read that he was ‘running now’ – was he simply able to run away? Did the driver also die? Why did he not pursue Tony? As Tony runs through the bush, he hears ‘gunfire behind him’. Is it possible that Jill was able to shoot the driver before the bullets killed her?

There is a clue in Catton’s video with Waterstones, in which she says “One of my principal ambitions for Birnam Wood was to ask myself whether I could do what Jane Austen had done for a comic form for a tragic form. So rather than ending with everybody getting married, my book would take a more tragic direction. Though perhaps that’s saying too much!”

Everyone dies, then, and Catton’s book is the latest in a long line of texts that explore hubris, limitation, disappointment and the agony of gaining self-knowledge. For the members of Birnam Wood, the tragedy is that their dreams of ‘breaking good’ an anti-capitalist gardening collective died the moment they drank from Lemoine’s poisoned chalice. For Lemoine, perhaps the tragedy is simply that, for all his god-like superpowers of limitless wealth and resources, he is never anything more than a human who can be killed with a bullet.

In my last year at Cambridge I spent a term learning about tragedy. That was a few years ago now, but I still remember: tragedy is about coming to realisations too late. Realising your own limitations. Realising that you’ve run out of options. Realising that you’re a victim of a mess entirely of your own making, and try as you might you only have yourself to blame. Realising that you took the first step down the wrong path many moons ago. Realising that you are alone, that you are trapped, that you were mistaken all along.

Charles wrote in the Washington Post that the finale ‘prefigures the very apocalypse they’re all trying to forestall’. Is this, then, a vision of hopelessness, a microcosm of the destruction the human race will bring upon itself? In the end, climate disaster will not discriminate. The young people are the first to go, before the wealthy finish each other off. The characters are struck down with rabbit poison and hunting rifles, an ironic detail that mirrors the cruelty with which humans have treated the natural world.

I read the last 150 pages in two delicious gulps. Is there anything better than not being able to put a book down? To feel one’s eyes dart frantically across the page, spotting yet another shocking twist, then forcing oneself to read the whole page slowly?

I’m not ashamed to say I was rooting for Tony until the very end. I kept thinking that he was going to manage it, that he was going to get away on his broken foot and get the photos developed and break the story. It sounds pathetically optimistic written down, but don’t we always want the little guy to win?

That’s not to say that I adored Tony’s personality – he acted like an idiot most of the time. But people do often act like idiots, and we can still like them, understand them, want them to succeed. I was swept up with the plot’s tension, counting the remaining pages, realising with dread that it was too late, that his very last chance was blown. Like all good writers, Catton made me care.

The last sentence of Birnam Wood is 113 words long and ends with Tony praying that ‘the scale of the destruction would be visible from overhead, so that somebody would see it, so the somebody would notice, so that somebody would care, and as the fire began to blaze and crackle up the ancient trees around him, Tony prayed that somebody would come to put it out.’

Tony’s final prayer is that the fire will be put out before it destroys him and the nature around him. As we hear earlier on, just like a plant, he wants to live.

Even after serving us a tragedy of Ancient Greek proportions, a scene of total death and destruction, ‘more bodies, more vomit, all young people, all dead’ – it is a masterstroke from Catton that she presents us with a hopeful image in the novel’s dying breath. Before death, Tony tries to send a signal to a higher power – almost literally, ‘overhead’. He hopes that someone will notice the fire from above, come down to investigate and discover the wrongdoing. His hope is at once pathetic – the plea that ‘somebody would care’ reminiscent of his earlier delirious conviction that his mother will avenge his death by breaking the story to the press – but it is a hope that the reader fervently shares. In Hamlet, Prince Fortinbras walks in on the scene of death, symbolising the dawn of a new era. A similar hope pervades here; that a new, outside character will walk in after the curtain closes and make sense of it all and deliver justice.

