A new vocabulary had come into force: Birnam Wood was now a start-up, a pop-up, the brainchild of “creatives”; it was organic, it was local; it was a bit like Uber; it was a bit like Airbnb. In this new, perpetually unsettled climate, Shelley’s defection from the conventional economy had gained, she knew, a kind of retroactive valour, and even Mira — seditious, independent-minded Mira — suddenly seemed to be just the sort of trendy big-talking renegade one could imagine being contracted by the government as a black-ops adviser, writing inflammatory blogs and newspaper columns that defended unorthodox opinions and debated the right to free speech. Agitation had lost its juvenile cast: it had been made urgent again, righteous again, necessary again. An aura of prescience now permeated Birnam Wood.
I was one of those readers who was make impatient by Eleanor Catton’s widely-praised last novel, The Luminaries — mostly because I found it to be too esoteric; too full of literary tricks and authorial fingers in the plot for my taste — yet I still recognised Catton as a wonderfully talented writer and I looked forward to whatever she came out with next. As a follow-up, Birnam Wood does not disappoint: a thrilling bit of political ecofiction with compelling characters, an immersive setting, and timely commentary on modern social ills, I gobbled this up (aided by the fact that it’s half as long as her last novel). I can see a complaint that this might be a bit potboilery — and especially when compared to the literary fireworks of Catton’s last work — but I personally loved everything about this and am rounding up to five stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Between the press coverage of the knighthood and the reporting on the landslide on the pass, Thorndike had been much in the public consciousness in recent months, and if Birnam Wood could stage a demonstration on the Darvish property, Mira thought — if they could arrange to be caught in the act of trespassing — if they could invite prosecution, even, for the alleged crime of planting a sustainable organic garden on an empty tract of land — and if they could then present to the media exactly what they’d planted, and explain their mission, and enumerate their goals, and prove themselves to be serious and good-hearted professionals whose work was tidy, and efficient, and fruitful, and thoughtful, and respectful of the land — would that not be a form of breaking good? They would risk criminal charges, of course, but at least they’d get their message out. And since Owen Darvish was to be knighted for services to conservation, at the very least they might provoke an interesting debate.
The plot of Birnam Wood involves the intersection of three groups of people: the “Birnam Wood” of the title is a collective of guerilla gardeners who plant crops on abandoned and underused urban land, and although they claim a “horizontal” power structure, it is essentially led by two young women, Mira (the dreamer) and Shelley (the doer). When a landslide closes the only passage through the (fictional) Korowai range in New Zealand’s South Island, Mira plots to expand her group’s activities by secretly cultivating a former sheep farm in the area that had been recently for sale, and now pulled from the market because of the landslide. This farm is owned by the second group: Sir Owen Darvish (a pest control entrepreneur who had recently received a knighthood, to his surprise and delight) and his wife, Jill, the newly minted Lady Darvish. Although the Darvishes had long been well off, they have just become multi-millionaires by privately selling the majority of their land to the third party: American tech-billionaire Robert Lemoine, who told the Darvishes he was interested in their farm in order to build himself a remote luxury doomsday bunker, but who actually has a secret plan that will see him become the world’s first trillionaire. When Mira runs into Lemoine while scouting the farm — and he offers her a lot of money to make a legitimate nonprofit out of Birnam Wood, for secretive reasons of his own — Mira will need to decide whether or not to compromise her core values in order to finally make a success out of her passion project. Each of these three groups are not entirely honest with one another, deceptions and misunderstandings abound, and much like the tragedy referenced by the book’s title, there’s definitely something Shakespearean about the way that self-interested power grabs tend to lead to a fall.
Forget the bunker, forget everything he’d planned to write about survivalism, and growth hacking, and techno-futurism, and imperial-stage-capitalist decline, and New Zealand’s pathetically obsequious courting of the superrich. Forget all of that. This was his story. He couldn’t quite see the whole picture yet — but a picture was undoubtedly forming. Whatever was going on in Korowai was going on in secret, and he, Tony Gallo, Anthony Gallo, was going to be the one to flush it out.
Intersecting with and tying the three groups together is Tony Gallo: One of the founding members of Birnam Wood, Tony is newly returned from four years of teaching English in Mexico; and although he would be devastated if anyone learned he actually lives off a trust fund, he intends to make his mark as a leftist eat-the-rich investigative journalist. Between having debates with the other members of Birnam Wood about the morality of accepting money from a drone-building tech-billionaire and misunderstanding the link between Lemoine and the Darvishes, Tony serves as both a believable, vocal critic of late-stage capitalism and as a loose cannon interfering with the others’ well-laid plans.
“So anyway,” Shelley went on, “this is what I was thinking: that, like, the real choices that you make in your life, the really difficult, defining choices, are never between what’s right and what’s easy. They’re between what’s wrong and what’s hard.”
The above quote seems to be the central theme of Birnam Wood, and throughout, Catton shows people — from the most dippyish of hippies to supposedly democratic governments (to Macbeth himself, for that matter) — knowingly choosing what’s wrong, because it’s what they want to do; it’s self-serving lies and manufactured personas that lead to misunderstandings that lead to tragedy. Throughout — from the characters to the political debates to the thrilling action — this was just so readable and timely. I may have complained that I found The Luminaries to be all sizzle no steak, but here we have the steak and I leave entirely satisfied. (However, I’ll understand if others want a bit more sizzle.)