Tragedy isn’t just about running out of time and realising how bad things truly are. It’s also about performance. It’s about pain being witnessed by an audience. It’s about the audience caring, the audience listening, the audience heeding a warning and taking something away with them after the tragic characters have breathed their final breath upon the stage. In this text, perhaps we, the reader, are Fortinbras, who must interpret the scene we find, bear witness to the pain and take forward the lessons that the characters learnt too late. We are the ‘someone who cares’ that Tony prays for.

What do you think happens after the story’s last page? Do you think someone notices the forest fire? How will they interpret the scene they find? Do you think that the presence of Lemoine and Jill’s corpses will complicate the planned interpretation that an aggrieved Tony killed the other members of Birnam Wood? Will anyone work out the truth? Where is the roll of film now? Still in Lemoine’s pocket? Will anyone find it, will anyone bother to develop it? Will they know what they are looking at? Or even if the photos are destroyed, will they find the mine itself further up the hill? Will Lemoine’s secrets be revealed? Will anyone face the consequences – not least for the five deaths caused by the landslide at the start of the book?

How is it possible that Catton is able to kill every character and yet still leave us with a dream of a happy ending? In her video with Waterstones, the author explains her ending beautifully, and with it, how she has mingled together the tragic form and the thriller genre to create something profoundly hopeful that speaks to climate nihilism:

“We’re staring down our own finitude as a species, as a planet, and I think that there’s something very dangerous about thinking like that. It can become a licence to behave however you like, really. But it’s also this kind of depression, the kind of depression that Macbeth voices at the end of Macbeth when Lady Macbeth dies and he says ‘tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ – you know, who cares, this is all just ‘a tale told by an idiot’. He’s such a nihilist in that moment, and so I was very certain in myself that I didn’t want to write a nihilistic book, I didn’t want to write a depressing book. I wanted to write a book that excited you because it made you want to know what was going to happen to these characters. If you achieve that as a writer you’re giving the reader a sense of the future, you’re making them want to keep reading, and so even for a little moment, in that brief time that they’re reading your book, they have a reason to live.”

READ 11 – 21 MARCH 2023

If you enjoyed reading this review, or found it useful, please consider buying me a coffee . Thank you!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Waterstones YouTube channel: Eleanor Catton on Birnam Wood and its influences

Review by Dwight Garner in The New York Times: Guerrilla Gardeners Meet Billionaire Doomsayer. Hurly-Burly Ensues.

Review by Ron Charles in The Washington Post: In Eleanor Catton’s ‘Birnam Wood,’ the end of the world creeps up fast

Review by B. D. McClay in The New Yorker: Eleanor Catton wants plot to matter again

Review by Kevin Power in The Guardian: hippies v billionaires

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12 Comments Add yours

Fantastic piece, worthy of your Austenian name!

I did just finish Birnam Wood and I did just google “Birnam Wood ending!” Thanks for putting the great novel into perspective. Your piece is great.

I finished this an hour ago and agree that the way it is nihilistic and optimistic at once is very masterful, such a scary and weird book. I think it’s interesting that Tony appeals to a power above – above like the drones and above like the all knowing narrative voice. Just the fact that the story is being told implies that someone was watching and that maybe just witnessing the horror means something.

Ok, but Jill shoots Lemoine with an AIR rifle, a .22 caliber pellet gun! That wouldn’t kill someone, would it? Anyway, the ending, for me, was disappointing, seemed rushed and implausible and, well, lazy. Otherwise, very cool book, especially the articulate political philosophizing by Tony and the collective.

This is a PHENOMENAL review! Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you thank you thank you!

Wow, glad I found this. I appreciate the ending even more now.

I’m 12% through the book and there is no discernible plot so far. Just lots (and lots) of character descriptions

I’m grateful for reviews like this that help me to understand and appreciate even more the books I love.

I wish you didn’t include the spoiler about The Secret History. I haven’t read that yet. Thoughtless.

Hi Ellen, thank you very much for your comment. I wouldn’t consider it too much of a spoiler as the death is revealed in the first sentence of the book. I hope you enjoy reading it when you do, it’s great! Thanks, Rebekah

So I raced through the ending. I actually found the characters a bit tiresome and Tony’s monologues in need of editing. But the novel does grip you in the end, so even though I was a bit bored with the book and found it to be too long, I did want to read how it ended and that part was gripping. Excellent review that captures the broader thematic point about how we have allowed (privileged) man to essentially rape nature, bringing about our mutual destruction. The cleverness of technology seems too overwhelming for the weaker characters (and society) to combat, and technology put in the wrong hands, the book suggests, may destroy us all.

In my speed-reading the ending, I thought that Lemoine had sequestered Shelly, not including her in the breakfast, making me wonder if somehow Shelly survived?

I badly wanted to leave a 1 star review for this book. So badly, that I’ve just spent half an hour trying to figure out how. If you’d asked me if I recommended the book after 99% of reading, I would’ve said, “Meh, hard to know. On the one hand I dislike the fact there are no chapters and it took about half the book before an interesting character who shows that there’s going to be some plot shows up, but after that I quite enjoyed it, and it looks like it’s going to have a really interesting ending.” After reading the whole thing, however, I would say, “Avoid this book like the plague. The ending is stupid and lazy. It’s as though the author was tired of writing and thought, “What the heck, I’ll just kill everyone – I hate lefties anyway, and was looking forward to rubbing them all out – and leave everyone wondering what happens next without actually tying up any loose ends. I’ll call it edgy, dramatic, a cliffhanger.” No Eleanor. It’s none of those things. It’s just lazy writing. JRR Tolkien didn’t have Sam push Frodo into the fire in order to get the ring burned up, and then leave us wondering if he himself would be killed in the eruption. And that’s what you’ve done here, though worse. And whilst a lot of your writing is engaging and page-turning, your plot decisions, decision to leave out chapters, and decision to have most of your characters be pretty unlikable (hey, they’re complex! – No, mate, they’re just unlikable,) your pacing decisions… does the book a huge disservice. I’m the kind of person that reads and rereads books I like again and again. I will not read this again. And I will not even give it away – I don’t want to inflict it on anyone. Unless I happen to bump into a real version of Lemoine or Mira or Shelley perhaps…

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2023

Kirkus Prize finalist

BIRNAM WOOD

by Eleanor Catton ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 2023

This blistering look at the horrors of late capitalism manages to also be a wildly fun read.

An eco-activist group in New Zealand becomes entangled with an American billionaire in Catton's first novel since the Booker Prize–winning The Luminaries (2013).

Mira Bunting is the brainchild behind Birnam Wood, an “activist collective” of guerrilla gardeners who plant on unused land (sometimes with permission) and scavenge (or steal) materials to grow food. Mira is a “self-mythologising rebel” whose passions are tempered only somewhat by Shelley Noakes, who sees herself as Mira’s “sensible, dependable, predictable sidekick.” This role is starting to chafe—as is the lack of money—and Shelley plans to leave Birnam Wood. Just as Shelley’s about to cut ties, Mira makes an announcement: On a recent scouting trip near Korowai National Park, she located a farming property owned by a Kiwi farmer named Owen Darvish, temporarily abandoned due to a recent earthquake. This land is soon to transfer ownership from Darvish to an uber-rich tech CEO looking for a spot to doomstead. When the businessman, Robert Lemoine, catches Mira scouting on the land, he offers to bankroll the group to the tune of $100,000 since the act will help his bid for New Zealand citizenship. What could go wrong? Catton swirls among perspectives, including those of Mira, Shelley, Lemoine, Darvish and his wife, and a former Birnam Wood member called Tony, whose aspirations to fame look within reach as he suspects he’s got a major scoop concerning Lemoine’s real motives. In many ways, the novel is as saturated with moral scrutiny and propulsive plotting as 19th-century greats; it's a twisty thriller via Charles Dickens, only with drones. But where Dickens, say, revels in exposing moral bankruptcy, Catton is more interested in the ways everyone is cloudy-eyed with their own hubris in different ways. The result is a story that’s suspended on a tightrope just above nihilism, and readers will hold their breath until the last page to see whether Catton will fall.

Pub Date: March 7, 2023

ISBN: 9780374110338

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023

LITERARY FICTION | THRILLER | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

by Catherine Newman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 2024

A moving, hilarious reminder that parenthood, just like life, means constant change.

During an annual beach vacation, a mother confronts her past and learns to move forward.

Her family’s annual trip to Cape Cod is always the highlight of Rocky’s year—even more so now that her children are grown and she cherishes what little time she gets with them. Rocky is deep in the throes of menopause, picking fights with her loving husband and occasionally throwing off her clothes during a hot flash, much to the chagrin of her family. She’s also dealing with her parents, who are crammed into the same small summer house (with one toilet that only occasionally spews sewage everywhere) and who are aging at an alarmingly rapid rate. Rocky’s life is full of change, from her body to her identity—she frequently flashes back to the vacations of years past, when her children were tiny. Although she’s grateful for the family she has, she mourns what she’s lost. Newman (author of the equally wonderful We All Want Impossible Things , 2022) imbues Rocky’s internal struggles with importance and gravity, all while showcasing her very funny observations about life and parenting. She examines motherhood with a raw honesty that few others manage—she remembers the hard parts, the depths of despair, panic, and anxiety that can happen with young children, and she also recounts the joy in a way that never feels saccharine. She has a gift for exploring the real, messy contradictions in human emotions. As Rocky puts it, “This may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel .”

Pub Date: June 18, 2024

ISBN: 9780063345164

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Catherine Newman

HOME IS WHERE THE BODIES ARE

by Jeneva Rose ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2024

Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.

Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.

Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.

Pub Date: April 30, 2024

ISBN: 9798212182843

Page Count: 270

Publisher: Blackstone

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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by Jeneva Rose

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Birnam Wood: Summary and Ending Explained

By: Author Luka

Posted on Last updated: June 17, 2024

Categories Book Summary , Ending Explained

Birnam Wood, written by New Zealand author and screenwriter Eleanor Catton in 2023, is her third novel. Catton gained recognition at the age of 28 for her second book, The Luminaries, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2013 with its 832 pages.

The story unfolds near a made-up national park on New Zealand’s South Island, where a young activist group, named after the forest in Macbeth, strikes a deal with an American tech mogul. This mogul claims to have bought the land they intend to guerrilla garden on and surprises them by offering financial support.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

The narrative shifts perspectives, exposing each character’s hidden and deceitful motives. As betrayals and revelations pile up, the plot hurtles toward an apocalyptic and fiery climax.

Summary  |  Ending Explained

Birnam Wood Summary

Mira Bunting, the 29-year-old founder of the guerrilla gardening group Birnam Wood, discovers an ideal piece of land near Thorndike, close to the Korowai National Park. The town is cut off due to a landslide, and the property owner, Owen Darvish, is away with his wife, Jill, receiving recognition for conservation efforts.

Shelley Noakes, Mira’s roommate, best friend, and Birnam Wood partner, feels overshadowed by Mira and believes the organization may fail because she handles all the practical work. Tony Gallo, Mira’s former love interest and group member, seeks Mira out, prompting Shelley to decide to sever ties by sleeping with Tony. Despite Tony’s attempts to reconnect with Mira, Shelley reveals Mira’s alleged drunken state during a one-night stand.

Mira explores the potential Thorndike site alone and discovers a surprising landing strip and plane. A man with an American accent, revealed as Robert Lemoine, the CEO of an American drone company called Autonomo, confronts her. After confessing her plans, Mira receives the gate code and assurance from Lemoine that he won’t inform the Darvishes.

Lemoine takes things further by hacking into Mira’s phone, checking her search history, and tracking her movements using a drone. He finds excitement in their shared illegal activities—Mira trespassing on private property, while he secretly extracts rare-earth minerals in the national park. He remains untroubled by the landslide and deaths caused by his actions. Lemoine plans to mine the Darvishes’ land, having already purchased a portion, under the guise of building a doomsday bunker. Surprisingly, he decides to financially support Mira’s activities.

Three weeks later, Shelley organizes a Birnam Wood meeting. Unaware of Tony’s return, she hasn’t shared her unsuccessful encounter with him. Mira, surprised to see Tony, reveals Lemoine’s $100,000 offer. A heated debate ensues between Tony and Mira regarding the group’s principles. Shelley supports Mira, leading to a vote in favor of accepting Lemoine’s money, prompting Tony to leave feeling humiliated. As Owen Darvish is knighted, Shelley and Mira prepare to depart.

Sir Owen and Lady Jill, now having sold their land, share dinner with friends. Jill discloses the sale but remains bound by a nondisclosure agreement. Owen discovers an email from Anthony Gallo, inquiring about the land sale to Lemoine. Panicking, he wonders who Gallo is and how he’s aware of the situation.

Meanwhile, Tony plans to write an article about wealthy individuals purchasing land in New Zealand. Despite considering infiltrating Thorndike under the guise of helping with guerrilla gardening, he decides against deceiving former friends. While surveilling the national park, Tony encounters a restricted research area and a security-guarded cell trailer, leading to panic and confusion.

Returning to the sheep farm, he witnesses Lemoine and Mira in conversation, perplexed by the lack of sale information. Tony emails the Darvishes for an interview, and to his surprise, Owen calls back, expressing astonishment at work being done behind his farm. Tony hangs up, leaves a message for Rosie, and informs her that he’ll be out of service.

Feeling guilty about not disclosing the true ownership of the land, Mira grapples with her attraction to Lemoine, whom she suspects may be a “psychopath.” Spotting someone who looks like Tony walking into the trees, she remains conflicted.

Lady Darvish dismisses concerns about Tony, but Sir Darvish, feeling unsettled, decides to book a flight to investigate. Lemoine recalls Lady Darvish’s intervention when he was on the verge of losing the deal with Darvish, realizing she went behind her husband’s back. He reflects on a dark thought, admitting he would have killed her if she were his own wife—his wife died in a helicopter accident.

Meanwhile, Lemoine’s workers report a security breach at the illegal extraction site. Unable to access Tony’s phone, Lemoine calls Rosie, posing as someone from Tony’s workplace, but hangs up when suspicion arises. Tony notices a drone scanning the forest, triggering memories of past protests against mining in national parks, making him wonder if the government is involved.

Frustrated that she feels burdened with all the work, Shelley is upset by Mira’s infatuation with Lemoine. Lemoine, wanting to meet the group, brings dinner and drugs. An argument ensues between Mira and Lemoine, with Lemoine exploiting the emotional impact of his wife’s death to manipulate Mira. Dinner becomes awkward as Shelley flirts with Lemoine and confronts Mira for not participating in the drug use.

Lemoine, opting out of the drugs, faces increased aggression from Shelley, who publicly asks if he wants to sleep with Mira. As the drugs take effect, Mira and Lemoine leave for the Darvishes’ house, only to find a car at the gate. They hear a van passing by, resulting in a crash. Shelley, under the influence of acid, has inadvertently killed Owen Darvish.

Worried about Owen’s absence from a Birnam Wood meeting on the farm, Lady Darvish becomes concerned when Lemoine calls, claiming Owen hasn’t shown up. Jill tracks Owen’s phone, and Lemoine, after checking the spot, calls back with the devastating news that Owen is dead.

To manipulate the situation, Lemoine emotionally blackmails Mira into helping and convinces Shelley that the situation is not real. He alters Darvish’s phone, erasing evidence of his recent visit, and fabricates emails arranging the Birnam Wood meeting from days before. Shelley later demands $1 million from Lemoine.

Realizing Shelley is the key negotiator, Lemoine focuses on dealing with her. Lady Darvish, skeptical about her husband’s accidental death, investigates further. Lemoine’s security captures footage of someone taking pictures of his extraction site—Tony.

Blocked by black SUVs, Tony escapes, safeguarding his film, but sustains injuries after jumping off a cliff into a river. Mira and Shelley return to the farm, encountering a man with an assault rifle. Lemoine claims he’s protecting against a threat to his life and instructs all official matters to go through Shelley. Mira resigns as Birnam Wood’s CEO, and Lemoine asks Shelley to spend the night.

Mira encounters delirious Tony, who reveals crucial information. Determined to help, Mira witnesses construction beginning on the bunker. Lemoine’s sinister plan involves framing Tony for the demise of everyone in Birnam Wood while he escapes with hidden minerals in construction equipment.

Mira retrieves Tony at night, but Lemoine’s drones track them. Lemoine intercepts them, confiscating Tony’s film. Shelley, unaware of Mira’s nighttime activities, sees Lemoine with Mira in the car. Later, realizing Mira is missing, she learns from Lemoine that he’ll meet the entire group in the morning.

Concerned, Lady Darvish heads to Thorndike and discovers signs of a struggle in her home. Hearing a scream, she grabs a rifle, finding multiple dead bodies and Tony tied to a deceased Mira. Realizing Lemoine’s true villainy, Lady Darvish shoots him between the eyes. She frees Tony but is shot by Lemoine’s bodyguard. Tony, using his last strength, locates the mine site and sets it ablaze to ensure its discovery.

Birnam Wood Ending Explained

In the final pages of Part 3, the narrative accelerates towards its climax, brimming with action. The earlier foreshadowing expertly laid out by Catton unfolds, culminating in a tense moment when Jill Darvish seizes the .22 rifle from the display case.

Shelley’s ambition peaks as she takes charge of the paperwork. Her initial attempt at interfering with Mira’s love interest fails, but she succeeds on her second try with Lemoine, sidelining Mira and exposing her true ambition. Leading Birnam Wood is not Shelley’s true desire; she craves to surpass Mira.

Despite her pivotal role in Darvish’s death, Shelley shows no remorse or acknowledgment, overlooking Mira’s meaningful stare as their cars pass. This dramatic irony raises tension, as readers understand Mira’s silent communication while Shelley remains oblivious. Having achieved her greatest ambition, Shelley fades from the narrative, consumed by the malevolence explored in Catton’s novel.

Mira’s ambition seems subdued during this portion of the story, but Catton intricately weaves her character development to contribute to the novel’s climax. Mira’s turning point emerges when she decides to betray others, realizing she has a scapegoat in Shelley.

In her attempt to escape, Mira betrays everyone at Birnam Wood, sacrificing her self-mythologized identity, her most cherished possession. A prior conversation reveals Mira’s belief that deep apologies are unnecessary, aligning with her renewed ambition that leads to her demise. Ignoring Tony’s instructions in her excitement, she allows the drones to trace her escape, sealing her tragic fate.

Despite Lemoine’s prior straightforwardness with Mira, Catton begins telling lies about his work being for governments. Ironically, they don’t believe him; he’s more successful when he admits to having an evil plan. This deviation initiates Lemoine’s downfall, as his evil only works when in plain sight.

Catton builds tension by showing that his plans could have been stopped earlier, signaling that he is losing control and deviating from his typical characterization. This results in him being present and vulnerable, unlike his usual preference for distance.

While characters heavily rely on gadgets throughout most of the book, what prevails here are low-tech objects and physical human activity. The final blow to Lemoine comes from an old .22 rifle, emphasizing the contrast with modern technology. Lady Darvish doesn’t use tracking devices or surveillance; she physically investigates.

Characters who rely on physical action without technology find the most damning information throughout the book. Physical movement, like Tony winding film, intimidates Lemoine more than a man on a drone’s video feed. Catton portrays human activity and physical reality as an antidote to the dangers of technology.

The final scene is apocalyptic, reminiscent of the battle scene in Macbeth. True to Catton’s concept of connecting all characters to the ambitious Macbeth and his fatal ending, Tony, Mira, Shelley, the Darvishes, and even Lemoine betray someone or themselves multiple times.

The remaining Birnam Wood workers are also implicated, having not questioned the situation despite realizing the significant money involved. Every character who dies is led there by their ambitions. The lone survivor is the guard, loyal to Lemoine and betraying no one throughout the book, making him the only person left at the fiery end.

Happy reading! ❤️